Haiti
It doesn’t take long to discover that nothing is ever quite what it seems in Haiti. Not what you see, not what you hear, and not even what you suspect. It is all wrapped in ambiguity and contradiction, like the people themselves. Ask a direct question, and you get a bemused reply that simply raises more questions. The Haitians—all charmers, even when at their most sinister— speak in a strange double-talk tiesigned to conceal what they really mean and transform the obvious into mystery.
Least of all can you trust your own senses. On the surface life seems placid and uneventful. The people go about their business in the dusty streets of Port-au-Prince, the shantytown capital that houses a third of a million souls in various degrees of misery. Scarcely anyone ever gets shot up in public anymore by the Tonton Macoutes, President Duvalier’s own private militia of sportshirted, pistol-packing thugs. And at night you can walk down the darkest alleys in absolute safety. Law and order is a dream come true in Duvalier’s Haiti, and at first glance it seems literally like an island of tranquillitv.
As indeed it is, for the sun-seeking North American tourists who paddle around the kidney-shaped swimming pools of the luxury hotels in suburban Pétionville, high above the steaming capital. From the hill the view is scenic, the vegetation lush, the souvenir vendors amusing, and everyday life blissfully uneventlul. But in the humid streets of Port-auPrince and in the teeming slums that rim the waterfront and spread into the countryside, life is neither calm nor picturesque.
Shaky
In Haiti today everyone is waiting for something to happen. No one is quite sure what is going to happen; when or how or if it will happen. But tension is in the air, and the stability of Papa Doc’s regime seems shakier than at any time during the past half dozen years. Ever since last May the Haitian dictator has been a recluse in his palace, emerging only on ceremonial occasions, such as Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s breathless Latin-American tour that brought him to Port-au-Prince lor a few hours on July 1. The event induced Papa Doc to leave his palace for the first time in two months. He was cheered by thousands of Haitians who had been brought in trucks from their villages and forced to stand for hours in Lite ninety-degree sun to greet their leader and his American visitor.
The precise cause ol Duvalier’s seclusion has not been divulged, and rotating rumors fill the knowledge gap. Instead of putting to rest the rumors of his illness and possible departure from office, the brief appearance of the sixty-two-year-old President triggered a new round of speculation about palace intrigue and what might succeed his regime.
The regime has been badly shaken during the past few months by attacks from without and within. In April the government announced that it had tracked down and summarily executed some thirty rebels in the hills outside Port-au-Prince. They were labeled “Communists’' (the customary term for anyone who opposes Duvalier) and accused of collaborating with foreign powers. A government decree banned all Communist activities, defined as “crimes against the security of the nation,” and applied the death penalty to those committing or abetting such vague crimes. Scores of people, denounced as “agents of international Communism” or simply as “Communist sympathizers,” were arrested and disappeared into the notorious Duvalier prisons.
But the attacks against the regime continued, and in May government troops were fighting against a group of “exiles and mercenaries on the northern coast. The airborne exile landing was combined with an attempt to bomb the presidential palace-ascribed to the machinations of former President Paul Magloire, now in exile in New York. In an appeal to the UN and the Organization of American States, the government’s spokesman described the attacks as “international brigandage which would not have been possible without the tolerance of such neighboring countries as Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United States. While there are a good many Haitian workers in Cuba, some of whom no doubt have been trained as guerrillas, it appears that the old B-25 which made such an amateurish job of bombing the President’s palace came from a base in Florida. The regime reacted with a new roundup of suspects, charged that the Cubans were behind it all, and called for the United States to resume its military aid to Haiti.
Duvalier has been trying to convince the Nixon Administration that his government is threatened by a Communist conspiracy. The accusation holds little water, for the Cubans have been very circumspect toward Haiti, and the Haitian Communists are divided and weak. But it is an argument that has wrung money out of Washington before, and Papa Doc can hardly be blamed for trying to get the old dog salivating again.
The regime has been threatened not only by the capricious activities of the exile groups, with their periodic, and invariably ill-fated, landings and bombings, but also by an increasingly high mortality rate among the Tonton Macoutes. A growing number of Duvalier’s private militia of killers have been murdered recently. Some believe that this is the work of resistance groups preparing the way for the dictator’s downfall. Others, rather more cynical and perhaps used to Duvalier’s ways, believe that he secretly ordered their murder himself since the Macoutes were becoming so strong that they represented a threat to his one-man rule. Papa Doc s lormula tor survival has always been divide-and-rule.
