Papa Gede
Bèl gason
Gede Nibo
Bèl gason
Lè li abiye tout an blan
Li pòtre yon depite
Lè li abiye tout an nwa
Li pòtre yon senatè
(Papa Gede is a handsome man
Gede Nibo is a handsome man
When he dresses all in white, he looks like a deputy.
When he dresses all in black, he looks like a senator.)
- Traditional
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| François Duvalier, 1957 |
One night in late 1954, a car pulled up in front of a house in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The driver waited. At last the figure of a woman carrying a suitcase appeared in the doorway. The driver helped the woman into the back seat, and per instructions drove a winding course through the streets of the city. When his passenger was sure that they were not being followed, the driver returned to the street on which he'd picked the woman up and parked at the house opposite the address he'd started from. The driver helped the woman out of the car and carried her suitcase to the door, which opened to let the woman inside. But the woman was no woman. She was the disguise of Dr François Duvalier, former Minister of Public Health under ex-President Dumarsais Estimé, now dead after 3 years of forced exile. This was Duvalier's second relocation since the summer when he'd moved from his own residence to the house next door. The objective was to keep his whereabouts a secret to the forces supporting the current Haitian president, Paul Magloire a military officer who had participated in the coup that ousted Estimé 4 years before. Magloire, losing grip on his office after a series of scandals exposed him as a kleptocrat and suspicious of rivals, had it in for Duvalier-- in an effort to pressure him to leave the country, he had seen to it that his employers, an American health mission had had him dismissed. But Duvalier had no intention of obliging the usurper's wishes for him.
François Duvalier was a young boy in Port-au-Prince when US President Woodrow Wilson in an effort to insinuate the US into the affairs of his Caribbean neighbor to the south sent Marines to occupy Haiti in 1915. By the time Franklin Roosevelt ended the occupation in 1934 in the spirit of his Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America, Duvalier was an intern, having nearly achieved his childhood dream of becoming trained as a doctor of medicine at the elite Lycée Pétion. The occupation had radicalized him as it had so many others of his generation. It inspired him while still a student to delve into the writings of Jean Price-Mars who advanced the notion of noirisme, defining the modern Haitian's struggle to restore the wisdom and strength of the peoples of Africa whence their forebears had been torn, first by the Spaniards for whom Columbus discovered the Island in 1492 and then by the French against whom the slaves had fought and won back their freedom in 1804. So preoccupied with noirism was Duvalier as an undergraduate that with fellow Lycée students Lorimer Denis and Louis Diaquoi, he had founded a journal and literary movement in 1932 called Les Griots after West African bards. The writings extolled the virtues of blackness, Pan-Africanism and negritude, and urged revolution against Haiti's other racial category, the minority of light-skinned mulattoes, descendants of Haiti's European colonizers and African slaves who by sheer virtue of the European mixed into their blood had been granted elite privilege over the oppressed black majority since the dawn of Haiti's often sad and bloody history. Duvalier's writings developed what journalist Elizabeth Abbott described as "a fanatical following."
The special object of Duvalier's fascination was vodou, the Haitian version of West African spiritual practices brought to the island with the first slaves in 1505 as filtered through the Catholicism of the Spanish and French masters they overthrew, a practice that was frowned upon by the official Catholic church and driven underground by the US Marine occupation of the island from 1915 to 1934. In brief, as Anthropologist Julia Pfeifer has described it:
Haitian vodou is based on a belief in a unique supreme being as creator of the universe. Contrary to the Christian god, the supreme being is believed to be a distant god. This god is supposed to have transferred some of its power to a pantheon of deities, called loa. A serviteur always serves the loa, not the supreme being. Therefore, Haitian Vodou is a religion with a monotheistic head and a polytheistic body.
