Jamaica refuses to let a deposed Haitian president off his boat

The deposed president Dumarsais Estimé arrived by boat in Jamaica seeking temporary asylum. Haitian agents in Kingston, fearing he meant to use the island as a base to attack the newly installed government, created a row that prevented Estimé and his family from disembarking. Alexander Bustamante intervened, arguing that Jamaica must not allow the Haitian government to involve it in Haitian politics, that he himself was undesirable to some people at home, that nothing said by the Haitian government would be accepted without proof, and that a future ousted Haitian president would want the same courtesy. Smith calls the remark prescient, because Paul Magloire, who followed Estimé and had received the freedom of Kingston on a state visit two years before, landed at Palisadoes a day after being pushed out himself in 1956.

Dumarsais Estime taught Duvalier mathematics at the Lycee Petion. Duvalier married Simone Ovide Faine, a nurse, and they had three daughters and a son, Jean-Claude. He worked with American public health missions in the 1940s, went to the University of Michigan in 1944 for public health training and failed it, then followed Estime into government as director general of public health and rose to minister. When Estime fell he went into opposition and then underground, from 1954 to 1956, which he afterwards called his years in the maquis. Clement Barbot said he carried a worn copy of The Prince in his pocket through that period. To Washington he looked ideal: a civilian, a doctor, modest in his habits, no richer for having held office. He wore a black suit, white shirt, dark tie and black homburg behind heavy round spectacles, which foreigners read as the uniform of a careful family physician. Haitians read it differently. That is the dress of Bawon Samdi, the lwa who keeps the gate of the cemetery.

In September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, no European government imagined leaving Africa. There had been trouble. Political movements were forming that pointed toward later nationalism, the countryside protested, workers in the towns organised, Islamic and Christian movements rejected the assumptions colonial rule rested on, and African voices were getting louder. None of it threatened the structure, and no colonial power had given serious thought to retreat. Twenty years later Britain and France had begun programmes of withdrawal that could not be reversed, Belgium was about to lose the Congo, and only Portugal and the settler regimes of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa were digging in, at a cost paid out over the following decades. Europe left Africa in roughly the span of time it had taken to seize it. The change came from two directions, from what European governments needed at home and abroad, and from African movements altering the facts on the ground. Grievances accumulated through the Depression and the war hardened after 1945 into parties.

Diederich explains how he came to be in the middle of this story. Sailing for the South Pacific, he put into Port-au-Prince, left the sea to hunt for a stolen camera, fell for the country, worked briefly at an American owned casino and in 1950 founded an English language weekly, the Haiti Sun. Stringing work for American and British media followed. He describes the period from the late 1940s to the middle 1950s as a time when the country had more than charm, and later contrasts it flatly with what came after, calling the seven years from 1957 a nightmare in which friends and colleagues were killed or vanished while he filed reports abroad, often anonymously, and censored himself at home to avoid joining the disappeared. The paper is also the source for many of the dates in this book, since he covered the arrivals and departures himself.