HAITI: Picnic Campaign

Festooned with colored lights and filled with little tables & chairs, the ordinarily bare parade ground of Port-au-Prince’s broad Champs-de-Mars wore the air of a fête champêtre. While bands blared meringues through the soft tropical night, 15,000 happy Haitians downed free rice, beans, griots (fried pork), and heady island rum. Nearby cinemas and bars offered free movies and more free drinks. From time to time loudspeakers broadcast polite speeches by politicians suggesting that the picnickers might vote for Colonel Paul Magloire for President.

For more than a month Haitians have been reeling under one such outpouring after another of Candidate Magloire’s official hospitality. In addition to buying movies, drinks and picnic suppers for everybody, the tall, handsome colonel has also wooed the upper crust with balls and brunches in the best hotels, the masses with sandwiches tossed from army trucks.

Colonel Magloire is the strong man of the Haitian army. It was Magloire who put Dumarsais Estimé in the presidency four years ago, and it was Magloire who sent Estimé on his travels last May for trying to bypass the constitution and get himself reelected. The Estimé experience convinced the colonel that he had better stop fooling and run the country himself.

In a shrewd move to make the most of his power and prestige, he arranged that the new President would be chosen not by Congress, but by direct popular vote. The move was almost too successful; for a while he had no opposition at all. Finally an obscure architect named Fénelon J. Alphonse came forward to stand against the popular colonel. At first no one would believe Magloire was not paying his expenses. But after thugs shot up his house, Alphonse plastered the capital with handbills proclaiming: “Down with dictatorship! Long live the rights of man!”

In the prevailing atmosphere of rum, lights and music, such protests went all but unnoticed. This week, as the voters prepared to go to the polls, there was no doubt that the open-handed Strong Man would be Haiti’s next President.