Vodou is less a doctrine or set of moral principles than a system of ritualized interactions with the spiritual world, particularly through experience of loa (or lwa), spiritual entities something akin to gods or saints. The loa are encountered through ceremonies conducted at a usually remote often dirt floored temple called a peristil by either a houngan or male priest, or a mambo, the female counterpart. After days of preparation, the drumming begins and a conch is blown to beckon practitioners, known as serviteurs, to a ceremony. Offerings are made, including perhaps a sacrificed chicken or goat, ritual drawings called vévé specific to each loa are drawn on the floor of the peristil in cornmeal. Drums are played and the practitioners dance until any one of them signals through contortions that they have entered a trance state in which they become a "horse" mounted by the loa. At this point, the loa speaks through the horse, offering counsel and instruction, and granting serviteurs access to the hidden mysteries.
The loa associated with Duvalier was Papa Gede, alternately known in other aspects as Gede Nibo and Baron Samedi, lord of death and guide of the recently deceased to the afterlife. Often represented with a top hat, his face half white and half black, a handsome man of taste and power, perhaps a Senator usually smoking a cigar, with a cane or sometimes, as at a funeral, an umbrella as a reminder that death like rain falls on us all. As a doctor who specialized originally in the treatment of yaws, the deforming and necrotic bacterial infection to which children were especially susceptible, and who in his position with a US sponsored health mission to Haiti had had a great hand in eradicating it from the island by prompt treatment with penicillin, Duvalier first acquired the nickname Papa Doc, in reference to Papa Gede's power to protect children from being taken before their time.
Duvalier's hero (and as observed by Estimé's sometime love interest, Katherine Dunham, American dancer, anthropologist, and eyewitness to events in Haiti at the time, Duvalier's better) was Dumarsais Estimé. Estimé shared with Duvalier both a hatred for the mulatto elite, and an obsession with mulatto women. Both had mulatto wives (and therefore children). With Duvalier's help, Estimé had himself wrested the presidency from an earlier military coup that had also been instigated by the mulatto Magloire. Estimé had been popularly elected. During his term he initiated reforms, nationalized industries. He named Duvalier secretary of labor and then Public Health Minister. But in spite of Estimé's broad popularity with the people, he had enemies in high places, and found himself in exile in 1950, restlessly on the move for 3 years, from Port-au-Prince to Havana to Paris and finally to New York where he died in 1953.
Now, after 4 years of relative prosperity in Haiti that coincided with postwar boom in the first world, Magloire's future was uncertain, and Duvalier with his friends, including Clément Barbot another former official in Estimé's government displaced by Magloire's coup, were planning for Haiti's next phase. Magloire's corruption caught up with him and he was forced into exile before the end of his term. A series of provisional governments assumed presidential duties during the long campaign. Duvalier campaigned on a populist noirist platform that harkened to the Estimé administration, whose abrupt ouster was still deeply resented by the black majority that had elected him. Most notably Duvalier campaigned on a promise to give women the vote. In noirist fashion he openly criticised his opponent Louis Déjoie (and closest rival following the forced ejection from Haiti by motorboat of the former frontrunner, Daniel Fignolé), as a corrupt mulatto who would be a repeat of Magloire. After many months, the election was finally held September 22, 1957. In an election not without fraud and intimidation from both sides, Duvalier won with more than 70% of the nearly million votes cast. He was inaugurated October 22. Thereafter, he would consider 22 his lucky number.
Almost immediately upon his inauguration, Duvalier set about rewriting the constitution to consolidate power, and to reshape the government in a way that let him use civic promotions and appointments to begin making good on his promise to restore a measure of power and wealth to the black majority from the tiny mulatto elite. It was also during this period that first glimpses of the repressive sadist Duvalier would become apparent. Before the end of the year, dozens of opponents and critics were thrown into Fort Dimanche prison. There were incidents of murder, brutality and intimidation. In January 1958, Yvonne Hakime-Rimpel, editor and publisher of the feminist magazine L'Escale and early critic of the autocratic measures of Duvalier awoke one night to a group of nine men in her bedroom, members of a hooded vigilante group known as the cagoulards who had been called into duty during the campaign by Duvalier for purposes of intimidation, who after terrorizing her husband and young daughters, took her from her house by car to a remote field where the men in turn raped her. A voice she recognized as Duvalier's ordered the men to finish her off. One of them -- whether to save her life or to see that she remained alive in terror she was never sure-- fired at the ground next to her, and she was finally left in a ditch for dead. The effort succeeded in silencing her.
