30116: Blanchet: HAITI -- HISTORY -- Magloire (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Max Blanchet <maxblanchet@worldnet.att.net>

     * *


     *TIME.com <http://www.time.com/>*


 *BON PAPA*


     *Monday, February 22, 1954*


     *Cinnamon-skinned girls in Dior dresses, starchy diplomats and
     officers sparkling with gold braid gathered one night last week in
     the majestic, tile-floored great hall of the Presidential Palace
     in Port-au-Prince. The occasion: a ball in honor of Jamaica's
     visiting Governor Sir Hugh Foot and Lady Foot. Just at 10, the
     orchestra blared out a march, and Lady Foot entered the room on
     the arm of a huge, kingly-looking black man resplendent in white
     tie, tails and full decorations. His Excellency Paul Eugene
     Magloire (pronounced mah-glwar), President of the Republic of
     Haiti and host of the evening, stayed on until 2, ceremoniously
     dancing with each guest in the order of her husband's rank,
     gravely bowing to Lady Foot's parting curtsy.*


     *The ceremonial public appearances of Paul Magloire are always
     kingly. Usually he is in one of his uniforms (cost: $300-$1,000
     each), which variously employ the old-fashioned trappings—the
     plume, the spurred boot, the epaulet and the aiguillette. His
     manner, too, is regal; one aide carries his special, seven-inch
     cigars in a leather box; another stands ready to hold his
     gold-headed cane like a staff of office. A vast, burly man—he
     stands six feet and his chest measures 44 in.—Magloire carries off
     his formal appearances with unerring dignity. When on parade he is
     being what he knows many lowly Haitians want in a President: a
     father-king, a national bon papa of regal mien. Loving it, they sing:*


     *He gives us jobs and money—oh! oh! oh! He can stay in the palace
     as long as he wants!*


     *In the palace, between ceremonies, Magloire puts aside fancy
     dress and operates as the kind of detail-cracking,
     eleven-hour-a-day executive that any topflight Detroit
     industrialist could understand. He rises in the dawn cacophony of
     his capital's unbelievably numerous roosters, and hops on an
     exercise machine. After a rubdown, he breakfasts in bathrobed
     comfort on fruit and cafe au lait. Then, in a suite filled with
     alabaster busts, stuffed pink cranes, Empire clocks and pictures
     of himself and other Haitian heroes, the President reads reports
     and mail, takes a thoughtful second look at work saved over from
     the night before. At 7:30 he showers and dresses, usually in grey
     gabardine or white linen, a silk tie with a gold clasp, grey suede
     shoes. Soon he is sitting at a cluttered desk in a smallish office
     conspicuously free of ornament.*


     *He speeds through his work, reading documents and penning "O.K.
     PM" on them. When his ministers call, he half turns in his chair,
     folds his hands in his lap, watches sidelong from penetrating
     brown eyes, and rumbles out courteous, unruffled answers. He
     usually lunches with his family of one son and four daughters
     (although Mme. Magloire is currently in a Baltimore hospital for a
     checkup and the two elder daughters are attending a Brookline
     Mass, convent school). After a siesta, he goes back to work until
     dinner at 7. He sometimes takes an evening off for poker or
     bridge, and occasionally drops in at the city's biggest nightclub,
     where he sits with a few young aides, cradling a highball in his
     big hand, beaming at the dance-floor merriment but taking no part
     in it. More often he works through until 10 or 11 p.m., especially
     if the next day's schedule calls for another public appearance.
     Pageantry takes time —but Magloire recognizes that it is part of
     his job of ruling tiny Haiti.*


