Journey of a Lifetime

As usual when overwhelmed by armed men enjoying a little brief authority, I adopted an attitude of polite preoccupied condescension—like a prefect moving down upon a third-former whose mother is hovering. For a new and meaningful relationship with an unwelcoming armed guard, it helps to be slightly patronizing but brandishing a permanent smile. It also helps if you’re saying something like, “Do you mind standing aside, please. British television filming the President. Thank you so much, just back a bit more…” He doesn’t understand, but he gets your drift and suspects you might be Somebody, or know Somebody.

It is hard to shoot a man, or even strike him with your rifle butt, when he is smiling at you in a friendly way and talking about something foreign. It helps the odds.

The confident, cheerful attitude won through again. When they expect you to be humble and timid, a certain pleasant senior-officer asperity throws them off-balance. This is even more effective when guards or police or hoodlums don’t understand English.

To attempt their language, whatever it is, instantly places you in the subordinate position of supplication, and invites questions. Since adopting this haughty approach, I am pleased to say I’ve hardly ever been shot.

So we stood in the searing sunshine in what seemed like a sharpshooters’ convention, waiting for Papa. I became aware that one or two of the more heavily armed men had started talking about us and doubtless about our presence as interlopers upon their scene. Before they could get their little brief authority together, there was a distant roar of massed motorcycles.

The first arrival was, improbably, a chromium-plated Harley-Davidson, ridden by a large black dressed like a tubby boy scout. On his pillion was a younger man in a sort of beach gear. Presumably they were significant figures, but they didn’t seem to threaten my prefect, who was at that moment telling senior spectators to move back a bit to allow better pictures.

They were followed at a distance by a horde of regulation military outriders surrounding an enormous black Mercedes 600. This noisy group had come at least 600 yards from the palace gates. The limo stopped. A sort of tremor ran through the massed troops.

A couple of portly colonels with machine guns struggled out and stood to attention, quivering. After a long pause, a small stooped figure in a dark suit emerged, with a white frizz under his black homburg. Blinking behind thick lenses in the sudden silence, he asked in a whisper for what appeared to be the Mace of Haiti: the President’s own sub-machine gun. This was handed to him and, reassured, he restored it to a guard. His gestures were those of fragile old age, and he walked with a slight shuffle; yet this was the man who held a nation by the throat.

He noticed our white faces and camera instantly, but without acknowledgement. He had presumably been alerted by Joliecœur. After military salutes and anthems, he entered the small Red Cross building with his wife, Mme Simone Ovide Duvalier, a handsome Creole in a large white hat, closely followed by me, as usual brushing machine guns aside with a polite smile and a “So sorry, do you mind?”

In the scrimmage Ted Morrisby and I managed to converge upon the President. In a way we were expected. We explained we had crossed the world to see him for an important programme, and after some hesitant queries received a murmured invitation to visit his palace next day. We fell back with relief from the small figure who seemed to wish us no harm.

Later we learned that his chargé d’affaires in London was a Whicker’s World enthusiast, and upon our request for visas had sent Papa Doc an approving telex.

Coming to power in 1957 with the support of the army, the astute Dr Duvalier had observed that dictators were always overthrown by their own armies—usually the Commander of the Presidential Guard—so he overthrew his, quite quickly.

He explained his military philosophy to me later, in an angry rasp: “Only civilians can own a country, not the military men. The military man must stay in his barracks and receive orders and instructions from the President, from the King, from the Emperor. This is my opinion, this is my philosophy. To have peace and stability you must have a strong man in every country.”

“A dictator?” I suggested. The hesitant soft voice rasped again: “Not a dictator, a strong man! Democracy is only a word—it is a philosophy, a conception. What you call democracy in your country, another country might call dictatorship.”

His Haitian army once had 20,000 men—6,500 of them generals. It was now reduced to ceremonial duties, and colonels. In its place the President created his Volunteers for Defence—the evil militia of Tontons Macoutes. This unthreatening phrase meant “Uncle Bagman” after the legendary giant bogeyman who strode the mountains stuffing naughty children into his knapsack.