Magloire's plottings over the years had taught Duvalier to be distrustful of the army. In 1958 he recruited from the cagoulards a civilian militia officially called Volontaires de la Sécurité National that would become his secret police. Suspected of being behind several sudden disappearances they soon came to be known unofficially as Tontons Macoute, named for Uncle Knapsack, a figure of folklore who came into homes by night to gather bad children into his knapsack for breakfast. The one constant of the Macoute uniform was a pair of dark glasses to hide the eyes, and for those who could afford them blue jeans and a cowboy hat. Duvalier appointed his co-plotter Clément Barbot head of the force, and a young fanatic supporter of his election, Rosalie Bousquet who became notorious by her married name of Madame Max Adolphe as the Macoute's commandant. Barbot and Madame Max were called to their work. The Macoute's modus operandi was destroying the mental health of rivals by threatening and not infrequently killing their family members.
The US response to what was obviously becoming a problem in the Haitian capital was schizophrenic, on the one hand supporting movements to oust Duvalier that had grown among the exile community, on the other supplying massive amounts of aid. Nothing came of the plans for insurgency. The aid, along with revenue collected from capriciously introduced taxation went not to the national treasury but to the vaults of the private Haitian Commerce Bank, headed by Duvalier loyalist and sometime Macoute, Clémard Joseph Charles whose efforts at bribing the military to keep at bay their tendency to interfere in elections during Duvalier's presidential campaign had greatly helped to smooth his way to the presidency.
Nearby, earth shattering changes were taking place. On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro, partly inspired by Toussaint Louverture who had commanded the guerrilla army that had liberated Haiti's slaves from France in 1804, experienced the culmination of his revolution in Cuba, installing himself as leader. Duvalier's ally in the region, Fulgencio Batista, the dictator who had brought Casinos to Havana and great wealth to the foreign playboys and gangsters who operated them -- and to himself-- while delivering misery to his own people, was gone. Fidel himself was non-ideological. He professed to believe only in the Cuban people, but his two primary alternates, his brother Raul and the Argentinian lawyer and revolutionary-at-large Ernesto Guevara, known better by the Argentine slang for "guy", Che, were openly Marxist in their leanings. To begin to redress the inequities of Batista's incumbency, Fidel's intent was to adopt a policy of agrarian reform modeled after that recently attempted in Guatemala by Jacobo Árbenz before a CIA backed coup removed the democratically elected Árbenz from office in 1954. First, the Castro government needed to rid Cuba of potential opponents which they achieved with a series of public trials and executions. The nod to due process was unusual for the region to say the least. Within Eisenhower's Washington, the Dulles brothers at State and the CIA began concocting plots to rid Cuba of its exciting and immensely popular leader. Duvalier was deemed a less pressing problem. He may have been an out of control maniac but at least he was not a communist.
On May 24, 1959, Duvalier suffered a massive heart attack and was in a coma for nine hours. Some thought the neurological damage done during this episode might explain his subsequent behavior. Always an acolyte of vodou since his Griots days, following his heart attack, his interest in the darkest aspects of it became, in the description of Katherine Dunham, "pathological." She was among many who described him in this period as becoming gray in color with substance visibly oozing from his pores. He had become partial recently to a flamboyant streetcart vendor and sometime houngan named Zacharie Delva who he considered to have special vodou powers. When he learned of the death of a foe (perhaps within the walls of notorious Fort Dimanche prison where he'd put so many to be forgotten), he and Delva would plot with the Tontons Macoute to abscond with the corpse, or with just the head, for rites designed to absorb its power. In an effort to subdue the Catholic Church, always a threat and critic of his regime, Duvalier began a campaign to have foreign priests deported. While a mass was held at Port-au-Prince's cathedral to pray for the expelled priests, the Tontons Macoute entered with nightsticks to beat and arrest worshippers. To celebrate the expulsion, Delva held a vodou ceremony on the cathedral steps during which he drank the blood of three freshly sacrificed black pigs.
