The Seeds of Fiction (10 page)

Following thirteen years of warfare, in 1804 an ex-slave, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, led his armies to victory against the French and declared the new nation of ex-slaves Haiti (the Indian word for ‘mountainous lands'). The black Caribbean nation entered a hostile white world. It was the second free country in the hemisphere after the United States. Fearful of foreign invasions, the victorious Haitian leaders led their armies across the border in conquest to occupy much of the Spanish part of Hispaniola. In 1821, seventeen years after independence, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer occupied the entire island, and the eastern two-thirds became known as ‘Spanish Haiti'. The border disappeared for twenty-three years until 27 February 1844, after Boyer was overthrown and, taking advantage of the political chaos in Port-au-Prince, a group of Dominican patriots led by Juan Pablo Duarte seized Santo Domingo and brought about the capitulation of
its Haitian garrison. The Dominican Republic came into existence, and the border reappeared.

We reflected sombrely on the fact that no strip of land in the Caribbean had seen so much killing. Graham displayed a keen interest in the border history and lore. The Haitianization of the border area dated as far back as the early 1930s. Haitian currency and the Creole language dominated the region. Dominicans were fearful of crossing the border because they believed that powerful old Papa Legba, the Voodoo deity and interlocutor between man and his gods, guarded the roads leading into Haiti. They associated the Haitians with black magic. Yet Haitians crossed over into the Dominican side, looking for work in the sugar-cane fields and as market traders and to flee political oppression. The Dominicans feared a ‘black tide' was engulfing their country.

We arrived in Monte Cristi on the north coast. From there we headed west to the frontier at Dajabón, but before entering the town we branched off again, heading north towards the coast to inspect an area where exiled Haitian General Leon Cantave's ragtag army had been trained. Cows grazed peacefully in the pastures. We passed
saco mangles,
men who made a living collecting the bark of the mangrove tree which was used for dyeing animal skins. At Pepillo Salcedo a smart-looking Dominican navy corvette was berthed at the Granada Banana company dock. A small empty Haitian military post was within shouting distance on the other side of the river mouth.

I parked the Beetle on the side of the road, and we walked through the wild vegetation in the Punta Presidente bird sanctuary. As we struggled through the undergrowth on the bank of the river we startled a flock of flamingos that rose and flew like a pink cloud. Then we heard an engine start, and two men in a motorboat ploughed off into the open sea, the throttle wide open.

‘They are up to no good. I bet they're Cuban
gusanos,'
Graham said, using Castro's word, worms, for Cuban exiles.

We got back in the Beetle and headed south to Dajabón. The old customs gate looked more like the entrance to a fort than the entrance to the Dominican border town on the banks of the Rio Dajabón, more commonly known as the Massacre River. The river originally got its nickname in the seventeenth century when Spanish troops ambushed buccaneers on the river bank while they were hunting cattle on Spanish territory. The Spanish slaughtered the men.

The water under the Dajabón bridge was green and sluggish. Dominican soldiers were amused by our visit and our interest in the border. They allowed us to proceed to the middle of the bridge, but one of the solders warned me. ‘
Con cuidado.
Carefully,' he said, as I stepped over the yellow line in the middle of the bridge to take a picture of Graham taking a picture of the Haitian side of the river.

The soldier set his rifle down and pointed to the Haitian side.
‘Alli estàn
los Haitianos.
The Haitians are there.' He nodded meaningfully at the foliage that cloaked the river bank. It all looked pristine and deserted. Graham focused his little Minox camera and snapped the view of Haiti. It was the only time during all the years I knew him that his camera worked on the first try.

Graham had a mischievous look in his eye, as if he wanted to provoke the Haitian soldiers into showing themselves or perhaps even shooting at us. The Dominican guards were cautious. ‘Haitian soldiers and Macoutes have you in their gunsights,' one of the Dominican soldier warned. ‘They are watching your every move.' As if to show proof of what he meant, he pointed to the pockmarks left by bullets that had struck the Dominican customs house when Haitian troops had opened fire with a .50-calibre machine-gun on General Leon Cantave's retreating army of Haitian exile recruits and cane-cutters. It had been a real war scene along this section of the Massacre River in September 1963. Cantave's forces fled in total disorder, throwing away their weapons in terror, after trying unsuccessfully to capture the army barracks in the border town of Ouanaminthe, which could not be seen from the bridge. Since that incident the border had been closed. There was no traffic or contact between the border guards on each side of the river.

