13413: radtimes: Baby Docs Ride (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Baby Doc's Ride

http://www.mcpost.com/   [The Skies Above]

by Sarah Weston

When I was based in Miami with my airline, I kept an apartment across the
street from the area known as Little Haiti. Being a genteel lily-white lady
born and bred on the West Coast, my forgivable first reaction was "We're
not in California anymore, Toto." Little Haiti is quintessentially third
world  rusting cars on cinder blocks, refrigerators in front yards, old men
lounging in front of liquor stores. But what I soon realized it was not was
a slum. I saw no hookers,
no drug dealers, no bands of young men prowling with narrowed predatory
eyes. In short, it was not like the rest of Miami. It was merely poor. And
so I began to relax.
Haiti has the dubious distinction of being the poorest nation in the
Western Hemisphere. This is visible even from seven miles up. Haiti has the
look of a wasteland, a battlefield, a carcass scoured by ants. The rest of
the Caribbean is stunning in its nacreous coralloid beauty, but Haiti has
been picked clean, nearly every scrap of vegetation, edible or combustible,
long since plucked and devoured. Though this history of poverty extends
back nearly two hundred years, no little part of it is due to the regimes
of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier. Papa Doc maintained a 600-man palace
guard and 5,000 militiamen to keep the populace, 90 percent illiterate, in
check via a reign of terror and murder. Baby Doc, who assumed the
presidency at age 19 when Papa Doc kicked the bucket, was marginally more
enlightened, but not so much so as to avoid being given a final heave-ho in
1986. But then, one perhaps has to look at his upbringing.
I flew recently with an ex-Pan Am pilot who had been around during its
glory days, and who told me this story. Somewhere around 1969, when Baby
Doc was a plump and pimply teenager, he decided he wanted a birthday
present from Papa. And what does every teenager want for his birthday? A
car, of course. But Papa was not just any Papa, and Baby was unarguably the
heir apparent. Besides, there was national prestige to consider. So it was
decided that Baby Doc should have a Ferrari. Given the economy of Haiti,
and the fact that the roads were more suited to Jeeps with only the first
two gears, Ferrari dealerships were in short supply. So Pan Am was
contracted to send one of its flagship 747's over to Milan and bring back,
fresh from the factory, a
spanking-new Dino.
But consider for a moment the price tag of this bauble. In modern dollars,
a 747 rents for around $10,000 per hour. Haiti to Milan is about 10 hours
each way. 747s were then brand new, and cost a premium to be removed from
regular service. And finally, with the car itself costing  what,
$200,000?  this is becoming a fairly hefty trinket. Then consider that your
very survival depends on maintaining those 5,000 militiamen, and how little
each of them is being paid, and soon you see that Baby Doc's toy equates to
a significant portion of the national defense budget.
But the public be damned. Oh, those lines, those hand-sewn Italian leather
seats! Oh, the god-like glory, to be Helios in a golden chariot! And oh,
the chicks to be had! So sure enough, on the appointed day a 747 touched
down at Port-au-Prince for the very first time, a jewel box awaiting the
opening imperial touch. That touch was not far away. Baby Doc waited, in a
cluster of limousines festooned with more flags than a naval destroyer,
more bodyguards than a
Mafia funeral. The Ferrari was disgorged, its twenty-four hand-rubbed
layers of lacquer gleaming in the Caribbean sun. What a thing of beauty! It
could hardly have been more magical had a unicorn stepped out from a swirl
of fairy dust. All eyes were locked upon it, all breaths held as one. Baby
Doc approached it gingerly, as if it might rear and gallop away if
startled, and held out two fingertips to touch it. He circled it slowly,
running those fingers along it as if to calm it.
He stood eye to headlight with it, absorbing the ecstasy.
And then he strode quickly over to the driver's door, opened it, and wedged
his pubescent bulk quickly into the cockpit. The 747 captain broke into a
trot in his direction, waving his arms. Immediately, he was blocked by
three black-suited praetorian guards shoving rough palms into his chest.
Wait, he shouted, waving more frantically, wait. But in all of Haiti no one
tells Baby Doc to wait, and the captain was hustled roughly away from the
scene.
With a surge of determination, Baby Doc grabbed the key and turned. It
