Istwa Nou

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 1934 a young Haitian doctor writing under the name Abderrahman published a page of complaint and defiance. He described what it was to come from the class of youth the elite dismissed as misbegotten, rejected with mistrust and contempt for having emerged out of the lower depths of the real Haiti, pushed back among the homeless and the hungry, worn down daily by poverty and by the arrogance of people newly arrived at money. The writer was François Duvalier. Heinl treats the passage as the key to everything that came after, and it is hard to argue with him. Twenty three years separate it from Duvalier's presidency. The doctrine that grew out of it holds that the light skinned elite had forfeited the right to govern by existing, its offence being its presence ahead of any particular act of misrule. Private humiliation had been converted into political theology. A reader in 1934 would have called it the cry of an angry young man.