Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

Duvalier was aware of his growing unpopularity, and turned for inspiration to any or every dictatorship, however horrible. There was Mao (‘mon petit livre vert’); there was Hitler (‘un chef, un peuple, un pays’); there was Mussolini (‘le chef a toujours raison’). Slogans such as the emperor Dessalines’s ‘Je suis le drapeau haïtien’ would be put up in neon on the port-side, some of the sections then failing to light up, thus leaving some bits of incomprehensible tubing flickering dimly when the electricity was working. All of this was orchestrated by a strange figure named Gérard de Catalogne, a Guadeloupian quarteron who had picked up his knowledge of Fascism at first-hand, since he had served in the secretariat-general of the youth movement of Vichy France. A sense of survival had caused him to find an appointment in Tahiti. There he met a lady, the daughter of the Norwegian consul in St Petersburg and his Russian wife (who had gone into a camp). She was interpreting for General MacArthur. The two married, looking for a sympathetic refuge. Santo Domingo turned out to be overcrowded; across the border in Haiti, Duvalier offered a more promising outlet. They founded a newspaper, Le Nouvelliste , and advised Duvalier as to ideology. Curiously enough, the official name of the Tontons , ‘Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale’, came from Mussolini’s ‘Volontari per la Sicurezza Nazionale’, who had also confused national security with the operation of protection rackets on small grocers.

It is impossible to get rid of such dictators if they are ruthless enough, and so it was with Duvalier. He forestalled palace coups by exiling his son-in-law as ambassador to Paris and, over the radio, organizing the execution of his best friends. He himself died in his bed, after a long and painful illness, on 22 April 1971. His illness was a secret, though everyone knew; on the morning of the death, there was a strange calm in the town, as even the dogs somehow did not bark, or the cocks crow, as they generally and cacophonously did. It was a palpable grande peur , as in the start of any revolution. It was clear that the old brute had finally died when, on the radio, they played their classical record, of all oddities the K464 Mozart string quartet which had been Beethoven’s favourite. This only happened at times of national emergency, such as a hurricane or an invasion scare. The record had a crack in it, so that the same phrase was repeated again and again, though no-one noticed. Then, hour after hour, those Duvalier speeches were replayed, meandering through all the platitudes of twentieth-century megalomania: ‘je, je, je, moi, moi, moi’, ‘des anarchisses’, ‘le pèple’, ‘la politik que préconize mon gouvernèmon’, ‘contre les mersses demokratik’ etc. The Americans and the usual smooth mulatto middle-men managed, to everyone’s surprise, to organize a transition of power to Duvalier’s teenage son, Jean-Claude.

Duvalier’s funeral had a mass turnout. He lay in state in the presidential palace for rather too long, given the heat and the power cuts, and was then escorted to a vast mausoleum. There were some alarms in the crowd as it shuffled through the dust and the ruts. An aircraft hopping between Nassau and Kingston was thought to be bringing vengeful exiles; the wooden balconies, overloaded with spectators, sometimes let out pistol-like cracks; and a little gust of wind, a miniature tornado, suddenly swept the street rubbish into a column. In voodoo superstition, this means that a soul is entering hell, and it momentarily disconcerted the shuffling, blue-denimed or evening-coated procession. Life then got back to genial normality for a while. ‘Baby Doc’ liked parties with his young mulatto friends. He was first run by his mother, known as ‘La Cornélie du siècle’ from her overweight Gracchus, and then by his wife, who took her friends on shopping expeditions to Paris by private plane while the going was good. Hope there was, that light industry — sewing baseballs — and the use of Creole for elementary instruction by missionaries would help the country to progress. Instead, the rule was ampil pitit : a plague of children, swamping the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. These were the dragons’ teeth of la partie française de l’île de Saint-Domingue , and many sensible people might well look across from Môle Saint-Nicolas in the north-west, from where, at night, you could dimly make out the flickering lights of Cuba, across the narrow gulf.

There had been another revolution on Cuba, and it was set to have a vast effect on Latin and Central America because it stood for liberation from the American imperialism shown in those lights. The island had been taken from its Spanish masters by the Americans in 1898 and though it was independent that independence was limited, in that there was a permanent American base at Guantanamo, and the economy was more or less captured by the USA. It did make much progress: Cuba was the most developed of countries south of the USA in terms of literacy, medicine, etc. But there was something of a revolutionary tradition and for a good reason, much of the island having nothing else to think about. It was in one sense condemned to a semi-colonial status because of its chief and even only crop, sugar. Cuba was the largest producer in the hemisphere, and it was the Americans who bought it up, by a fixed arrangement which helped when world prices were low and and not when they were high. Sugar occupied half a million acres, and there were huge factories for grinding; transport took much labour. The revolts of the past had been for rent reductions, and there had also been revolts against the cattle-breeders or tobacco-growers: the landowners generally feared another Saint-Domingue, but anti-imperialism was a powerful enough cause, and had produced its local hero, José Marti, who had denounced the Americans. Their initial occupation had been contemptuous.

The GDP per capita figure was not too bad, but there was an enormous income gap. Sugar had the disadvantage that the cultivation and harvesting of it took six or seven months, and sometimes just four, after which the workers had nothing to do, especially given the heat of the climate, and if they did not develop a habit of saving, then they would be in debt for much of the year and would have trouble repaying out of the next year’s proceeds: a classic debt-spiral known throughout the peasant world (the real meaning of the word kulak is not ‘rich farmer’ but ‘usurer’). This was complicated again by the existence of a black minority, descended from the slaves that Spain had kept going even after the French had freed them (in 1848). The sugar-owners lived well, and Havana was a famous capital, with noble Spanish colonial architecture. It attracted literate Americans. But it also attracted gangsters, who took over the gambling and the prostitution: Havana became a place where the repressed Americans of that era could escape from the world of the Eisenhowers. Cuban politics was dominated by these interests, and there was much nationalist resentment of this. In 1933, an army sergeant of mixed blood, Fulgencio Batista, with Communist associates, led off with a campaign against the rich, then retired in 1944, but returned after a coup in 1952, this time just greedy; gambling franchises were given out freely, and required contributions towards Batista’s own funds; he became very rich. Meyer and Jack Lansky, as Mafia capos, became notorious. On the other side peasants in shanty towns might be evicted for small debts owed to grocers. Meanwhile a university did go up, and middle-class children often became disaffected in it, as they watched Havana obey the Americans. There was a strong enough current of discontent in Havana, much of it among students.