     *Mulattoes Y. Blacks. The nation ruled by President Paul Magloire
     is the western third of Hispaniola, a mountainous, sun-drenched
     Caribbean island on the rum-and-bougainvillea side of the Tropic
     of Cancer. The size of Vermont, it teems with more people per
     square mile (299) than any other republic in the hemisphere.
     Through the streets of its capital, Port-au-Prince (pop. 150,000),
     move midget French cars, bulging orange buses, sad-eyed donkeys
     and a steady trickle of sewage. In the city's malodorous Iron
     Market, women traders, their skirts hitched up to the thighs,
     carry on a haggling commerce in used bottles, flour-sacking for
     dresses, red beans that are sometimes sold not by weight but by
     the bean. Above all this, in fresh, violet hills overlooking the
     city and the turquoise bay are the villas and the hotels of the
     rich, the diplomats, the foreign business colony and the tourists.*


     *Haiti is proud to be an all-Negro nation, a "Black Republic"—but
     it is by no means a classless nation. The creme is a hereditary,
     mostly mulatto elite, about 2% of the 3,500,000 population.
     Well-to-do lawyers, doctors, poets and government servants, the
     elite like to think of themselves as "colored Frenchmen." They
     quote Racine, appreciate fine wines, prize lightness of skin and
     occasionally give elegant banquets at which the waiters change
     gloves with every course. Their language is French and their
     religion Roman Catholic. They are Haiti's Brahmins, and just a
     little way down the social scale, they are beginning to blur into
     a growing middle class of U.S.-style businessmen, progressive
     farmers, tradesmen and artisans.*


     *But 90% of all Haitians are black, barefoot, unlettered peasants,
     tilling small patches of land. The peasant works the soil with a
     hoe rather than a plow, picks coffee from 25-ft. wild trees,
     builds wattle-and-daub huts with an airy scorn for the right
     angle. His women carry the freight of Haiti—on their heads. Almost
     any grandmother can balance 100 Ibs. of charcoal, a huge basket of
     cabbages or a severed cow's head and tote it 40 miles.*


     *Most of the peasants are God-fearing Catholics who go to Mass
     early every Sunday—just as soon, in fact, as the*


     *Saturday-night voodoo dance is over. "Bon Dieu Bon," they say;
     God is good, and supreme in matters of the soul, but the voodoo
     loa of remote African memory—Maitresse Erzulie. Papa Legba and the
     snake-god Damballa—are still highly serviceable in such workaday
     matters as appeasing the dead and assuring successful births. The
     peasants are poor (per capita income is $62 yearly, lowest in the
     hemisphere), but they somehow rise above the deadening poverty of
     the Andean Indian or the Moscow streetsweep-er. They have sun,
     fertile (but dry) land, fruitful trees, personal freedom and
     hot-blooded vitality.*


     *The conflict between these two extremes—the rich and the poor,
     the cultured and the uncouth, the mulatto minority and the black
     mass—has kept Haiti aboil for most of the 150 years since it first
     proclaimed its independence, yet the contest is basically
     economic, i.e., the haves to keep and the have-nots to get, rather
     than racial. Say the Haitians: "The rich Negro is a mulatto, the
     poor mulatto is a Negro."*


     *Queen of the Antilles. Modern Haitians can trace the roots of
     this basic division back through a turbulent history that still
     clings like a remembered nightmare. Columbus discovered the island
     on his first voyage, pronouncing the estimated 1,000,000 Arawak
     aborigines "lovable, tractable, peaceable, gentle, decorous and
     praiseworthy." Spanish exploitation and smallpox soon wiped out
     the lovable Indians. In the 17th century, French buccaneers
     loosened Spain's grip on the island and France fastened onto the
     western end; a century later Saint-Domingue was France's proudest
     colony, the "Queen of the Antilles." Its foreign trade of $140
     million yearly dwarfed that of the infant United States, and the
     profits from sugar, chocolate, indigo, coffee and cotton built
     many a chateau on the Loire or town house in Paris.*