Despite the current spate of strange activities, compounded by the disappearance of various suspected opponents of the regime, Haitians gingerly avoid political discussions. Wise people have learned not to talk about politics, and those with an acute sense of survival try not even to think about it. “Let’s talk about Susan Sonta,”a young Haitian intellectual said to me in his office crammed with highbrow American film cpiarterlies and literary reviews, “and about your student revolution.” When 1 tried to steer the conversation back to the Haitian scene, he deftly began to lecture on the African origins of voodoo. Later I learned from another source that his uncle had been killed by the Macoutes and that he himself had been held in the infamous political prison known as Fort Dimanche.
“Politics isn’t my business”
Self-censorship also extends to foreigners, such as the lovely American woman who has been working in Haiti for the past decade. Once as I gently tried to shift our conversation from the richness of Haitian musical lore to the problems of everyday life under Papa Doc, her usual smile froze, and she replied testily, “Nothing’s the matter here. Anyway, politics isn’t my business.”Her reply was typical of the small American colony in Haiti—resident businessmen and plant managers, a hotel proprietor or two, a few Negroes in exile from racism and the black revolution, and a variety of amateur ethnologists, escapists, sybarites. and artists. These people stay on good terms with the government by keeping their nose out of politics. Papa Doc has nothing against the resident Yankees, who live in great splendor on little money (a full-time servant costs $30 a month, and a palatial house under Si00) , and the Haitians treat them with their usual kindness and hospitality.
Officially the American presence has been subdued since Washington cut off direct economic aid to Haiti in 1962, when President Kennedy declared Papa Doc’s regime to be dictatorial and incompetent. The diplomatic personnel who remain are discreet and usually appreciative of Haitians and their culture. They work hard, lament over the had relations between Port-au-Prince and Washington, and feel cut off from one of the few Latin-American governments that is relatively independent of the U.S. Embassy. They sit ensconced in a shiny white cube on the edge of the sea, besieged by an unending file of Haitians seeking immigrant visas to the United States, and enjoy the pleasures of being rich in a poor country. At lunchtime the station wagons line up in the embassy driveway, where their wives and pink-skinned children wait to take them back to hillside homes that are trimmed in bougainvillaea and stocked with supplies from the PX at Guantánamo. Yes, Guantanamo in Cuba, where they periodically go shopping for U.S. goods at taxfree, duty-free prices.
These American officials readily admit that there is oppression in Haiti, that the press is stilled, the trade unions muzzled, (lie intellectuals driven into exile or forced into silence, and that justice is dispensed at the whim of Papa Doc. But this is old hat, and they tend to treat it as a matter of course. Politics in Haiti may, literally, be a life-anddeath matter, but it is not sérieux. What seems to engage their interest is the problems of what used to be called “nation building.” They want to bring in more foreign (particularly U.S.) private investment, raise health standards, improve education and transportation, and steer Haiti along the path of sustained economic development. They tend to view Haiti as an engineering problem which can be set right with diligence, cooperation, and Lite proper tools.
They are unhappy about the absence of a formal U.S. aid program to Haiti, although they are quick to point out that the aid program was allegedly misused by the Duvalier regime. “Much of the aid money was wasted,” one explained, “and a lot of it found its way into Duvalier’s pocket. “ This, of course, Papa Doc vehemently denies, and in turn charges that the aid cutoff in 1962 was part of a plot by Kennedy to overthrow his government.
This, however, was a long time ago, and Papa Doc is now ready, indeed eager, to kiss and make up with Washington. Aside from citinghis anti-Communist credentials, he argues that his government is economically responsible and is trying to follow an orderly development program within its drastically limited means. Even today there is a small U.S. aid program trickling into Haiti, most of it consisting of food and medicines funnelcd through the UN and the OAS. This program has been extremely helpful in the countryside, where the people are even more destitute than in the capital.