Graham was fascinated by one story that had emerged after the battle for Ouanaminthe. One of Cantave's toughest fighters, Captain Blucher Philogenes, was killed in the encounter. According to a radio message intercepted by the Dominicans, Duvalier had ordered that Philogenes's head be flown back to Port-au- Prince in a pail of ice. The story of the special plane dispatched by the Palace to fetch the head soon spread on both sides of the border.

‘What did Papa Doc want with the head?' Graham asked.

Bajeux and I offered answers, but who knew really knew the mind of a butcher? I assumed he wanted to savour contemplating it, but Bajeux suggested he needed to verify that the officer was dead before paying a bounty to a member of his garrison who claimed to have killed him. There was also the possibility of a simple scare tactic, suggesting an act of black magic, which Graham believed to be the best possible answer. ‘Shakespeare,' he said. ‘Hamlet talking to Yorick's skull.'

Despite its bucolic atmosphere, Dajabón was far from silent. Dominican
meringues
blared full-blast from radios in shops and homes along its dusty streets and from a scratchy loudspeaker system attached to the roof of a neighbouring bar.

We sat in the shade in one of the
colmados.
We had to raise our voices to be heard above the music. Graham brought up the so-called ‘Parsley Massacre' of October 1937 when the Dominican military had macheted and bludgeoned Haitians to death by the thousands, many on the banks of this river (and it is popularly believed that this is the origin of the name Massacre River). Only
when the soldiers' arms grew tired were they permitted to use their old Krag rifles and shoot those trying to escape across the river. Black corpses choked the water and along the ravines, according to survivors I interviewed for a feature on the massacre. El Jefe's men conducted a literacy pronunciation quiz, and failure to win the quiz was instant death. ‘Say
perejil
(‘parsley'),' every black person was asked, and if that person did not pass the test with the correct pronunciation,
perehil,
they were dead. Some twenty thousand Haitians were slaughtered throughout the Dominican Republic on dictator Trujillo's orders.

The fact that the news of this horror had taken so long to reach the outside world troubled Graham. It illustrated how tightly, in those days, a Latin American
caudillo
could control communications in his country. Quentin Reynolds of
Collier's
magazine, alerted by six lines in a United Press wire service dispatch, flew down and discovered the terrible truth that Trujillo had attempted to hide. Albert C. Hicks in his book
Blood in the Streets: The Life and Rule of Trujillo
tells of the killing by a Dominican army captain of his family's elderly Haitian servant who had been with them for decades. The officer's wife, who witnessed the murder, ‘for a considerable period after that day had to live locked in a room in a sanatorium, a raving maniac. She couldn't understand that her husband was simply acting on orders from
El Generalissimo.'

Before resuming the journey I cleaned off the mass of splattered insects on the car's windshield. Then I poured drops of water on the dirt road, on each of the cardinal points of the compass. Graham liked the idea that we had appealed to Papa Legba to ‘open the gate' for us
— ‘Papa Legba ouvri barye pou nou
— and for a safe trip. Graham saw the invocation as the equivalent of Catholics beginning their prayers with the sign of the cross. Papa Legba is invoked at the beginning of ceremonies when a person wishes to communicate with his gods. This powerful Voodoo
lwa
is keeper of the keys, guardian of the highways, crossroads and man's destiny. ‘And this,' Graham asked, pointing to the St Christopher medal attached to the dashboard. ‘Is this Papa Legba's Catholic equivalent? We are not taking any chances, are we?'

With the sun directly overhead the car felt like the inside of an oven. ‘I shouldn't have had that beer,' I grumbled.

‘But you did.' Graham disagreed with my view that one should not drink in the Tropics until the sun went down over the yardarm. ‘I think it's ridiculous,' he said. ‘One should not be limited by any such code. A drink is good any time, and it is especially good for the digestion at noon — in the Tropics or anywhere.'

