October to December 1977 · Haitianspan
Washington praises Haiti while freed men describe Fort Dimanche
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In October 1977 Terence Todman, the American delegate to a press freedom conference in the Dominican Republic, arrived from four days in Port-au-Prince and told the meeting that his government had noted with satisfaction a series of Haitian measures improving the fundamental human condition. The speech was not administration policy. Washington let it stand anyway. Prisoners released in the amnesties of that year were meanwhile describing what the government said no longer existed. From Montreal, Marc Romulus set out the arrival at Fort Dimanche: stripped, examined, thrown against a wall to wait for the commandant. He described thirty men to a cell, five minutes at two in the morning under a pipe a quarter of an inch across, coffee and a stale roll at half past five, and tuberculosis in half the prison population. Television carried further than any of it. Interviewed by a Canadian network in mid October, Jean-Claude Duvalier said there was not one political prisoner in Haiti. The Miami Herald quoted an American official saying that if they pushed him too far he might get angry.
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