     *To till the plantations, the French repopulated Saint-Domingue
     with Negroes from Dahomey, Senegal and the Congo. On
     jasmine-scented nights, white planters took to wenching with
     African maids, and ultimately produced a light-skinned class of
     freedmen with color lines so finely drawn that a contemporary
     record recognized 250 different blood combinations. By the time
     the French Assembly pronounced the Rights of Man. 40,000 whites
     were lording it over 28,000 gens de couleur, while both were
     keeping a firm hand on 450,000 black slaves.*


     *One Saturday night in 1791, the drums at a plantation voodoo
     dance subtly changed their beat. On other plantations the talking
     drums picked up the word and passed it on. Minutes after the
     signal, the lush, peaceful colony of Saint-Domingue flamed up in
     murderous revolt. With pruning forks, machetes and torches, the
     slaves massacred 2,000 French planters and their families, fired
     the canefields and the great houses. In the following decade of
     turmoil, Toussaint L'Ouverture, an obsequious slave coachman until
     he turned himself into a general, led his black armies to bloody
     victories over the French and the interventionist Spanish and
     English as well.*


     *"Gilded African." In Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte scoffed at the
     "First of the Blacks" as a "gilded African," and sent 90 ships and
     40,000 veterans of the Egyptian campaign to retake Saint-Domingue.
     By treachery, the French captured Toussaint and shipped him off to
     France to die in a mountain prison. But in the end, black troops
     and yellow fever smashed the French for good.*


     *The new nation picked the Arawak word Haiti (meaning Mountainous
     Land) for a name, then proceeded to split itself in two. In the
     north, the fabulous Henri Christophe made himself King, set up a
     ludicrous aristocracy and built a monumental stone fortress on a
     needle-top mountain—history's greatest feat of construction by
     Negroes. Christophe's labor force, mostly sugar workers, toiled
     from dawn to dusk to keep his treasury solvent. Once the King
     spotted, far below him, a subject asleep in the door of a hut. A
     56-pounder was loaded, aimed, touched off; loafer and house vanished.*


     *But such cruelty taught the Negroes, as they say now, that "the
     stick that beats the white dog will beat the black dog too." In
     the end, led by the rebel Duke of Marmelade, they revolted, and in
     1820 Christophe, brought to bay, killed himself with a silver
     bullet—providing a theme, a century later, for Eugene O'Neill's
     The Emperor Jones.*


     *In the south, meanwhile, a mulatto general, Alexandre Petion,
     held office as President over a government of elite former
     freedmen. He gave black war veterans bits of land and ruled with
     an easy hand. When Christophe died, Haitians gratefully turned
     their backs on the Emperor's ruthless labor discipline and
     embraced the subsistence economy Petion developed. Sugar
     production, 67,000 tons in 1791, dropped to 15 tons in 1826. The
     less populous, Spanish-speaking eastern end of the island broke
     away, resumed the old Spanish name Santo Domingo, and became the
     Dominican Republic. The world forgot the drowsy little island, and
     Haiti itself seemed somehow hypnotized for nearly a century, while
     rivers ran dry, land was worked out, men grew torpid, and
     government degenerated into a quickening cycle of revolutions.*


     *Enter the Marines. By 1912, rebellions had ousted eleven of 18
     Haitian Presidents. Then, in the space of 43 months, one President
     was blown up in his palace, another was poisoned, three more
     deposed. The U.S., fearing the European powers might try to
     intervene, decided to act first.*


     *A new revolt was forming near Cap-Haitien, under an ambitious
     politico named Guillaume Sam. Admiral William B. Caperton, U.S.N.,
     on the U.S.S. Washington, met Sam unofficially and offered him
     tacit support, urgently warning Sam not to "loot or burn down the
     cities." But once in office, Sam balked at signing a treaty for
     U.S. occupation of Haiti. Instead, he jailed and massacred 167
     suspected revolutionaries—then panicked and fled for asylum to the
     French legation. A raging mob broke into the building, found Sam
     hiding under a bed, dragged him out, literally tore him limb from
     limb, and paraded through Port-au-Prince with his head on a pole.
     Haiti's history had hit bottom. Admiral Caperton, waiting in the
     harbor, immediately landed two companies of marines and three of
     bluejackets, and the U.S. occupation began.*