In return for loyalty, Duvalier gave his army bully boys the right to lean upon the terrified populace, to tax and torment. Every nationalized hoodlum performed discipline duties with which Papa Doc did not wish to be publicly associated, and was licensed to kill. To provoke or deny any bogeyman intent upon stuffing his knapsack was to invite a beating, at least.

All hope drained from the nation during Duvalier’s years of sudden and unaccountable death, as Haitians submitted to the gangster army which stood over them, controlled improbably by Mme Rosalee Adolph, Deputy, wife of the Minister of Health and Population, who had since 1958 been the Supervisor General of the Volunteers: “They are not paid—though I am paid, because I am a Deputy. If we are attacked someone has to defend the Head of Government. I have always got my gun. It is always ready.”

The smiling little woman packed it, demurely, in her handbag. After she had proved her firepower we all went, obligingly, up a mountainside to see some of her volunteers in action. We had expected a mass of toiling figures but found only a handful working on a road, watched by twice as many whose duty, it seemed, was to watch. Tontons did not volunteer to work—they volunteered to supervise.

By then Papa Doc was believed to have executed 2,000 Haitians and driven 30,000 into exile and the rest into terrified silence. In that manacled land it seemed unlikely that there was anyone left to criticize, let alone attack. A missing Haitian would be unimportant and unnoticed, though the arrest or death of a foreigner could only be ordered by the President. There was little comfort in that, for he seemed totally unconcerned about international criticism.

A foreign passport was no protection. The Dominican consul was found with his throat slashed so ferociously that his head was almost severed. Cromwell James, a 61-year-old British shop owner, was arrested by Tontons and severely beaten—presumably for resisting extortion. It took ten days for his lawyer to reach him in jail, to find he had been charged with highway robbery! He died four days later: gangrene, from untreated wounds.

In a destitute land, such extortion yielded diminishing returns, for there were always fewer victims to be squeezed. When the Tontons began to demand money from foreigners the British Ambassador, Gerald Corley-Smith, complained. He was thrown out and the embassy closed. Duvalier renounced the convention of political asylum and raided other embassies to get at terrified Haitians hiding from the Tontons. Washington was curtly told to recall its ambassador, Raymond Thurston—who was Papa Doc’s financial crutch.

Though Haiti was officially Catholic, the church was also attacked. Archbishop Raymond Poirier was arrested and put on a Miami flight wearing a cassock and sash and carrying one dollar. Soon after his successor, the Haitian Bishop Augustus, was dragged from his bed by Tontons and not even allowed to put in his false teeth before he was deported. The Catholic Bishop and eighteen Jesuit priests followed him, as did the American Episcopal Bishop Alfred Voegeli, who had ministered to Haitians for twenty years. Papa Doc accepted the Pope’s excommunication with his usual equanimity and went on to ban the Boy Scouts.

Next year President Johnson agreed to send another ambassador to Port-au-Prince, Mr Benson Timmons III. Papa Doc kept him waiting five weeks for an audience, and then gave him a stern lecture on how a diplomat should behave.

Committing international hara-kiri, antagonizing the world while continuing to ask for aid, may not have made economic sense, but to Haitians it made some emotional sense: proud Haiti, first to defy the slave master, once again standing alone. From their point of view Dr Duvalier had one vital thing going for him: most of Haiti’s presidents had been upper-class mulattoes with light skins, but Papa Doc was as black as his hat.

In the years following the war some hundreds of millions of dollars were given or loaned to this friendless nation, much of it going directly to President Duvalier. The world finally realized Haiti was too corrupt and hopeless to help, so the dollars dried up. When we arrived in December 1968 the economy was in a state of collapse—finance in chaos, public works decaying, few passable roads and a government so venal that all trade not offering corrupt officials a rake-off was at a standstill.

With the lowest income, food intake and life expectancy in the hemisphere, the lives of the amiable, long-suffering Haitians have changed little since the days of slavery two centuries ago. Shoes are still a luxury. I found it impossible to exaggerate the poverty of a land so out of step with the rest of the world. From a workforce of two or three million, only 60,000 had jobs—almost all on the government payroll.

