Haitian Patterns

...Haiti, the Heinls amply prove in their monumental history, will remain wedded to its own patterns of politics, economics and justice...

...To be sure, there is a tendency, after confessing that no archives survive, to describe massacres of mulattoes by blacks and blacks by mulattoes in great detail...

...and the fate of the gang of assassins—"stabbed, shot, kicked, gouged, trampled, twisted, all but dismembered"—is another atrocity to be chalked up to the record of Francois Duvalier...

...The reign of terror that is reported to have been Duvalier's principal occupation during the remainder of his 13 years in office is documented for the most part in the Heinls' work by quotations from hostile sources abroad...

...He was, as they say in Haiti, un authentique—a man of his time and people, who managed to hold the great powers at arm's length and, even in his unreasoning lunges to the East, won for Haiti Hinche, Lascohobas, and the fertile Plaine du Centre...

...James Leyburn, a Yale sociologist-historian who wrote The Haitian People back in 1941, came closest...

...For whatever reason he was asked to leave, Heinl at once became an implacable foe of the regime, proselytizing against it in American magazines and supporting efforts to oust it...

...In the case of the Heinls, Haitian partisans of the elite or noir persuasion (and who on the island is not a partisan, publicly at any rate...

...As their indictment gathers momentum, the Heinls' style becomes increasingly intemperate and their marshaling of hostile rhetoric and unprovable evidence more barefaced...

...however, this would hardly be true...

...The leader of the intruders, Arthur Payne, is a "a swashbuckling handsome 34-year-old Dade County deputy...

...Marine Corps, Navy and Coast Guard mission invited by President Francois Duvalier to rehabilitate Haiti's Armed Forces...

...I myself, possibly prejudiced by Leyburn, whom I respect, can find little to fault in the Heinls' objectivity as they thread their way through the coups and countercoups of the 19th century, down to and including the Marine Occupation that began with a bloodbath and then the public dismembering of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam on July 27, 1915...

...Hence the government ordered the destruction of the business district of the city...

...Colonel Heinl arrived in Haiti for the first time in 1959 as head of a U.S...

...A Newsweek editor's flippant characterization of Duvalier as "Big Brother masquerading as The Mad Hatter" is considered worthy of quotation...

...But on the whole the Heinls are careful throughout this period to leave generalizations to Haitians: "Political intrigue is our mania, a trait in our national character...

...Writers &Writing HAITIAN PATTERNS BY SELDEN RODMAN A Mm JLs the title of Robert and Nancy Heinl's new book covering the period suggests, the history of Haiti from the time of Hispaniola's discovery in 1492 to the death of Francois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier in 1971 was Written In Blood (Houghton Mifflin, 716 pp., $21.95...

...Foremost among these is the book Papa Doc, by the journalists Bernard Diederich and Al Burt, put together mainly from hearsay and clippings in the anti-Duvalierist press in the United States...

...The Church," the Heinls say, "with its French hierarchy, its Breton seminary, its foreign (overwhelmingly French) priesthood, represented a prime example of ecclesiastical colonialism...

...Another frequently cited source of still less credibility is Graham Greene, whose paranoid indictment of Mexico (Lawless Roads) should have cautioned the Heinls to quote the author of The Comedians with at least a grain of salt...

...The Colonel says he was ejected for refusing to sanction the admission of the secret police into the Armed Forces, or their training at American military schools...

...The cost was evidently too high...

...Haiti for the first time was self-sufficient in such staples as cement, flour-milling, rice, and hydroelectric power, though the heartbreaking poverty and illiteracy of the peasant masses and the attrition of their arable lands remained, as always, problems defying solution...

...Among all the merchants in the capital there weren't two noirs...

...Until now no one has attempted to supply the details with so much as a semblance of objectivity...

...with machine-guns firing overhead to the flanks and every which way...

...Francois Duvalier, who had also defied the French, the English and the Dominicans, lived to see the Pope (who had excommunicated him) similarly capitulate...

...The institutions of American political democracy that the United States never attempted to introduce into Communist Russia and China, Indonesia, or the nations of Africa or South America, and tried unsuccessfully to force upon South Vietnam, could not be imposed upon even the poorest, most defenseless of our neighbors...

...Toward the end of their 83-page closing chapter, the authors do admit'to a grudging admiration for "Papa Doc...

