Istwa Nou

Washington's new envoy to Haiti, Ambassador Knox, was the first Black American to hold the post since Dr. Furniss. He praised the government in public, pressed for fresh United States loans, and told reporters the mood in Washington had turned favorable. Port-au-Prince took his measure quickly and began calling him an honorary Tonton Macoute. Money followed the goodwill. Tourists returned, and assembly work arrived: the baseballs sold in the United States were being stitched by Haitians. Then, in the summer of 1970, students came home from schools abroad wearing beards and Afros. Duvalier ordered his militia to collect every one of them. The young men sat for hours in police stations until barbers arrived and cut them bald. The next morning their parents were herded into the palace to hear the president lecture on dress and conduct, closing with the remark that he disliked having to repeat himself. He was dying, and he was policing haircuts.

The photograph taken on 1 July 1969 shows Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, smiling with his arm around Francois Duvalier. What it does not show is that Rockefeller was largely holding the Haitian president up. Duvalier had not been seen in public since early May, not even on his own balcony. On May Day he could not get through his own speech and passed the pages to Paul Blanchet. His hands were swollen, his ankles too, and his face had puffed up. Nine days later he complained that he could barely breathe and that something heavy was lying across his chest. He was a physician and recognised congestive heart failure without help. Digitalis, diuretics and an enormous will to stay in office carried him through. On 20 May he underwent prostate surgery in secret at the old French hospital where he had trained as a young man. He was sixty three. The visit that held him up was also the visit that ended American disapproval.

Ordered to attack Cayard's squadron, the air force found that its one airworthy F-51 had been stripped of its weapons on instructions from the palace, and nobody could say where the guns had gone. Duvalier had disarmed the aircraft to prevent an air force coup, and the precaution now left him with nothing to send against a naval one. For two days the shore and the ships fired at each other without killing anyone. With fuel running out and no word from anybody ashore, Colonel Cayard turned northwest and took the entire coast guard into the American base at Guantanamo Bay, where the crews asked for asylum. That closed the last of at least nine invasions, coups and risings aimed at Francois Duvalier in thirteen years. Each of them failed in the same way. The regime was never strong enough to feel safe. Its opponents were never able to act together for a single afternoon.