sprang instantly to life, all strings and woodwinds sostenuto. Oh, could
Ulysses have felt more longing for Circe? Baby Doc closed his eyes for a
long moment to drink it in, and then opened them again, to see before him
the main runway at Francois Duvalier International Airport, the longest,
straightest, smoothest two miles of concrete in all of Haiti. It was as a
starting gate opened at a horserace.
He slammed the little thoroughbred into gear, popped the clutch, and in a
howl and a swirl of smoking tires was off.
                                          * * * * * * * * *
First gear wound to an E above high C. It slipped into second with a snick,
and finding its wind now, wound even higher. Into third, passing 70 mph,
and now the bass tremolo was coming in. And then  a shriek, a wounded cry,
a clash of tortured metal. Then silence, save the sound of wind and Pirelli
tires coasting to a stop. Then silence entirely.
The captain was still futilely waving his arms, pointing alternately to the
poor little fatally-gored gazelle and back to his airplane, where the
packages containing engine and transmission oil and radiator fluid stood
waiting. And so this tableau went on for the longest time, Baby Doc
standing disconsolately over his broken toy, the guards ringing him
stony-faced with one hand in their jackets, the captain still waving in
despair. And from the Ferrari the tink .. .tink … tink of molten metal cooling.
After an excruciating half hour another flotilla of limousines hove onto
the horizon. They slammed to a halt at the scene of the fatality and who
but Papa Doc himself emerged. He bristled quickly over to the sad wreckage,
this Faberge Humpty-Dumpty, and looked at it, then his son, then the car
again. He slammed a fist onto the hood. He kicked a $500 tire venomously.
Then he turned to Baby Doc and unleashed the full blast of his fury. Baby
Doc's head hung even lower, and the guards edged nervously away, trying
pointedly not to hear. The captain, his waving arms now slumped like
windless sails, decided this was an opportune time to gather his crew and
head discreetly off to the hotel.
The next day they arrived back at their airplane to head home to New York.
As they were performing the preflight, another lone limousine drove up.
Three more black-suited, sunglassed linebackers got out, one with a
briefcase. This one strode unsmiling up to the captain. "You go back," he
said. "We go back?" said the captain, puzzled. "You go back," he repeated
flatly, opening the briefcase. It was stuffed with cash, in very large
denominations. "Uh … one moment, if you please," said the captain, and he
hustled off to find a phone to call Company Dispatch in New York. After a
few minutes, he reemerged, looking bemused and thoughtful. He looked at his
waiting crew. "We go back," he said.
                                          * * * * * * * * *
And so they did. Back to Milan, back to the factory, back where a second
identical Dino was waiting. And two days later it arrived at its new home
in Port-au-Prince, the only (living) Ferrari in all of Haiti. And so the
Haitian national coffers were thus doubly depleted. That, plus the cost of
four quarts of 10-40, some transmission oil, and two gallons of radiator
fluid. And the cost of one factory mechanic, sent to assure it was all
properly administered BEFORE the aircraft touched down. And so Baby Doc,
prestige restored, became President one year later.
He told me this story as we descended into Los Angeles. And we laughed, as
will you, at the follies of youth. We laughed with delicious pleasure at
the downfall of pride. And secretly, being Americans, I'm sure we laughed
at the bumbling ineptitude of foreigners. We chortled as I gazed to my left
to where the Colorado River no longer empties, but trickles into a backwash
of sewage. We snickered as we descended from the clear blue rarefied air of
the desert Southwest into the brown sludge of the LA Basin. We hah-hah'ed
as I looked at every hill and valley covered with gleaming glass and
concrete, scoured by progress clean of all vegetation, edible or
combustible. And finally, as we crossed the freeway by the airport, all the
Beemers and Caddies and yes, Ferraris
moving at 12 mph, the laughter died in my throat. I thought briefly of my
little apartment in Miami, and was once again quite certain that I had
preferred its affluent surroundings to the poorer ones across the street of
my Caribbean neighbors. But I did have to wonder for just a moment, which
nation is more poorly guided, one with one big tin-pot fool for a dictator,
or one with a hundred million little ones for citizens.