...Diederich, who was himself ejected from Haiti in 1963, had personal reasons to seek vengeance...

...Black partisans would take offense at seeing their heroes among the Founding Fathers—Toussaint Louver-ture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henry Christophe—given responsibility for subsequent authoritarian police-states that sought to make order out of chaos...

...and to depend—as in the case of atrocities allegedly practiced upon the Dominicans by Dessalines and Christophe—on purple passages in Naboth's Vineyard by Sumner Welles, an admitted Negrophobe and Haitian-hater...

...Haitian historians, mulatto and black, have been understandably less than detached in assessing the interracial strife that has been the single most damaging deterrent to Haiti's development from 1791 to the present...

...but that part of Leyburn's admirable 300 pages dealing with the history barely overlapped the American Marine Occupation of 1915-34...

...But he also says (two pages later) that at the same time the CIA was arming and supporting "attempts to overthrow Duvalier...

...When one of several attempts mounted in the United States to overthrow the beleaguered President and assassinate him actually reaches (after much killing of Haitians) the Army barracks on the palace grounds, there to be repelled finally by Duvalier himself and his Cabinet, the Heinls present the defenders as a "mob...

...French historians have glossed over the cruel record of the French slavocracy in the 18th century, and the even more heartless economic reparations imposed on the helpless nation in the 19th-century to make it pay for what France had lost...

...The power of the elite in commerce, education and religion had been broken...

...enormities and the exaggerated racist put-downs that have distorted accounts of Emperor Faustin Souloque's bizarre rule in the middle of the last century...

...Marcelin), or "This struggle [of 1883 under Salomon] is a war of color, noirs against mulutres—a war of extermination...

...In 1966, they add, when Paul VI lifted the excommunication and sent Duvalier his inscribed photograph, "any noir altar boy might henceforth aspire to the archbishop's mitre and cathedra...

...Every Haitian is a born conspirator...

...would probably contend that the authors' "bias" goes back as far as the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary regimes that fastened upon Haiti its familiar pattern of fatalistic minifandistas and urban plunderers...

...Mulatto intellectuals, on the other hand, could be as quick to defend their heroes, Alexandre Petion and Jean-Pierre Boyer, whose reaction to the ruthlessness of the black commanders was to subdivide the land irretrievably, thus creating that endemic poverty and political apathy among the majority that would permit a succession of urban chieftains to rule as they pleased...

...Their answer might be that they are now reporting what they saw with their own eyes...

...w ? ? hy is it that when the Heinls come to the contemporary recurrence of Haiti's ugly but wholly internecine racial conflict, they seem to lose their historical tolerance and indulge in polemics...

...Picot) The Heinls are especially good at uncovering both the Selden Rodman , our guest columnist, litis among his books Haiti: The Black Republic and The Miracle of Haitian Art...

...Change, when it does come, will come from within...

...He had survived all the vacillations and ambiguities of American foreign policy...

...He left four years later, never to return...

...For eight years later Washington reversed itself, sent an ambassador (the first black one) back to Port-au-Prince, and during the old man's last three years helped prepare the way for his son, now ruling in comparative peace and popularity...

...Duvalier is shown inside his heavily guarded fortress toasting John Kennedy's death in champagne, conducting black masses, and regaling his Cabinet "with warm blood from a chalice to whose rim stiff hairs from the slaughtered pig's throat still adhered...

...Washington, after initially supporting his candidacy, spending $40 million on roads and irrigation projects to help keep him in office, then vowed to force him out...

...Soulouque, whom Victor Hugo caustically described as a black Napoleon III, and who spent more money (30,000 French francs) on one green costume than he budgeted that year for all public education in the country, created an aristocracy of noirs that parodied Christophe's supportive apparatus...

...So is an exiled ethnologist's patently absurd statement that the opposition includes "the whole conscious population minus one citizen—the President...

...Yet ridiculous as much of it was, "and inefficient, corrupt and bloodthirsty as he was," in the Heinls' summation, "Soulouque managed to be something more...

...They might also wince upon being reminded how these great generals who had been slaves proscribed vaudou, the African cult that had triggered the very insurrection that brought them to power, and which survives as the religion of the peasants to this day...

...never again would a French blanc stand between Haitians and the throne of Bon-Dieu...