While Duvalier was ill and during his recovery period, Clément Barbot had assumed presidential duties. When he was able to resume as president, Duvalier began to suspect that Barbot had taken advantage of his illness and he began to worry that his former comrade would come to betray him in an effort to gain power. A distance grew between them.
Meanwhile, an election in the United States meant a new president of a new party in 1961, the young and glamorous Senator John Kennedy. Kennedy chose for his Attorney General his own younger brother Robert Kennedy, but the younger Kennedy was in some respects something of a co-president. Like the Dulles brothers before them, the Kennedy brothers, scions of the family of businessman and politician Joseph Kennedy, who made a fortune frequently in competition with the mob that Robert Kennedy would build his own reputation prosecuting, and who imbued the sons he groomed for greatness with pro capitalist enthusiasm were both possessed of the disease of Communist Derangement Syndrome, and this caused them to make embarrassing blunders fresh out of the gate.
The most visible and painful of these was proceeding with the absurdly cockamamie secret plan hatched during the Eisenhower administration to stage an invasion of Cuba from the logistically disadvantageous Bay of Pigs, by a rag tag group of exiles in April 1961. In spite of warnings from more seasoned advisors, the Kennedys, whose win in November had been narrow, wanted to prove themselves to doubters of their acumen and resolve in foreign affairs. The ok was given. On April 15, a boat sailed for Cuba from Guatemala. It made land two days later in the finger shaped Bay of Pigs and in the initial surprise, appeared to have had an advantage, but in the difficult terrain, the situation turned. Initial gains were reversed at Playa Larga. To compound problems, when Kennedy sensed correctly after three days that the tide had turned against the invaders, and having lost a plane in the pre-battle reconnaissance, the Navy hero did not have the nerve to follow up with Air power. The result was that Castro's forces (with Castro himself directing things in person from nearby Palpite) soon gained the upper hand, ending the invasion with 1200 captured, 2 American planes shot down and 2 American supply ships lost. Castro achieved hero status when it was revealed that the new US president was behind the attacks. Most significantly, the incident forced Castro's hand in terms of seeking alignment. All of his overtures to the US since assuming power had been met with indifference if not outright hostility when it was clear that Castro sought American recognition on his own terms. Castro observed that Latin American countries that went their own way like Guatemala were squashed by the US at the soonest opportunity. Countries that courted the US tended to be corrupt and were only humored when they neglected their own people in favor of right-wing American business interests. Originally inclined to go it alone, Castro learned from the Bay of Pigs incident that the US could not be trusted. Better to keep the designs of the uncomfortably close neighbor in check with a match in terms of power and might, and even better if the ally were not in the neighborhood, breathing down his neck. Not yet a Communist, but more of a survivalist, Castro reached out to the Soviet Union.
The humiliation experienced by the Kennedys at Bay of Pigs at first intensified their thirst for redemption through glory, causing them to entertain a variety of schemes. No idea was too foolish. As Journalist Alex Von Tunzelmann notes:
In addition to inventing several cigar-based death traps, including soaking the tobacco leaves in botulinum toxin, the CIA fixated on another of Fidel’s hobbies—diving. There was a poison diving suit, impregnated with fungus spores that would cause a skin disorder. There was a poison aqualung, with the mouthpiece of its breathing apparatus rerouted to release tuberculosis bacilli into his mouth. The head of the CIA’s Cuban task force, Desmond FitzGerald, wondered if they could make an exploding seashell for the Cuban leader to pick up. At this, reality briefly intruded. One of the CIA agents in the room asked how they would make Fidel choose the right shell: “Put a flashing neon sign on it and have it play Beethoven’s Fifth?”
The epitome of the derangement may have been the extent to which Robert Kennedy, famously aggressive in going after the mob in Congress had been willing to go in pursuing CIA plots to use the expertise of mob hitmen against Castro. The fervor for glory was not limited to Cuba. One possibly CIA approved plot had succeeded in the Dominican Republic -- the successful assassination of the brutal long time dictator Rafael Trujillo in May 1961, a plot that had been brewing since Trujillo's surrogates had made an attempt on Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt's life the year before.