     *Exit the Marines. There was much in the occupation to trouble the
     U.S. conscience. Puppet Presidents, all of the elite class, were
     shuttled in & out. With almost embarrassing speed, the U.S. gave
     Haiti a new constitution, masterminded by Assistant Secretary of
     the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt; the document removed the defiant
     clause of all 16 previous Haitian constitutions forbidding
     foreigners to own land. Officers from the U.S. South ("they know
     how to handle the blacks, you know") humiliated highbred Haitians.*


     *But the Marines effectively ended the cycle of revolutions,
     disarmed rebels and bandits in mountain warfare (the death toll:
     1,500 Haitians), restored peasants to the land, improved health
     and sanitation, built roads. Setting up a small gendarmerie, they
     lifted from Haiti the crushing burden of an army that once had
     6,500 general and staff officers. They trained civil servants,
     building a nucleus of Haitians competent to run the machinery of
     government. Most important, they set up rural schools, where
     peasants could begin to get the education they needed to compete
     with the elite. Such was the reputation of the Americans for
     efficiency that the surname of Dr. W. W. Cumberland, customs
     receiver, became an accepted Creole word meaning shortcut.**


     *With the Good Neighbor policy, occupation became obsolete. In
     1934, Roosevelt visited Port-au-Prince, ordered the Marines to run
     down the U.S. flag and pull out. For Haiti, it was the end of one
     era, the opening of another.*


     *Under the Citadel. When the marines were first splashing ashore
     at Port-au-Prince in 1915, Paul Eugene Magloire had just turned
     eight years old. His birthplace was Quartier-Morin, a few miles
     southeast of Cap-Haitien. His father was Eugene Magloire, a
     peasant so energetic that he rose to be one of the many generals
     then running Haiti's army. The general was killed in a shooting
     accident in 1908, and the infant Paul was brought up by two
     brothers in Cap-Haitien. The Brothers of Christian Instruction
     gave him a Catholic education, stressing French and Latin, while
     in his family's fields he learned the peasant's ways and Creole
     tongue. Cap-Haitien, "Paris of the New World" under the French but
     since burned and sacked a dozen times, gave him a sense of past
     glory and present despair.*


     *Magloire got a degree in arts and letters from the National
     School in Port-au-Prince and taught school for a year, but soon
     concluded that he could not live on a teacher's pay. He
     transferred his ambitions to the military, and graduated from a
     Marine-supervised gendarmerie training school. Soon Magloire's
     political education began.*


     *President Stenio Vincent, a poet-nationalist elected on an
     oust-the-U.S. platform when the Marines supervised an honest
     election in 1930, picked Lieut. Magloire for his aide-de-camp. But
     Vincent's government stumbled in 1937, when the Dominican
     Republic's Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, in a moment of rage,
     let his forces massacre an estimated 15,000 Haitian cane-cutters
     who had crossed the border to seek harvest work. The Haitian
     President settled for an indemnity of $550,000 from Trujillo. With
     murdered Haitians thus officially priced at $37 each, Haiti soured
     on Vincent, and his government succumbed in 1941. The next
     President was Elie Lescot, a member of the elite, who chose
     Magloire first to be chief of the national police, then head of
     the palace guard, a key position.*


     *Tableau in the Palace. President Lescot was snobbishly antiblack,
     and word got around that he had accepted favors, up to & including
     a $35,000 gift from the hated neighbor. Dictator Trujillo. One day
     early in 1946, blacks appeared in the streets carrying signs "A
     bas les mulâtres!" Stores hastily shuttered their windows and
     women in the hills refused to come to town with food for the market.*


