Istwa Nou

The simple country doctor, as he still described himself to foreign reporters, had gathered a peculiar coalition. In the light stood the griots led by Jean Price-Mars, and medical colleagues like Aurele Joseph, who had fought yaws beside him in the 1940s. There was a brain trust with Roger Dorsinville and Lucien Daumec, his brother-in-law and speechwriter. There were communists, the brothers Jules and Paul Blanchet, Herve Boyer, and Rene Depestre until 1960. Major Jacques Laroche ran a Duvalierist cell inside the army. Clemard-Joseph Charles, who had produced the forty six thousand dollars that paid off Cantave's soldiers in May, handled money, and so did a young deputy from Cabaret called Luckner Cambronne. Behind them stood a Cuban explosives technician, a Dominican agent who came and went on Trujillo's orders, and assorted foreigners. Above all of them was Clement Barbot of Saint-Marc, a former schoolteacher who had been caned as a boy by a French priest for calling Dessalines the greatest of Haitians. Barbot never forgot it, and the revolution would eventually eat him.