The successful operation so close to home unnerved Duvalier and made him suspicious of the young American president, but with anti-Duvalier forces in exile famously more concerned with plotting against each other for life in Haiti after Duvalier than with cooperating with each other against Duvalier himself, nothing could get off the ground; the United States had learned to bide its time and tolerate Duvalier in the meantime. Incentive to stay within tolerable lines came in the form of millions of dollars in aid filling the coffers of Clémard Charles's Commerce Bank. In order to turn on the American aid tap, Duvalier and many others learned, you needed only to raise the spectre of communism haunting the Americas with the US. With Havana's casinos closed, Port-au-Prince seemed to some as worth consideration for the next gambling mecca in the hemisphere. Duvalier instructed his ministers to encourage it, but the dictator's erratic behavior made Haiti too large a gamble even for the mob.
While the Bay of Pigs fiasco was unfolding in Cuba, Duvalier suddenly dissolved the government and announced an election. Since the Haitian constitution forbade a president from succeeding himself, his name was not on the ballot. Indeed, the reason for the sudden election was unclear. The only candidates on the ballot were Duvalier loyalists. On the day of the election, turnout was so low that officials scouted for anyone who could be counted, even among foreigners and non-residents and rounded them up to cast their ballots. In spite of the low turnout, the results were announced a week later: over a million in favor of the Duvalier government and another term for Duvalier; 0 against. While the world scorned the election as an excessive display of the megalomania of a disturbed dictator, Duvalier humbly accepted "the will of the people."
Now at the height of paranoia, all of Duvalier's efforts turned to retaining power. He had elevated the flamboyant houngan Zacharie Delva to a status akin to a personal Rasputin. Under Delva's spell, Duvalier had become especially suspicious of his former ally, the brutal head of the Tontons Macoute, Clément Barbot who Duvalier feared had never lost the taste for power that he'd experienced when he'd assumed presidential duties while Duvalier convalesced from his heart attack in 1959. Duvalier had Barbot arrested and thrown into Fort Dimanche prison where he languished for 18 months before Duvalier relented and had him released, a broken man.
Duvalier's antics, instability and open hostility to American aims had earned him a place on Kennedy's short list for regime change. While those plans would take time, the one thing Kennedy could do now to exert pressure on Duvalier was eliminate aid. In October 1962, the world learned that the Soviet Union had been stockpiling nuclear weapons in installations in Cuba. During the tense standoff between the US and the USSR, in an effort to restore good graces with Kennedy, Duvalier let Washington know that Haiti, 40 miles from Cuba at its closest point was at its disposal if a base was needed for operation. The US took him up on his offer and dispatched troops to Port-au-Prince without communicating the plan to anyone in Haiti. When a startled minister reported to Duvalier that American soldiers were walking on the lawn under his window, Duvalier panicked assuming they had come to assassinate him. Only when he had crammed his family with hastily packed suitcases into a getaway car did he learn that the Americans were in Haiti on his invitation.
Not that the US did not have its hands in several efforts to disrupt the status quo in Haiti. Kennedy was resolute on doing what he could to oust Duvalier and install a more stable government that could be leveraged in the ultimate goal of removing Castro from Cuba. But messages were mixed. In the spring of 1963, a group of Haitian Army officers, believing they would receive American arms and support, embarked on a coup, but when they learned that they were mistaken about the American's level of commitment, their plans to loot munitions from Haiti's armory for the mission were intercepted and they were exposed. Most of the officers fled but Col Charles Tournier was captured, and when brutal bloody torture did not yield the names of his co-conspirators, shot. For several days, Macoute were instructed to find as many former officers as they could and have them killed on the pretext that they had access to guns and could have been involved in the plot.