Americans in Haiti, even while disapproving of the Duvalier regime, believe that the direct aid program should be resumed. “The ones who suffer,” they argue, “are the people, not the government.” They believe that if the regime would accept the strict controls Washington favors, Haiti could benefit greatly from inclusion in the aid program. Most Haitians tend to agree, even those who are bitterly anti-Duvalier. But they have mixed feelings. They berate the United States for neglecting Haiti and imply that Washington’s motives are really racist. At the same time they resent American interference in Haitian affairs and say that Duvalier could only exist with U.S. tolerance. While the intellectuals hate Papa Doc, they admire him for defying Washington and for refusing to accept American control as the price of economic assistance.
Strings of nationalism
The wily Duvalier plays the strings of Haitian nationalism like a virtuoso, evoking the indignation and wounded pride that arose from the American occupation that began in 1915 and did not end until 1934. At the beginning of that occupation, ordered by Woodrow Wilson for the ostensible purpose of subduing disorder and preventing foreign intervention, (he U.S. Marines landed in Port-au-Prince, went to the Haitian National Bank, and carried off $500,000 in gold, as part of an arrangement between Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan and the directors of the Haitian Bank, which was in turn owned by the National City Bank of New York. The Haitians argued that they had injured no Americans, defaulted no debt, and violated no obligation of the United States. This plea went unanswered. A puppet government was set up, the legislature dissolved, and a new constitution favoring U.S. investments forced upon the Haitians. An officer of the Marine detachment, Colonel Smedley D. Butler, later wrote that in Haiti he was “doing the dirty work for the National City Bank.”Haitian resistance against the invaders turned into guerrilla warfare. In the “pacification" effort 3250 Haitians were killed. The bitterness engendered by the occupation, which continued in the form of an economic trusteeship until 1946, has lingered on to this day.
Aside from paying off U.S. and foreign creditors, the American occupying forces did what they were best at: they built roads, schools, hospitals, and a workable telephone system. They also trained a strong gendarmerie which ended rural resistance and centralized political authority in the capital. When the Americans left, the things they built gradually fell to pieces: the roads have washed away, the schools and hospitals have become inadequate, and the telephone is little more than a decorative object which emits static. But the idea of centralized control caught on. Through the Tonton Macoutes and the militialike National Security Volunteers, the idea has played a part in the long, unhappy reign of Francois Duvalier, self-declared President-forlife.
Thus the American impact on Haiti has not been negligible—indeed the U.S. dollar is the semiofficial currency of the island—but it is not quite what many Americans imagine. The impact is economic: Haiti has provided a safe haven for American investors in search of raw materials, rich land, and cheap labor. It is political in that the country, whether ruled by dictators or democrats, remains firmly in the American orbit. But it is not cultural, unless one counts a few American schools and the pervasiveness of English among young people.
The good country doctor Duvalier gives the Americans very little credit. His relations with the embassy are cold, but correct. He seems to feel that the U.S. government is responsible for his “bad press” abroad, and particularly for the disastrous drop in tourism following the withdrawal of aid in 1963. There is an element of truth in this, for Washington did discourage Americans from visiting Haiti. But the reason given was internal instability, and it can be said that Papa Doc helped substantiate this charge by unleashing a reign of terror against his political opponents.
Fearing an invasion of Haitian exiles abetted by Washington, and perhaps convinced of this by the sudden appearance of American warships in the Bay of Port-au-Prince, lie decided to wipe out the last vestiges of political opposition. His private militia, the Tonton Macoutes, were called into action. Suspected opponents of the regime were dragged from their homes at night, others were shot down in the street. Thousands fled the country, others cowered in terror and silence. Those were the days Graham Greene wrote about in The Comedians, and they are still spoken of in whispers.
The situation is a good deal calmer now, and one could walk the streets of Port-au-Prince without necessarily being aware that Haiti is anything more than another happygo-lucky, merengue-dancing Caribbean island. The people are remarkably beautiful, even though on closer inspection many seem malnourished and suffering from debilitating diseases such as malaria, pellagra, and tuberculosis. The cotton clothing is brilliantly colored, although it is often little more than bits of rags patched together. By day the marketplaces and streets teem with activity, even though few, except the occasional tourist, have money to buy anything. At night the air is heavy with the perfume of tropical flowers, and the dark streets are quiet and perfectly safe. “A lot safer than Washington, D.C.,” as the embassy people kept telling me.
