HAITI: The Marines Are Back

U.S. Marine Colonel Robert Debs Heinl Jr. impatiently waved his heavy swagger stick one day last week as Haitian troops dashed across a drill field in Port-au-Prince and hit the dirt in platoon combat formation. “That looked like hell,” grumped Heinl, “but when we can’t find any mistakes, the time will have come for us to leave.” In the sprawling headquarters of the International Cooperation Administration in downtown Port-au-Prince, ICA Director for Latin America Rollin Atwood wound up a rigid, five-day inspection and said: “From a year ago, Haiti has made tremendous progress.”

Invited Guests. Both assessments were the product of the big new role that the U.S. has quietly begun to play in the hitherto chaotic affairs of Haiti. President François Duvalier invited the U.S. in. Caught between two strong-arm neighbors —Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Truiillo—Duvalier talked enviously of “Jamaica and Puerto Rico, whose political destinies are stabilized by larger countries.” The President frankly described his own bureaucracy as “incompetent.”

Responding, the U.S. nearly doubled the size of its ICA staff in Haiti to 66 technicians, including an art professor from the University of California, a traffic expert sent to study Port-au-Prince’s breakneck driving habits, a platoon of agronomists to start Operation Poté Colé (Pull Together), which is designed to hike farm productivity in once-fertile northern Haiti. Taking up a desk just down the hall from Finance Minister Andre Theard, ICA’s Nolle Smith, 70, a Negro economist from Wyoming, has helped cut petty corruption and inefficiency, is now sitting in on talks about a schedule of taxes and customs duties. Cost of the ICA effort in 18 months: $11,870,000.

Out of the Past. Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. proudly ended a 19-year Marine occupation in Haiti; the return of the Marines is ironical but seemingly vital. Colonel Heinl (Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, Korea), Yaleman (’37) and Marine historian, arrived last January with red mustache, pith helmet and fluent French to find the Haitian army in horrifying shape.

He discovered rusted rifles of every conceivable make, ammunition so old that only half of it would fire. Among the debris in one corner of the armory, he even found a long-forgotten coffin containing the body of the daughter of President Alexandre Petion (1808-18). But he also found old blue ceremonial uniforms in the army warehouses and soon fielded a band that gives rousing renditions of the Marines’ Hymn, plus a passable version of the Haitian anthem. More important, Heinl’s 40-man team taught the troops how to get from bunks to battle stations all over town in 30 minutes flat.