There seemed little chance of strikes. The unemployed had heard the President’s personal physician Dr Jacques Fourcand warn what would happen if Haiti ever found the energy to rise against Papa Doc: “Blood will flow as never before. The land will burn. There will be no sunrise and no sunset—just one enormous flame licking the sky. It will be the greatest slaughter in history—a Himalaya of corpses.” That benevolent doctor was a neurosurgeon and President of the local Red Cross, when not attending to the Father of the Nation.

Fear and violence were not new to that fevered land where the cheapest possession had always been life. It was once the richest French colony, but after the only successful slave revolt, in 1804, suffered a succession of tyrannical black governors, emperors and kings. In half a century there were sixty-nine violent revolutions. They left behind the world’s poorest country—a mountainous, teeming tropical land, only twice the size of Yorkshire. Nine out of ten of the 5 million Haitians are illiterate, but they are a sympathetic and artistic people, the women docile and, it was said, like panthers dreaming.

My only pleasure in that cowed capital came from the Peintres Naïfs. I was particularly taken with Préfet Duffaut, a sort of Haitian Lowry who always painted his native village of Jacmel and peopled it with busy matchstick figures. I bought two of his paintings and later gave the better one to my friend, the lovely Cubby Broccoli who was my Christmas host later that month in Beverly Hills. I realized on arrival at Cubby’s new home that the simple, charming primitive painting was quite out of place in his grand new mansion off Sunset Boulevard, and was surely destined to rest in one of his distant loos. I longed to ask for it back in exchange for something more suitable—say, a Rubens.

For any foreigner not affected by poverty or tyranny, Haiti still provided a dramatic holiday background. In those stricken days one cruise ship arrived each week from Miami. This stayed only a few hours, as most of the passengers were too frightened to go ashore.

To tidy up the foreground for the adventurous, all beggars were banished to the countryside for the day. Jealous Tontons stood watching for the braver to file ashore and fill their predatory line of elderly taxis. They were then driven up the lowering mountainside behind the capital to the little resort of Kenscoff, where they watched some flaming limbo dancers across their cold buffets before returning with relief to their ship, and sailing away.

We recorded their sad celebration amid despair, but left early to be ready to film the dockside departure. As we drove down the mountain, there in the middle of the road was a brand new corpse, still bleeding.

The unfortunate man was obviously dead. A body asleep, drunk or just unconscious is somehow…different. I told Racine to stop so that we could go back and at least cover the poor chap. He refused, and drove on faster. No Haitian would ever touch or rearrange any Tontons’ handwork for fear of suffering the same fate. That was why those bullet-scars across the airport walls had been left uncovered.

So all the cruise passengers in their motorcade which followed us down the mountain had to drive solemnly and in procession around that corpse. What the blue rinses from Pasadena made of this holiday demonstration I cannot imagine, but it surely did nothing for the Tourist Board’s “Come to Happy Haiti” promotion.

Haitians have seldom been able to summon up more energy for imported Christianity than was required to bury their dead, Tontons permitting. They may be 90 per cent Catholic, as the reference books say, but they are 100 per cent voodoo. In Haiti the supernatural is still alive.

When a peasant dies, before being placed in his coffin he may be dressed in his best clothes—if he has any—and seated at a table with food and a lighted cigarette between his lips or, if a woman, a clay pipe. When friends and neighbours arrive the feasting and dancing of the wake begins. Although by law the corpse is supposed to be buried within twenty-four hours, decomposition is often allowed to set in. This ensures that sorcerers will not dig him up and make a zombie, a work slave, out of him. The heavy stone slabs with which Haitians cover their graves are added insurance that the dead will not rise to slave as zombies for the rest of time.

Papa Doc angrily denied to me that he was a houngan, a voodoo priest—or even a follower of Baron Samedi, the most powerful and dreaded god in the voodoo pantheon. Baron Samedi personified death itself. He was always dressed in black and wore dark glasses. The President’s choice of wardrobe may not have been accidental.