     *Soon Magloire and other officers called on the President. The
     scene that followed had the studied formality of an 18th-century
     tableau. Magloire informed the President that he could not fire on
     the people. The military men offered Lescot safe conduct to the
     airport and a ticket to Canada. Lescot, essentially a logical man,
     accepted. Thus ended a classic Haitian coup de langue—a "tongue
     revolution" in which rumors of discoatent, troubles or violence
     brewing in the capital bring on a spontaneous general strike and
     shake the regime down.*


     *To rule the country, the officers first set up a temporary
     military junta, then ordered an election for Congressmen who would
     choose a President. One candidate was a brooding, ulcer-afflicted
     lawyer named Dumarsais Estimé, son of black peasant parents who
     lived in the voodoo-haunted pine forests near Mount La Selle. His
     strongly anti-mulatto position made him the idol of the blacks,
     and won him the election.*


     *Heyday of the Authentiques. Black Haiti entered a time of
     tumultuous transformation. For his peasants, his "authen-tiques,"
     (his "real" Haitians) Estimé schemed to smash the elite and create
     a new ruling group of rich, powerful blacks. The authentiques
     quickly caught the idea: the soul of Africa began to show itself
     in novels and paintings. A written form of Creole was devised.
     Voodoo, which elite laws passed under Catholic pressure had driven
     underground, was openly tolerated again. Estime dreamed big:
     schools, hospitals, roads, docks, industrialization. He did
     succeed in raising wages for black workers. But all he really
     built was a rainbow-painted fairgrounds for a pathetically
     unsuccessful 1950 International Exposition. He crippled the
     U.S.-owned Standard Fruit Co.'s Haitian operation, then found that
     the country had no banana business left. Meanwhile, official
     corruption got out of hand; a few insiders got rich quick; word
     got around that $10 million of the $26 million spent for the fair
     had never been accounted for. The big wheel that turns once and
     flips out a Haitian President began to move.*


     *Decline & Fall. The President lost control of his ministers; some
     of the followers he had enriched turned on him and the newspapers
     called his government a "tremendous scorpion." Frustrated and
     frenzied, but sure that he was still the choice of the blacks,
     Estimé tried to alter the Constitution so that he could run for a
     second six-year term; to back him, 20,000 of his supporters rioted
     in the streets of Port-au-Prince. But the disorder was quelled,
     and presently the same junta that had deposed Lescot marched again
     on the same red carpet to Estimé's office and sped him on his way
     to Manhattan (where he died last year, a lonely exile).*


     *For Magloire, the moment of decision had come. The boy who had
     played in the ruins of Haiti's glory below the Citadel, who had
     ushered in one President and sent two on their travels, resolved
     to be President himself. He had the election law changed to allow
     direct vote of the people, staged a sure-fire campaign with
     festive bamboches with free rum, food and dancing. By 151,115
     votes to 2,000 for his opponent, an obscure architect, the people
     voted him in.*


     *Magloire took office—and took with him his conviction that 1)
     neither blacks nor mulattoes should dominate Haiti at the expense
     of the other group, and 2) he must avoid quick, flashy works
     (e.g., Estime's Exposition) and concentrate on long-haul
     technological advances.*


     *No Little Troubles. "Zafair nèg pas jamm piti" say the Haitians.
     "Negro troubles are never small." But before facing the troubles
     of his country upon taking office, Magloire counted his assets.
     The economy was stable at its simple, garden level; the currency
     was sound (and convertible) at five gourdes to a dollar. The
     culture, traditions and national vitality were so rich and varied
     that only overwhelming reasons could justify much social
     tinkering. And land reform, the crying need of most of Latin
     America and the Far East, had been a fact in Haiti for more than a
     century. Nevertheless, the central problem was land and
     agriculture, partly because the population was shooting up (at the
     present rate of growth, it will reach 6,300,000 by the year 2000).
     Magloire singled out more efficient food production as his No. 1
     task.*


