Istwa Nou

Duvalier kept communists close and used them. Paul and Jules Blanchet and Herve Boyer sat in his circle, contacts with Havana and with the French and Mexican parties were allowed to continue, and in November 1961 he sent Jules Blanchet to Warsaw and Vienna to ask for Russian aid. Washington was the audience. The American ambassador said in 1963 that he did not think the president a communist, only a man who found them useful to wave. The tolerance ended wherever a threat appeared. In April 1961 the novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, who had travelled to Moscow, Peking and Havana for his party, sailed from Baracoa with four companions and twenty thousand dollars and came ashore at the Mole. The peasants he had come to liberate tied him up and delivered him to the nearest garrison. After some days of beating in the cells of Fort St George the five were taken out under the walls and stoned to death by those same peasants, on orders from the palace. The rival party led by Rene Depestre lost its leaders in 1966. The two merged in 1968 and proclaimed a single communist party on 31 March 1969.

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.