1966 · Haitianyear only
Duvalier announces that the explosive phase is over
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On Ancestors' Day 1966 Duvalier declared that the violent stage of his revolution had ended. Exiles should come home. Every democracy needed an opposition, he said, and a country without one was a graveyard. For a while the change was visible. The curfew ended, roadblocks disappeared, militiamen at the airport stopped emptying briefcases, and foreign correspondents filed without censorship. In April the emperor of Ethiopia visited for a day and the government called it a triumph of diplomacy. In June, receiving American reporters, Duvalier denied that any censorship existed, on a morning when the incoming New York Times had arrived with pieces cut out of it. Haiti had a democracy, he told them, and he was a democrat and a scientist. The journalists kept looking at the paperweight on his desk, which was a large revolver. Asked about it, he lifted the weapon between two fingers as though it were a dead mouse and told an aide to remove it.
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