Ecce homo appears under Duvalier's photograph in the capital

By the late 1960s a visitor walking through Port-au-Prince would see pictures of Duvalier captioned Ecce homo. The Latin means behold the man, and in the Gospel it is what Pilate says when he brings the scourged Christ out in front of the crowd. Every literate Haitian in a country schooled by Catholic priests knew exactly where the phrase came from and what it was doing under a photograph of a living head of state. It belonged to a wider effort to present the president as more than a man holding an office: a figure of religious weight who embodied the nation itself, so that opposing him was not a political position but a kind of blasphemy. The regime built this in every register it had, Catholic, Vodou and national at once. The president who had been excommunicated in 1961 was by the end of the decade being displayed in the posture of Christ before the mob.

Every morning at six, as the light reached the Caribbean, a young Haitian journalist named Raymond Alcide Joseph went on the air from a New York station with news of Haiti in Kreyol and sharp jokes at the expense of the president. Haitians called the programme six o'clock mass, and few people with a transistor missed it. Joseph spoke for the Coalition Haitienne, an exile group backed by Paul Magloire that stayed away from invasions, having watched the farce in the Florida Keys in 1966 where a landing party was stopped by federal agents while a television crew paid for the story and helped write the script. The Voice of America had dropped its Kreyol service on instructions from the White House, so for three years Joseph's Radio Vonvon was the only competition for the two hours a day Rene Depestre broadcast from Havana. Duvalier obtained jamming equipment licensed for export by the United States and used it against Vonvon. He left Havana alone.

Richard Nixon's administration handled Haiti with fewer scruples than its predecessors and more clarity. Ambassador Clinton Knox repeated in his telegrams that Haiti had no democratic tradition, and that democracy, corruption and good governance therefore could not serve as measures for judging the Duvalier government. Nelson Rockefeller had come back from his own visit with recommendations along the same lines. Henry Kissinger proposed to Nixon a more open policy toward the country. On 21 April 1971 the United States approved the succession of Francois Duvalier by his son. Knox described what was arriving as a new Duvalierism deserving every form of official American encouragement. Jean-Claude Duvalier ruled until 1986. He promised an economic revolution to follow his father's political one. Under him the violence grew quieter, in order to improve the image of the regime and attract foreign lenders, and the machine still went out whenever the government judged itself threatened.

Speaking in Havana in 1968, the Haitian poet Rene Depestre described the negritude of the Duvalier government as a delirious mystification. His argument was that the regime's language about race concealed an ordinary struggle for power between rival groups inside the Haitian propertied class, and that dressing it as the triumph of the black majority was a service performed for reaction. Depestre had grown up inside the intellectual world he was attacking. He had been a young radical in Port-au-Prince in 1946, expelled and exiled repeatedly, and he had argued with Aime Cesaire, for whom negritude meant something other than a state doctrine. From Cuba he broadcast two hours a day into Haiti in Kreyol. The charge carried weight because it came from the left rather than from the elite the regime liked to name as its enemy. It said that a black government could reproduce the same order under a different flag.