Twenty years of Duvalier rule leave a million Haitians outside the country

The Duvaliers held power in Haiti from 1957, and by the end of the 1970s the reckoning stood at more than thirty thousand people disappeared, victims of a daily repression built up into a system of government, and close to a million Haitians in exile for economic or political reasons. The country was kept alive by international aid that in practice protected foreign capital and the local fraction allied with it. American power on its own does not explain how one family took the state and held it. Haitian opposition groups had proved unable to produce a radical critique of the language the regime spoke, and often reproduced that language without noticing, out of fear of an analysis that would show where it came from. Explaining the regime as a natural inclination of the masses toward dictatorship was the most common form of that failure.

On a Wednesday afternoon in the autumn of 1979 a man called Jean Baptiste came into the general medical clinic at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Two weeks earlier he had left the wards with tuberculosis confirmed by biopsy and drugs that were known to work against it. He was emaciated, could barely walk, fell to one side when he did, and the left side of his face had dropped. The senior emergency room resident argued that he needed time to heal. A week later he returned unable to walk at all, held up by friends, and was admitted only under threat of disciplinary action. A scan showed several large lesions in his brain, read at the time as pockets of tubercular pus. He died within a fortnight. His physicians concluded that he had come in too late carrying too much disease, which was a reasonable conclusion in 1979. Nothing in the training of anyone on that ward described what had actually killed him.

Kebreau finished the job the same night. The cabinet went to jail along with twenty Fignolist organisers. At half past ten the next morning, with the guns of Fort National firing, the general told the press that the army had taken charge, that soldiers were the fathers of the family and not politicians, and that they wanted order and elections. On the night of the sixteenth the hammering on lamp posts started after the eight o'clock curfew and then turned into a sound people compared to the sea. Word had gone round that Fignole had been secretly executed. It was false. The slums came out anyway, breaking the street lights as they went, and the darkness was followed by fire. The fire brigade had its engines wrecked and its hoses cut. Fort Dimanche answered the attack from La Saline with machine guns. Then the army came in behind half-tracks and light tanks, firing into the alleys and into whole blocks of plank houses. This was the last time the poor of Port-au-Prince acted on their own account for thirty years.

The American press reported that an American owner of a company in Haiti was buying blood plasma from destitute Haitians and exporting between eleven hundred and thirteen hundred gallons a month to the United States. The firm, Hemo Caribbean, had been operating for about eight months and was making four to five dollars a litre. It belonged to Joseph B. Gorinstein, a broker with interests in New York and Miami, who had signed a contract negotiated directly with President Francois Duvalier, dead by then since April of the previous year. The main intermediary between the government and the company was said to be Luckner Cambronne, minister of the interior and national defence. Haitians in rags and without shoes filed through the Hemo Caribbean centre six days a week. Donors received three dollars a litre. Anyone vaccinated against tetanus was worth more, because that plasma could be used to make vaccine, and received five.