Shaken at the exposure of the army plot, Duvalier thought Haiti could use an occasion to remind itself of his benevolence. He declared a Month of Gratitude -- gratitude of the Haitian people for himself-- from April 22 to May 22 of 1963 (purposely setting the beginning and end dates as the number he considered the most auspicious for him ever since his election and inauguration on September 22 and October 22 of 1957). During the month, rallies were to be held at which officials were expected to give speeches in praise of Duvalier-- words supplied by the president's office if they were not forthcoming on their own. The declaration removed all doubt as to whether Duvalier would vacate the presidency as the constitution required on May 15. The festivities were interrupted mere days in however by an incident that would go down in infamy in the Duvalier years. On the morning of April 26, a limousine driving Duvalier's 14 year old daughter Simone and 11 year old son Jean-Claude was ambushed by a sniper as it pulled up to the children's school in an apparent attempted kidnapping. In the gunfire, the chauffeur and two Macoute body guards were killed. The children managed to make it safely inside the school. Duvalier was livid when he found out. He at once incorrectly surmised that the shooter must have been a former lieutenant and famed sharpshooter François Benoit, and ordered him brought in for punishment. Benoit, somehow got wind of the plan and rather than risk failure in convincing Duvalier's thugs of his innocence, escaped. When the Macoutes discovered him missing, standing in as proxies for Duvalier's fury, they machine gunned Benoit's family and for good measure on the president's orders went on a rampage killing anyone they could find with a first or last name of Benoit. Duvalier could not quite bring himself to believe the truth at first, that the perpetrator of the attack was his old friend, fellow anti-Magloire plotter and disgraced former head of the Tontons Macoute, Clément Barbot. But when a rumor spread that Barbot had escaped by transforming himself into a black dog, Duvalier ordered all black dogs in Haiti shot. Barbot eluded the Macoutes until July when he was found in Cazeau, plotting another attack, where his hut was torched with gasoline and he was machine gunned with his fellow plotters as he fled.
Kennedy had already cut off aid to Haiti since 1962. At news of the escalating terror, he ordered American warships to Port-au-Prince Harbor. "They cannot touch me," Duvalier said. "I am already an immaterial being." When international observers from the Organization of American States flew in, Duvalier whipped up a drunken carnival of peasants from the countryside as a display of the contentment of his people. He addressed the committee only in Creole, insulting them to their faces. His increasingly erratic behavior had American experts convinced the end was near for his incumbency, but at a news conference for the foreign press at which an air of finality hung over the proceedings, Duvalier appeared late, then casually waved off suggestions that anything was wrong in Haiti, abruptly ending the press conference saying, "I would like to stay longer with you but I'm very busy today." Graham Greene, whose novel The Comedians describes this period of Duvalier's era, expressed disbelief that Duvalier's outrageous brutality did not get him killed.
But if Kennedy was eyeing a future without Duvalier, Duvalier was brooding that something had to be done about Kennedy. Sending hit squads to Cuba and the Dominican Republic without care for international law. Toppling democracies to suit the elite, the people be damned. Running his own country with friends, cronies, his own brother, was he any different from Trujillo or Castro? Wasn't the US among the last of the modern nations to abolish slavery? Weren't American blacks among the most oppressed, impoverished, threatened group of people in the world? What was going on in American prisons? What about the millions of poor in America's cities and Appalachia? What made the US different from any other country in terms of international crimes of war and oppression of its own people? Democracy? Weren't there stories about missing ballot boxes in West Virginia and dead people voting for Kennedy in Chicago? Who was Kennedy to pass judgment on Duvalier? Was it his Whiteness? Wasn't Kennedy with his privileged life the American equivalent of the mulatto? Weren't all American presidents?
Duvalier seethed with a desire to give Kennedy a taste of his medicine. In October 1963, a rumor went around that Duvalier, with the houngan Delva officiating, conducted a ceremony in which he stabbed a vodou doll of Kennedy in the neck 2,222 times, and pleaded for aid from Papa Gede in carrying out the deed.
Mysterious forces prevailed. A conduit for the spirit mission existed in Haiti at that time. Recently Duvalier had been approached on more than one occasion by his banker Clémard Joseph Charles, of the Commerce Bank. He had wanted a word with the president about a proposed business venture with an American national, a friend of US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy's aunt, Edith Bouvier. Duvalier's ears must have perked up at the news of this connection to his nemesis Jack Kennedy. The business partner's name was George de Mohrenschildt.
*****
Umbrella Man:
Part 2: Bèl Gason
