Free The Seeds of Fiction by Richard Greene, Bernard Diederich Page B

carefully tooled up his regime for the sole purpose of retaining power.
    Even Duvalier’s own middle class suffered. There were no sacred cows. The mulatto élite at first suffered but were quick to make the necessary accommodation to Duvalier — and he to them. Haiti’s impoverished masses were offered only hyperbole. They were learning from both his rhetoric and his actions that their new Papa was not in the least permissive or forgiving. Even based on the most dispassionate analysis, the regime of François Duvalier ranks as one of the most inhuman. And covering Haiti as a newsman had become a high-risk occupation. No story equalled the naked terror of Papa Doc’s Haiti in the early 1960s. It was a pervasive terror that clawed at your viscera, which haunted you day and night. Duvalier’s brutality was at once predictable and capricious, meted out by savage, sick and sadistic henchmen, the Tontons Macoutes, who were given
carte blanche
— they didn’t need to explain their excesses to anyone. Some of the criminals became pro-Duvalier fanatics.
    Duvalier’s decapitating of Haiti’s Catholic Church, the university and the high schools left the country an intellectual cripple and even co-opted God. The damage wrought by Papa Doc would have long-term effects even after Duvalier was buried. Hundreds of Haiti’s best and brightest — teachers, lawyers, economists, agronomists, jurists and other professionals — fled thecountry. It was more than just a brain drain; it was a mass exodus of the country’s most talented. Semi-literate Duvalierists replaced skilled professionals in government jobs as rewards for loyalty. Many of the competent professionals who lost their jobs were even barred from joining the exodus (Duvalier personally controlled all exit visas), so they remained and vegetated, ever fearful of the knock on the door. At first Duvalier branded his enemies lizards and then, more politically profitably, communists. He outlawed youth associations and judo classes and purged the ranks of high-school and university teachers. Higher education in Haiti, as professor or student, became the domain of only loyal Duvalierists.
    As for the Catholic Church, with orders to be ‘rough and rapid’, Papa Doc’s police placed 56-year-old Monsignor François Poirier, the last in a long line of French archbishops of Port-au-Prince, on a plane to Miami with a dollar and a prayer book. The government publicly accused Poirier of financing communist students in a plot to overthrow Duvalier. The archbishop, a strident anti-communist, turned almost apoplectic when he learned of the charge. Haiti’s only Haitian-born Catholic bishop soon followed Mgr Poirier into exile, as did another French bishop and the rector and priest-professors of Petit Seminaire St Martial high school. The first Haitian-born bishop was seized and deported without even time to put in his false teeth — they remained on his night table. I couldn’t help thinking that Graham would be interested — as a Catholic convert and creator of the whisky priest of
The Power and the Glory
— in exploring Papa Doc’s fight with the Church.
    In retaliation, the Vatican in 1961 excommunicated Duvalier and all other Haitian officials involved in the expulsion of Catholic clergy. The Vatican noted that it was the first excommunication of a head of state in the western hemisphere since dictator Juan Perón of Argentina in 1955. Duvalier ignored Rome’s action against him. No news of the excommunication was published in Haiti.
    The once-powerful Roman Catholic Church, the army, the judiciary and the Congress had all been purged and neutralized. As Duvalier said, it was those four powers that usually overthrew a president, so he overthrew them first. Most Haitians lived in silent terror behind masks of normality, pretending to know nothing, praying for a miracle of change, playing games to