Haiti: The Birthday Blowout

Haiti probably has less to celebrate than any other country on earth. Yet last week, in a four-day binge that it could ill afford, it celebrated the 60th birthday and tenth anniversary in power of the man who has made the country the mess it is: Francois (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier, Haiti’s official President-for-Life and Renovator of the Nation. The task of working up a suitable celebration fell to Director General of Tourism Luc Albert Foucard, who was appointed to his job shortly after he married Duvalier’s daughter Nicole last December. To prove himself worthy—he and another Duvalier son-in-law are vying for the President’s favor—Foucard pulled out all the stops.

He imported a score of beauty queens from Miami and the Dominican Republic and arranged a féte culturelle of poetry readings highlighted by the works of Francois Duvalier. Sample: “The black of my ebony skin merges with the shadows of the night.” He prompted a two-hour recital of tributes by Haiti’s leading politicians, soldiers, scholars, businessmen and civil servants. He arranged a delegation of 2,000 uniformed schoolchildren, a parade of uniformed soldiers and, as the ultimate tribute to his new father-in-law, a massive replay of Haiti’s carnival celebrations, which usually end with the beginning of Lent.

He could not, of course, arrange everything. As the carnival parade snaked by the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, a bomb inside an icecream cart exploded in the middle of the crowd. Another bomb went off a few hours later, while the Haitian capital was blacked out by one of its recurrent power failures. The toll: two dead, 40 injured. Duvalier’s response was automatic. While the sirens of ambulances pierced the air and the government-controlled radio station called for all doctors to report to the city’s general hospital, he ordered the mobilization of Haiti’s trigger-happy militia, known as the Tonton Macoute, or bogeymen. Duvalier also placed the country’s 5,000-man regular army on alert.

The Savior. The wonder is that there is anyone left in Haiti to set off bombs. In his years as President, Duvalier has stamped out virtually all opposition, executing 2,000 political enemies and driving the rest into exile or terrified silence. The Tonton Macoute is so ubiquitous that Haitians are afraid to talk to anyone they have not known for several years. The illiterate and docile peasants, who make up 90% of the Haitian population, believe what the government tells them—and it tells them ceaselessly that Papa Doc is their savior, to be revered on a par with Jesus Christ and Damballah, Haiti’s voodoo snake god.

Though the U.S. has cut off direct aid to Duvalier’s corrupt regime, he also has little to fear from the outside. In the past year he has repaired his relations with the once hostile Dominican Republic, thanks largely to the fact that he once granted asylum to President Joaquin Balaguer. He also made his peace with the Roman Catholic Church in October by participating in a four-hour ceremony inaugurating the first native Haitian archbishop and four new Haitian bishops. The Vatican in return sent a new Papal nuncio and lifted Duvalier’s earlier excommunication. As for the Communists, Haiti is one of the few Latin American countries on which they seem to have no designs: it is too helplessly backward even for them.

Drained Dry. Still, it is very profitable to be President of Haiti, or even close to the President. Under Duvalier, the government has become completely corrupt. Most Cabinet ministers are on the payroll of companies operating in Haiti, and bribes are a standard part of every government decision, from the granting of exit visas to the collection of corporate taxes. Duvalier himself, whose official salary is $14,000 a year, has acquired an estate worth millions in Haiti alone, is reputed to have millions more stashed away in numbered Swiss bank accounts. The primary source of his wealth is the Régie du Tabac, a government agency that was started to collect tobacco taxes but has since expanded to levy unofficial (and unreported) taxes on every single product sold in the country.

Such practices have drained Haiti dry. Once the most prosperous colony of the old French empire, it is today the poorest nation in all of Latin America. Its economy has been reduced in the main to rudimentary farming on worn-out land. Its once profitable tourist trade has been scared away by the bogeymen and their works. Starvation and disease are so widespread that Haiti, alone among all the countries of the hemisphere, refuses to publish figures on the life expectancy of its population. The reason: they would be too shamefully low.