Let me tell you about a boy and a palace.
It was spring of 1971, and in Port-au-Prince the National
Palace stood white as a wedding cake against the Caribbean sky. Pretty, you’d
have said. The kind of building you’d put on a postcard. But there are houses
that look pretty on the outside and are rotten in the walls, and this was one
of them. Something had died in there, and something else was about to be
crowned.
The boy stood at the podium. Nineteen years old.
Round-faced, thick through the middle, with the eyes of a kid who has been
called to the principal’s office and doesn’t yet know what he’s done. His
father was barely in the ground. Now the whole country was being asked to look
at this frightened teenager and call him Mister President.
His name was Jean-Claude Duvalier. The world would call him
Baby Doc, and the world, for once, would not be unkind in the nickname. It
would be unkind about everything else.
He hadn’t won anything. No one had fought for him, no one
had voted for him in any way you or I would recognize as voting. He was the
youngest president on earth because of whose seed he came from, the way a
prince is a prince. That’s the whole of it.
---
For the next fifteen years, in his name, the doors came open
in the night.
You know the kind of knock I mean. Not a neighbor’s knock,
not a friend’s. The knock that comes at two in the morning and tells you,
before you’ve even gotten your feet on the floor, that the life you had
yesterday is a thing you won’t be getting back. People were taken. People were
beaten on the roadsides where anyone might see, especially where anyone might
see, because that was the point. And some walked through the gates of the
prison and just stopped existing. The newspapermen asked where they’d gone. The
walls didn’t answer. Walls never do.
And all the while the money flowed upward, the way it always
does in a place like that, thick as syrup, into the pockets of the president’s
family and the men who kept the president’s family comfortable. Out past the
edge of the city, kids grew up with bellies that ached from nothing.
When it all finally came apart in 1986, Baby Doc didn’t go
to prison. He didn’t go to the gallows. He flew to France with millions of
dollars and called it exile, which is a lovely word for a man with a
villa in the hills above Cannes. He drove a BMW. He drove a Ferrari Testarossa,
red as a fresh cut. He bought a château, and two apartments besides, and he
shopped in boutiques where a single scarf cost more than a Haitian farmer would
see in a year.
Exile. As if the man had been wounded by it.
But to understand the boy you have to understand the father,
and the father is where the real horror lives.
---
François Duvalier was a doctor. Sit with that for a minute,
because it matters.
He’d gone out to the countryside once, to the poor places,
and he’d worked there. He fought typhus. He cured yaws, that terrible
skin-eating disease, with penicillin, and for thousands of farmers whose bodies
had been eaten up by sores, it must have felt like a miracle. These were people
who’d never had anyone with a medical degree look them in the eye. And he did.
So they loved him. To the people in the back country he wasn’t just a doctor,
he was something closer to an angel, and he was clever enough to wrap himself
in the old stories, the folklore, the voodoo, until the name stuck to him like
a second skin.
Papa Doc.
In 1946 that reputation got him a seat as Minister of
Health. When the army coup of Paul Magloire sent him scurrying underground, he
waited, and when amnesty came he walked back up out of the dark. In 1957, with
the army behind him, he won the presidency. It was September 22nd. He talked
the language of the Black majority, noirisme, the politics of a people
who’d been told for too long to wait their turn. It worked. It always works,
for a while.
Then the hand began to close.
The hope for democracy in Haiti lasted about as long as a
candle in a stiff wind. Slowly, and then not so slowly, the opponents
disappeared. The press got its tongue cut out. The army learned who its master
was. And for the work that needed doing in the dark, Papa Doc had a different
kind of tool.
The Tontons Macoutes.
---
Maybe you know the story they took the name from. Haitian
parents have been telling it to naughty children for generations. There’s a man
called Uncle Sack, Tonton Macoute, and he walks the roads with a big
burlap bag over his shoulder. If you’re bad, if you don’t mind, if you wander
out after dark, he scoops you up and into the bag you go. And you are never
seen again. Not by your mother, not by anyone.
It’s a nursery tale. It’s the kind of thing that makes a
six-year-old pull the blanket up to her chin.
Now imagine a government deciding to become that
story.
On paper they were the Volunteers for National Security.
They dressed in black, in the manner of the Italian fascists. Most of them drew
no pay, which tells you something right there, doesn’t it? A man who works for
free and carries a gun has to be paid some way. They were paid by the
people. They shook down the market women and the shopkeepers and the farmers,
and the regime looked the other way, because looking the other way was the
arrangement. Bernard Diederich and Al Burt wrote it all down in their book on
the subject, and it’s not pleasant reading.
For the grown-ups of Haiti, the children’s tale came true.
The sack was real. It just had bigger people in it.
In 1961 Papa Doc held an election with one name on the
ballot. His own. Over a million and a quarter ballots said yes, and not one
soul dared say otherwise. In 1964, a referendum with a result so close to a
hundred percent you’d have to squint to find the difference, and he named
himself president for life. And he dressed the part, all in black, like
something you’d see standing at the edge of a field at dusk. He wanted the
people to think of Baron Samedi, the spirit of death. He wanted them to feel
it in their guts.
Tens of thousands, they say, were killed or vanished during
his years.
---
But the body gives out, even on a man like that.
By the early 1970s it was the diabetes, and the heart. And
as Papa Doc lay in the great white palace, with the sickness doing slowly what
no enemy had managed to do, one thought gnawed at him like a rat in the
wainscoting: who comes after me?
He had one boy.