In 1963 President Duvalier received information that one of his few political opponents still alive, Clément Barbot, a former Commander of the Tontons Macoutes but now in hiding, had transformed himself into a black dog. Papa Doc quickly ordered that all black dogs in Haiti should be killed. Barbot was later captured and shot to death by Tontons; he was still a man.

Certainly there were many stories about the brutal President, some terrible, some silly. It was said that he sought guidance from the entrails of goats, that he lay meditating in his bath wearing his black hat; that he had the head of one of his few enemies still about, Captain Blucher Philogènes, delivered to him in a pail of ice. He then sat for hours trying to induce the head to disclose the plotters’ plans…

He was merciless, despotic, malign; yet he received me in his study with eerie amiability. Behind him were signed portraits of the men he admired: Chiang Kai-Shek, President Lyndon Johnson, the Pope and Martin Luther King.

He told me he blamed the world-wide loathing he had earned on an “international conspiracy set up by several white nations who spent many millions of dollars to destroy our Fatherland, sending the North American 6th Fleet to violate our national sea”.

He then muttered darkly, “The USA has been sending uncapable ambassadors so there is no talk between them and the President of Haiti. It is a question of men. The FBI is doing a good job, but the CIA not. It makes much trouble and must be blamed for the bad impression the world has of my country.”

He dismissed the insurgents’ bombing of his palace: “They are crazy. They will never reach their aim because I know who I am and I can’t be killed by anyone. I have faith in my destiny. No other President of Haiti could stand up and do what I did in the past eleven years—facing eight armed invasions and three hurricanes.”

Though he was President for Life and apparently convinced of his immortality, I wondered whether he had thought of a successor. He had not. “All of them are at school now—they are the young people.”

His only son Jean-Claude was sitting beside us in the presidential study. What he would do with his life? The fat moon-faced 17-year-old was embarrassed. “That depends on him,” said Papa Doc, regarding his son with pride. “I hope he will follow the advice of his father, of his mother, and become a medical doctor.”

As I grew more familiar with the President, I became more convinced that nobody’s all good or all bad. He had been a mild little country doctor looking after the peasants and earning his famous nickname. This non-smoking teetotaller who loved his family now saw himself as a poet. He presented me with Copy No. 892 of his Breviaries of a Revolution, and inscribed a collection of his poems, Souvenirs d’Autrefois, “to a friend of the first Black Revolution, Mr Alan Whicker, in souvenir of his short stay in the Island of Quisquetya, Sincerely, François Duvalier”.

It was said that after dinner in his palace he would sometimes go down to the dungeons to watch some political prisoners tortured, and on occasion might torture them himself. He was certainly known to slap ministers around his study, under the protective gaze of the Presidential Guard. A man of moods, he was sometimes almost playful and anxious to make a good impression, then glowering with suppressed fury at a critical word.

I had played myself in tactfully while getting to know him, leaving the tougher questions for a later visit. Then half-way through one conversation, I caught him regarding me balefully during a long silence. With a low menacing rasp, he said, “Mr Whicker, you are talking to the President of the Republic of Haiti.” It seemed a telling rebuke.

My crew had caught the distant clang of cell doors slamming, so when I turned to less sensitive matters there were audible sighs of relief from behind the camera. On a following day I reverted to my critical questions, about which he was matter-of-fact. It seemed that his occasional moods might be medically induced.

On one of these jollier days he even decided to show us his capital—and certainly one of the best views of Port-au-Prince had to be from the President’s bullet-proof Mercedes 600 limousine.

Papa Doc settled on the back seat alongside his gloomy bodyguard, Col. Gracia Jacques. We had no radio mikes in those days so our recordist Terry Ricketts rigged the unprotesting President with a neck mike and a long lead hidden around his body. Upon jumping out of the limo he several times did himself a slight injury, but without complaint.

He obviously wanted to show how popular he was, and certainly knew how to attract and hold an audience. A breathless cheering crowd chased us as we drove slowly through the town. Then I noticed Papa Doc was throwing handfuls of money out of his window. Our pursuers, scrambling in the dirt, were going frantic. When we stopped the President increased the excitement by bringing out packets of brand-new notes, peeling off wads and handing them out to anyone who seemed to have the right attitude.