The road meandered from the lush green riverside over dry, brown rolling hills where goats nibbled at stubbles of burnt grass. In the distant blue haze appeared the mountains where Maroons, escaped slaves from the large plantations that then occupied Haiti's bountiful Plaine du Nord, had established their campsites. These Maroons, or Cimarons as the Spanish called
them, led the early slave revolts against the French colonialists and played an important role in Haiti's independence war.

‘How good it is you have no radio,' Graham said. ‘We are quite cut off. Excellent!' We could, he said, survive at least a couple of days without news or music.

It worried me, though. There could be a coup d'état or civil war could break out, and we wouldn't know it.

Graham was surprisingly at ease as I drove along the rutted narrow dirt track, which required most of my concentration. I tried not to think of what could or might happen. Graham had an insatiable appetite for facts but also liked to hear all the fiction (rumours) from Haiti. We passed through Capotillo, at the small pueblo near which on 16 August 1963 Cantave's troops had made a swift incursion into Haiti and seized the picturesque little coffee town of Mont-Organisé. That attack had been a special embarrassment to Dominican President Bosch, who had been near by commemorating the Dominican Republic's independence from Haiti. The exile force quickly retreated to the Dominican side when reinforcements began arriving from Cap Haïtien to retake Mont-Organisé. These attacks were launched without the knowledge of President Bosch.

Near the Dominican town of Restauración a sawmill that once had belonged to Generalissimo Trujillo was in disrepair and appeared abandoned. The mules used for dragging pine trees to the mill grazed on a neighbouring hill. El Jefe had sold the mill to Antonio de la Maza, who established a coffee plantation near Restauración. His pinewood home here had once been the centre of the area's social activity. Years later, de la Maza led the team that assassinated Trujillo. He was later shot to death near Santo Domingo's Independence Square by the SIM (Military Intelligence Service) one night while I was having dinner near by with a group of colleagues.

As we came into Restauración Graham pointed to a little sign. ‘Look, they even have a Massacre Hotel.' It was a modest wooden building with a tin roof displaying the sign:
Hotel Brisas Massacre de Mariav de Rodriguez.

‘Before all the trails run cold you might think of writing a book about the massacre,' Graham suggested.

‘An American, Alfred Hicks, already wrote it,' I said.

‘I haven't heard of it.'

‘It came out in 1946.
Blood in the Streets.
But it's been out of print. I've never been able to find a copy.'

‘When I get back to London I'll see if I can find you one,' Graham promised.

Dust rose up like a blanket from the road and our little car sucked it inside like a vacuum cleaner. We had the swirling dirt in our eyes, and it ground like sand on our teeth.

We reached Villa Anacaona, a gritty village that carried the name of the
Taino-Arawak Indian poetess-queen of the region of Xaragua, today the southern part of Haiti.
Anacaona!
in her people's language meant ‘golden flower'. She had married Caonabo, the
cacique
(chief) of this central region through which we were passing. Christopher Columbus had ordered his soldiers to take Caonabo prisoner, and
en route
to Spain the ship sank and all aboard were drowned. In a treacherous act Governor Nicolas Ovando had his men seize Anacaona and hang her in Santo Domingo.

The last time I had been on the border was on 14 July 1963, when Duvalier's collaborator-turned-enemy, Clément Barbot, had been caught and killed outside Port-au-Prince. There had been a rumour of yet another uprising against Papa Doc, and the border was the closest I could get to Haiti.

We knew that Papa Doc's terror was only as far away as the other side of the road; his long shadow loomed all along this sad frontier. Again and again we found our thoughts and conversation returning to the enigma of the regime's violence. What lay behind its grotesque terror? Many people had been murdered, and for what? So that one power-driven psychopath could totally control the destiny of five million impoverished people? Graham knew about such things in other countries, but he saw Haiti under Duvalier as a true nightmare with Papa Doc exuding a unique evil.

‘Why are we stopping?' he asked when I pulled over.

We had reached the centre of the island of Hispaniola and the so-called International Road, which was a 54-mile stretch of mostly gravel and grass that passed for a road and wound back and forth through Haitian territory alongside the Libon River.