Free Back of Beyond by David Yeadon Page A

Macoute.
    “It’s a crazy place. We battled them all to get out of slavery and colonization—French, British, Dutch, Americans, Dominicans. Then when we beat ’em, we start in on ourselves—blacks against mulatto, poor against rich, bureaucrat against peasant, voodoo against priests, and now general against general. Jean Claude [Duvalier] even sold off thousands of our peasants as slaves to work sugar plantations over in the Dominican Republic. Most never came back. They died there.”
    Two rum cocktails arrived courtesy of Richard Morse. He’s always hovering around with his baby-face smile, a lanky catalyst, making introductions, easing the exchange of whispered gossip, an indispensable resource for journalists, with his fingers deep in Haiti’s multiflavored (and very sticky) pies.
    “The Duvaliers were a mess,” Jacques continued. “You wouldn’t believe. But they held the country together for a while—terror, voodoo, torture, execution, massacre—old Papa Doc playing Black Baron Samedi, the voodoo loa of the graveyard. ‘I’m an immaterial being,’ he said, and they believed him. When we finally got ’em out we didn’t know what would happen. There’s been some nasty stuff but…I don’t know, maybe it’s coming together. May not seem like much of a free place to you but it’s our freedom—and it’s all we’ve got. And when you get that close to nothin’, you give a lot to keep the bit you got….”
    The recent film The Serpent and the Rainbow (a very free and spirited adaptation of the rather scholarly book of the same name by Wade Davis) began as follows:
    The Serpent is the Symbol of the Earth
The Rainbow is the Symbol of Heaven
But because he has a soul
Man can be trapped in a terrible place
Where death is only the beginning…
     
    The film deals with the much-publicized (and much misunderstood) cult of voodoo zombiism in Haiti (on which more later). But the words also seem, in an ironic way, to suggest the dilemma of Haiti herself—“trapped in a terrible place”—bound by the tentacles of a savage, grotesque history, voodoo mysteries and magic, the power of the bogons (witch doctors), and a grindingly hopeless economy crushed by markets way beyond the control, or even comprehension, of Haitian politicians and bureaucrats.
    Some pundits wonder aloud whether Haiti can ever break loose from its tangled web of chaos. The cynical fringe even claim that Haiti has got so used to being the Western Hemisphere’s whipping boy and socioeconomic basket case that it has come to rather enjoy the game playing, particularly with the United States, and the benevolent cash and technical assistance handouts of international institutions and agencies.
    One CARE worker suggested to me it’s the Mouse That Roared syndrome—make a lot of noise and threats and wait for peace-at-any-price loans and grants. His ultimate scenario was another U.S. “benevolent takeover” (less repressive than the 1915 escapade—more like the Panama debacle instead), during which much of the physical infrastructure would be refurbished once again (Haitian minor roads are unbelievably bad) and the economic system put on something of a solid footing. At the opposite end of the scale there are those who believe that one more bloody rebellion, accompanied by all the familiar gory reprisals (plus one or two “accidentally involved” tourists, Peace Corps workers, or priests), and the world will fling up its collective hands in exasperation and turn its back, once and for all, on this hapless horror story of a nation.
    “There are indeed those, sir, who delight in poking fun at Haiti as an example of the hopelessness of blacks trying to run their own country. Not only here, but virtually anywhere on the face of this troubled globe.”
    Aubelin Jolicoeur sat in his customary position on a high barstool at the Oloffson bar, immaculate as always in a crisp, cream linen suit, silk tie, and gold-handled cane, carefully placed on