In a sense Haiti is a perfect holiday spot—so long as one has no squeamishness about poverty and no qualms about authoritarian regimes. The hotels are well run and remarkably cheap by Caribbean standards, the pools are ice-cold and palmfringed, the sun is hot and the vegetation lush, and the paintings produced by Haitian artists are imaginative and powerfully evocative. Unfortunately, the roads have so fallen to pieces that going to the beach is a two-hour chore, and a trip to CapHaïtien and the ruins of Henri Christophe’s magnificent, crumbling citadel by road takes three days (plus a travel permit from the Ministry of the Interior) . But there is a great deal to do in the capital. And for those who prefer not to look at the slums on the edge of town, there are the marvelous, decaying Victorian gingerbread houses of the Haitian elite, the cooler hillside suburbs of Pékionville and Kenscoff, the art galleries anti curio shops, and the sad little nightclubs, where tourists, government bureaucrats, the miniscule foreign colony, and the remnants of the local elite gather to do the merengue.
For the amateur sociologist the Haitian elite is a study in itself. Until quite recently the word elite was virtually synonymous with mulatto. Light-skinned Haitians, descended from the union of African slaves with French colonists, are only a tiny minority of the population. But even before the formal declaration of independence in 1804, they dominated the country through their key positions in commerce, agriculture, and government. Speaking French as a sign of education and “culture,” rather than the rich Creole language of the Haitian peasant, practicing Roman Catholicism rather than the folk religion of voodoo, and educated abroad whenever possible, the elite has been not only a separate class but a caste within Haiti.
Periodically, black faces have been allowed into the elite, for the mulattoes have often found it convenient to deflect the indignation of the peasantry by ruling through black presidents and black generals. But their economic and political control was undiminished. This began to change during the late 1940s under Estimé, when an increasing number of blacks were brought into the government bureaucracy. Under Duvalier, who considers himself a Populist and the ideological descendant of Estimé, this movement became a deliberate policy to eradicate the old elite and form a new one. Thousands of blacks moved into positions of economic and political power, creating a new class, which is a product of the present regime, anti perhaps dependent upon it for survival.
The Duvalier regime has been called a mulatto-hating dictatorship. But it is also something more: an expression of powerful forces which have long been submerged by a selfish, exploitative, culturally alienated elite. Elevating voodoo to official approval and bringing its hoggans, or priests, under his control, breaking the power of the Catholic Church and driving many foreign priests from the country, and preaching a kind of Black Is Beautiful philosophy, which emphasizes Haiti’s African heritage rather than its veneer of French “culture,” Duvalier has won considerable support from the peasantry and the urban proletariat.
In this sense, the so-called “Duvalier revolution,” to which he constantly refers, is real. But it is a revolution that literally is only skindeep. The elite now has a darker hue, but it is no less oligarchic. Haiti is still a country where 95 percent of the people—illiterate, undernourished, and politically voiceless—are manipulated and exploited. Duvalier has not changed the economic structure of the society, even though his “revolution” is phrased in the vocabulary of Third World nationalism. It is what our own Black Panthers would scornfully call “cultural nationalism”—substituting black capitalists for white capitalists.
Pencil sharpeners
So far the “revolution” is mostly verbal, confining itself to a new airport, a paved road that ends a few miles outside the capital, and a semiabandoned, deteriorating model village appropriately named Duvalierville. Government officials hurry to explain that great plans are in the works. An Italian firm is now building generators for the long-stalled hydroelectric project at the Peligre Dam, and a Canadian company is working on pipelines to provide a fresh-water supply for Port-auPrince. If these projects are completed, they could help attract new industry, which is already beginning to dribble into Haiti to take advantage of the low-cost labor.
Coffee is still the major export crop, with sugar, bauxite, and copper accounting for most of the remainder. Industry has been virtually nonexistent in Haiti, partly because there is no domestic market with the available cash to buy manufactured products. Most Haitians live on the subsistence level and cannot afford even canned foods (most of which are imported from the United States) let alone common consumer goods. Also the foreign-owned (largely American) firms controlling the mines and plantations do not want their products to be refined locally. Thus there are no plants in Haiti for making soluble coffee or turning bauxite into tin.