In this land of destitution, the arrival of the black Mercedes amid a shower of free banknotes caused far more ecstasy than Santa Claus. With an annual income in every crisp wad handed out, it was well worth trying to keep up with the Duvaliers.

It seemed unreal to be riding around with one of the world’s most feared men, discussing subjects none of his countrymen would dare think. I asked how he felt about Graham Greene and The Comedians. He brushed the novel and the gory film aside. “He is a poor man, mentally, because he did not say the truth about Haiti. Perhaps he needed the money, and got some from the political exiles.”

He was far more bitter about a predecessor, Major Magloire, then living in New York but threatening to return, because he had got away with the money: “He took $19 million from the National Bank of Haiti and used this money to finance armed invasions and to bomb the palace. He tried to kill me when he was president. I was in hiding for several years. Why did he not come here himself instead of sending his young officers?”

He answered that one himself, right away: “If he comes here he will be killed, because he is what you call a vagabond. A vagabond.”

Almost half of Haiti’s revenue was spent on Papa Doc’s personal security. So I questioned the use of his hated Tontons Macoutes: “It is a militia, they help me to clean the streets, they help me to cultivate the land, they help the Haitian army and they fight side by side in face of armed invasions.” Papa Doc got out of the limo, and the escort of Tontons instantly set up defensive positions around us, as though assassination was imminent.

He could not understand why he was dreaded by so many of his people: “I am the strongest man, the most anti-Communist man in the Caribbean islands. Certainly the question is a racial one because I am a strong leader. The US considers me a bad example for the 25 million Negroes living there. I should be the favourite child of the United States,” he said, stumbling in his enthusiasm for the subject. “Instead of which they consider me…the black sheep!” He gave me our programme title—a cackle, and one of those ghoulish grins.

Although his 500-strong Palace Guard now recognized us and knew we were harmless and acceptable, they were all permanently terrified of doing anything new, like allowing us through the wrong door. Getting in to see him was a daily problem.

I had the forethought to arm myself with a pass sternly addressed to “All Civil and Military Authorities” and signed by the President himself. This got me through the sentries on the palace gate, past a quiver of anxious guards on various doors, up the stairs and along the corridor and right up to the entrance to his chambers. There I was stopped by the Presidential Guard itself, a nervous group of captains and lieutenants who admitted they knew he was expecting me, but had no authority to disturb him. This was the Haitian “Catch-22”.

The only person who could actually approach him was his secretary, Mme Saint-Victor, a formidable lady and sister of another son-in-law—but she was away ill. So we sat under the chandelier in his annex while the President sat inside and waited, and nobody had the determination to knock on his door.

In exasperation I finally broke the stalemate by leaving the palace and going to the town’s telegraph office. I had seen a telex in Papa Doc’s inner sanctum and noted the number—3490068—so sent a message: “Mr President, I am waiting outside your door.” This worked.

Encouraged by our successful tour of the town, I suggested he might show us Duvalierville, which he ordered built several years ago as a national showplace, a sort of governmental Brasilia which would be his memorial. He said it was 20 miles away, and that was too far for him to travel. He was always most cautious when on the open road.

We later went to look for ourselves and found he was not missing much. Like everything else in Haiti, his empty dream had died for lack of finance. Crumbling and overgrown, the few piles of cracking white concrete stood in wasteland populated by a few listless squatters. It seemed a fitting monument. However, the President agreed to organize a visit to a nearby health centre. I listened as on one of the few working telephones in the land he chased his daughter to become an extra: “C’est le President de la République! Where is Di-Di?”

A stoic health centre patient with hepatitis had been organized to be looked at by Papa Doc, so now he would not dare to die. Across the body I recalled that the President was still a Fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine in London. He was delighted. “Do you know that? Yes, I am surprising, eh? I am still interested in medical matters and until I die I am just an MD and after that President of Haiti. It was the best time of my life, when I was practising medicine.”