     *Man with a Plan. In 1951, Magloire announced a five-year
     development plan emphasizing agriculture. Its cost—$40 million—was
     a measure of his political daring; in impact it was as though the
     U.S. were to put $100 billion toward a single end. The plan's axis
     is the damming of Haiti's biggest (and only main) river, the
     central Artibonite, and the irrigation of some 80,000 acres that
     are now dusty desert in the dry season and muddy lakes in the wet.
     The U.S. Export-Import Bank lent $14 million, Haiti voted
     $8,000,000, and last year the engineering contract was let to
     Houston's Brown & Root, Inc. Concrete work is about to start on
     the storage dam, to be 225 ft. high and 1,075 ft. long.
     Downstream, a diversion dam and a net of canals will distribute
     the Artibonite's tamed waters, better the lives of 160,000
     peasants. Forty thousand kilowatts of power can be added later,
     doubling Haiti's present output of electric energy.*


     *Haiti's supply of government jobs at any given time is only about
     one-third as great as the number of people qualified by education
     or training to fill them. After any President has been in office
     three years, it is plain who the lucky ones are, and the hungry
     outsiders naturally begin to grumble, agitate, fire bitter charges
     of inefficiency and graft. Magloire's good friend, Chief of Police
     Marcaisse Prosper, has provided an unfortunate focus for
     criticism. The juiciest current gossip of Haiti concerns Prosper's
     new hilltop home in fashionable Petionville, big as a U.S.
     small-city high school, lavishly furnished by Manhattan's W. & J.
     Sloane. The prosperous Prosper's salary is $350 a month.*


     *The 6,000-man army backs Magloire (Congress made him its
     commanding general), but might be helpless against a popular coup
     de langue. On the other hand, he has many strengths. Items: The
     price of coffee, Haiti's No. 1 cash crop, is up, as every U.S.
     housewife knows, and the 1954 crop is likely to be good. Despite
     price drops in sisal and sugar (production of which is almost back
     to where the French had it in 1791), exports plus imports should
     stay steady at the recent level of $80-$100 million yearly. Since
     most government revenue comes from import-and-export duties, the
     budget is likely to remain at around $26 million (v. $8,400,000
     ten years ago). CJ Magloire has been able to get along with
     Trujillo on a general-to-general basis that lets ill-armed Haiti
     keep its selfrespect before its excessively well-armed neighbor,
     although there is virtually no trade across the border.*


     *U.S.-Haitian relations are excellent. A promising tourist
     industry had doubled since 1951, bringing Haiti as much cash
     income ($2,750,000) as sugar did last year.*


     *Successful Failure. Tourism may be Haiti's greatest single asset
     in the years just ahead. Holiday travelers, especially the kind
     who hope for something more than a kidney-shaped swimming pool at
     the end of their plane rides, quickly sense a warming magic in
     Haiti. Flaming poinsettias and throbbing drums can make the blood
     run quicker, even in a dowager from Des Moines. The heady amber
     rum, made from whole cane juice aged in old sherry casks, is so
     cheap that a big evening can cost just $1 — which is also the
     price of a savory dinner featuring flaming Haitian crayfish. The
     weather is good the year around, the scenery spectacular. Heroic
     history seems to hang in the air, especially in the north, around
     Cap-Haitien; it becomes almost tangible in the presence of the
     3,000-lb. cannon, graved with the arrogant "N" of the Napoleon who
     lost them, in the gloomy gun galleries of the Citadel.*


     *By the standards of 1954-model materialism, the world's first
     black republic should perhaps still be reckoned an insanitary,
     barefoot failure. But by less pragmatic standards, it must be
     counted a heart-warming success—gentle, peaceable,
     individualistic, persevering and utterly free. With an eye cocked
     on awakening Africa, Paul Magloire passionately argues: "Haiti has
     shown by its struggle for liberty and progress that the black race
     and small nations can . . . achieve a status equal to that of any
     other human group. Haiti has given the lie to those who pretend
     that certain races are unfit for liberty, equality and
     self-government."*