Recently, however, there has been a small-scale influx of U.S.-based firms setting up plants in Haiti for the processing of materials imported from the United States. These plants produce embroidered cloth, electronic components, and nearly all the baseballs and softballs imported into the United States. They have been set up to use Haitian low-cost labor, which is less than §2 per man day. The American firms find it cheaper to send the raw materials to Haiti and import the finished products into the United States than to manufacture them at home with union labor. This is a rather shaky base for economic development, but at least it is providing jobs for a good many Haitians who would otherwise be unemployed.
Unemployment is a chronic problem in Haiti, particularly among the urban proletariat which has drifted away from the countryside but has been unable to find jobs in the cities. Port-au-Prince, with a population of 300,000, is in fact the only large city in the country, and here the problem can be seen most dramatically. The dark hovels of the slums, with neither running water nor electricity, make rural Sicily seem affluent by comparison. In the pathetic open-air markets, prematurely-old young women sell rotting fruit and rusty bits of metal. Children roam the streets, too poor to go to school.
The statistics are not very helpful, but do give an indication of conditions in the country. The average annual income (whatever that means in a country like Haiti) is about S50. This is the lowest for any nation in the Western Hemisphere, and puts Haiti on a par with such poverty-stricken areas as the Brazilian Northeast and the Bolivian altiplano. Population density, which is one of the highest in the world, is kept in check only by a high mortality rate. There are about 5 million Haitians, although nobody knows for sure, most of them living off the land. Their average life expectancy is 40 years, compared with 65 in the United States, and there are only about 250 doctors in the entire country. Of the 675,000 children of school age, only a quarter are actually enrolled in classes. At the university in Port-au-Prince, there are some 1500 students, and from dawn until long after sundown, one can see them strolling along the treeshaded walks of the park outside the presidential palace, notebooks in hand, memorizing their lessons and reciting them aloud, like a troupe of black Hamlets.
While these students are the cadre of the new elite, the prospects for most of them are not very promising, “Of course it’s nice to be one of the privileged few who get an education,” one student at the law faculty complained, “but what am I supposed to do with it—sharpen pencils at the Ministry of Underdevelopment?” In a stagnant economy there are not nearly enough professional jobs for the qualified people being trained at the universities. Young people are either forced into jobs beneath their capacities or obliged to emigrate. Tens of thousands of trained Haitians have left the country, many of them for political reasons, others because there is little economic opportunity. An estimated 50,000 Haitians live in New York City alone, not to mention some 300,000 who work in the Dominican Republic.
The political-minded émigrés are badly splintered; often their only common ground is their opposition to Duvalier. New York is the headquarters for the major bourgeoisliberal opposition group, the Haitian Coalition. Its membership ranges from the moderate left of its young director, Raymond Joseph, to the center-right of ex-President Paul Magloire. The Coalition has Washington’s unofficial blessing and represents the kind of vaguely progressive, property-respecting, pro-American government that the State Department would like to see installed in Port-au-Prince.
The left-wing opposition groups hold the coalition in contempt, charging that it is little more than a tool of the State Department and financed by the CIA. The two Marxist-oriented parties, PEP and PUDA, recently fused to form the Unified Party of Haitian Communists (PUCH), with headquarters in Havana. Like the Coalition, PUCH has an extensive information network within Haiti. In its two-hour daily radio program in Creole, it declares Duvalier to be a tool of American imperialism and calls for an armed peasant revolution. PUCH cadres have been organizing in Haiti for several years, and in 1967 held up the Royal Bank of Canada in Portau-Prince, walking oil with $60,000 lor the purchase of arms. PUCH has set up contacts in the university and has tried to organize peasant groups in the mountains so that it may be in an influential position when the Duvalier regime ultimately crumbles.
The government has seized upon and greatly exaggerated the Communist danger. Shortly before the Rockefeller visit, Gerard de Catalogue, whose Nouveau Maude is the unofficial mouthpiece of the regime, wrote in his newspaper: “Under the government of President Francois Duvalier, Haiti will never become a Communist spearhead directed against the heart of the United States.” What he neglected to point out, however, was that the longer the tyrannical Duvalier regime remains in power, the greater will be the appeal of the Communists to the suffering Haitians.
RONALD STEEL