And what a boy. Jean-Claude had grown up inside the palace
walls, wrapped in paramilitaries like a package in too much tissue. He had
never seen the hungry places. He had never smelled what the poor smell like,
never heard what they sound like when the knock comes in the night. Politics
bored him. What he loved were engines: the growl of one, the shine of a good
car on a straight road. His father had spoiled him rotten, and in the end that
was the best the old man could do for a successor.
So Papa Doc did what Papa Doc always did. He rewrote the
rules. Article 197 of the constitution got a nip and a tuck, and suddenly there
was a door through which his son could walk. A referendum on January 31, 1971,
reported 2,391,916 votes in favor.
Against? Zero.
Not a few. Not a handful of cranks. Zero. If you want
to know what fear looks like in numerical form, there it is.
On April 21st, Papa Doc died. The same day, the boy was
sworn in as president for life.
---
The world held its breath, waiting for Haiti to burn.
It didn’t.
The Macoutes stayed loyal. The army stayed loyal. The old
guard, the rich and clever men who’d grown fat on the father, closed ranks
around the son like blood cells around a wound. And in Washington, they were
relieved, or somewhat relieved, which is how Washington gets when it can’t
decide whether to feel guilty. No vacuum meant nothing for the communists to
climb into. That was the thinking. That was always the thinking.
In those early days Baby Doc barely governed at all. His
mother did that. Simone Ovide, Mama Doc, ran the house while her son ran the
cars. You were more likely to find him behind a wheel than behind a desk.
But a man can’t coast forever on his father’s corpse. At
some point he starts to want to be loved, or at least believed. Baby Doc wanted
a new face. A young, easy, modern one. So he let some of the political
prisoners go, and for a little while it almost looked like a thaw. Amnesty
International would later say what it really was: a gimmick. A new coat
of paint over the same rot. The old machinery of terror kept right on turning.
The armed forces, the Leopards, the six hundred-odd men of the presidential
guard, the military police, the Macoutes. Those were the hands. The velvet
glove was just for the cameras.
---
And Haiti stayed Haiti. The poorest country in the Americas.
Oh, the foreign companies came, lured by cheap hands and a
tax bill you could pay with pocket change. Some jobs appeared. The numbers on
the page got a little better. But the wages were among the lowest in the whole
hemisphere, and the farmers, the great mass of the people, saw none of it. The
soil wore out. The forests came down, stripped to the stumps. No one helped the
countryside, so the countryside emptied into the city, and the city turned out
to be a place where you could starve just as well, only with more neighbors.
A man from Amnesty International put it plainly, years
later: widespread, systematic violations. Crimes against humanity. That’s the
language of lawyers, and lawyers are careful. They don’t use words like that
lightly.
When people did stand up, the Macoutes came to meet them.
Twenty thousand dead, maybe thirty. And nobody was ever made to answer for it,
because that was the other thing about the Macoutes. They were not afraid of
anyone.
---
There’s one more story. It comes with a warning, because it
sounds like something a bad writer would dream up on a bad night. It’s an old
rumor, and I’ll tell it as one.
The man’s name was Luckner Cambronne, and he ran the
Interior Ministry, which in a place like Haiti is a bit like being appointed
head of the family in a Mafia film. And he got a name. The Vampire of the
Caribbean.
The whispers said that Cambronne was in the business of
blood. That the people the Macoutes killed didn’t just go into the ground. That
their blood, their bodies, their organs, were sold, and that the money went to
line the pockets of men with titles. Whether every word of that is true, I can’t
tell you. But the plasma center in Port-au-Prince was real. It was called
Hemo-Caribbean, and Cambronne controlled it.
And a scientist named Jacques Pépin looked at that place,
and at the history of a certain virus, and wrote a book arguing that the thing
might have come out of Africa and into Haiti, and then traveled onward in the
plasma, in the bags of blood, beginning around 1966. A terrible thing, to think
a country’s misery might have helped open a door for a plague.
---
So the people ran.
They went by boat, mostly. Little, leaking, overloaded
boats, pushed out into black water toward Florida, toward the Bahamas, toward
anything. In the early 1980s the American government began pulling them back.
Intercepting them, and sending most of them home. Home to the place they’d just
risked drowning to escape.
Then came the worst of it. American health officials put
Haitians on a list of high-risk groups for AIDS. Just like that, a whole people
got a label stuck to their foreheads. The tourists stopped coming. The hotels
emptied. And the one thin hope some Haitians had of making an honest living
went out like a light.
America had decided these were economic refugees, not
political ones. Funny how that distinction always lands in the same
direction. A political refugee gets a hearing. An economic refugee gets a boat
ride back to the men with the black uniforms.
A journalist in Miami, Nadege Green, has said what many have
thought: that race was at the bottom of it. That the detention and deportation
of Haitians, without anyone so much as listening to their claims, was
discrimination plain and simple.
---
And then, finally, the thing that dictators never believe
will happen to them.
The people had had enough.
It took months. Months of protest, of rebellion, of hungry,
furious people in the streets who had run out of reasons to be afraid. And on
the seventh of February, 1986, the boy who had never wanted the job, the boy
with the engines and the shine of fast cars, was driven out of the white
palace.
He went to France, with his millions, and his Ferrari.
But here’s the thing about Uncle Sack. He doesn’t go away
just because the storyteller stops talking. He’s still out there, in the
stories, in the hills, in the memory of the people who lived under his shadow.
And he remembers every one of them.
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