The Seeds of Fiction (6 page)

Pasquet's skull had been shattered. He lay face up with open eyes as if gazing into Duvalier's official portrait hanging on a wall across the room, a cynical smile on his face, his likeness pierced by a single bullet. Dominique's bullet-riddled corpse lay propped in the corner next to a door. Near him Captain Walker lay dead, shot through the right ear, a pack of Lucky Strikes balanced on his neck. Dany Jones lay half sitting, a small, clean bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

Payne was still alive. He was wrapped up in a mattress, his complexion pale from the loss of blood from his leg wound. When the soldiers ran in he pleaded for his life and called out, ‘Journalist, journalist!' But the soldiers cut him down with a burst of gunfire.

Perpignan, Hickey and Kersten managed to escape. Perpignan and Hickey ran across the street, through the grounds of the military hospital and over a back fence. Hickey was spotted by a soldier and shot through the head. Perpignan ran into the yard of a house and forced the houseboy to hide him in the chicken coop, but when the boy heard the mob outside he became frightened and ran. Perpignan shot him down with a burst from his Thompson submachine-gun, giving away his hiding place. The mob closed in. He was shot and stabbed. His clothes were torn and his naked body was dragged through the streets and into the Palace, where it left a trail of blood over the marble floors and stairs as it was hauled before Duvalier.

The mob also caught up with Kersten behind the barracks, where they hacked him to death with machetes and paraded his body through the streets.

‘I can't believe it. Eight men,' Graham said when I finished telling him the story. ‘They really thought they could do it.'

‘It always seems to be that way,' I said.

Graham made reference of the invasion in
The Comedians
when Philipot visits Brown who is swimming in the pool. The two men speak, wondering
what Jones is up to. Philipot tells Brown about the invasion. ‘I told him how seven men once captured the army barracks because they had tommy-guns.'

‘I'm sure that helped Papa Doc more than anyone can imagine,' said Graham.

‘That's when he started his Volunteers of National Security.'

‘His militia?'

I nodded. ‘The National Assembly passed laws. There was a curfew, everything. It gave him the excuse to build his terror network.'

‘And there were the usual repercussions, I'm sure.'

‘Oh yes. And he didn't have to hide it. He positioned a new Palace military staff that was loyal only to him. He made changes in the military. A few foreigners were expelled.'

‘They played right into his plans. It happens every time. It's like the Bay of Pigs. It did more for Castro than anyone else.'

‘You know,' I said after a while, ‘the problem with Haiti is that no one seems to care. That invasion made headlines because there were five Americans involved, but Papa Doc is committing horrible crimes every day. It just doesn't make the papers.'

‘Who would believe that the Cold War would ever come to the Caribbean.' Graham was pensive, then he added, ‘The US would support the devil if he was anti-Communist.'

‘Fascism may flow —'

‘Washington is paranoid,' Graham interrupted. ‘They're obsessed with Fidel. They don't want another Cuba. Papa Doc knows how to play the anti-Communist card.'

‘If they knew what's going on,' I said.

‘Believe me, they know.'

‘I wish Haiti would get more attention in the press. Very little truth comes out of the country, and when it does it doesn't get much play. There was Hector Riobé. I think he was in his mid-twenties. His father had been picked up by the Macoutes at a roadblock in Carrefour the day of the attempted kidnapping. They took his car, money and land. They executed him the same day but later told the family that he was still alive and needed money in prison. The family finally realized that they were lying. This became a Macoute racket to extract money from other families of the “disappeared”.'

‘But he was dead.'

‘Yes, very dead. Riobé was an only son. He decided to fight against Duvalier, and the Macoutes turned him into an enemy. He took his Ford pick-up and welded steel plates all around it, turning it into an armoured car. He assembled a flame-thrower and attached it to the car. His plan was to take over the police station in Pétionville.'

‘I heard about Riobé in Haiti,' Graham said. ‘I would like to hear what you know of his fight, which would seem to be driven solely by courage. It sounds like he had no chance of success.'

‘Yes, he was courageous, but it proved to be a suicidal attack,' I said and told him what I knew. Late on the night of 16 July 1963, as the celebration over the corpse of Clément Barbot was winding down, Riobé and his partisans drove the deserted streets of Port-au-Prince in his armoured vehicle. Halfway up the hill to Pétionville the vehicle overheated. The driver, Demas, jumped out and went to a house to ask for water. It turned out Riobé had welded a steel sheet in front of the radiator, blocking the truck's cooling system. But it was too late to fix. It was done.

When their makeshift tank finally reached Pétionville the overheated engine coughed and died in front of the small police post at the corner of the Pétionville market. They were only a few blocks from their target.

The policeman on duty offered to fetch some water. Another policeman walked around the strange vehicle, which resembled a Mardi Gras float. He pulled himself up to see what was in the back. Four men with 12-gauge shotguns and a .22-calibre rifle lay on the bed of the truck. The unarmed policeman ran away as the men jumped out, firing in all directions, waking up the market women sleeping beside their stalls and sending them screaming for cover.

The group abandoned the vehicle. Two of the youths figured the mission had been aborted and walked home. The other three, Damas, Riobé and Jean-Pierre Hudicourt, regrouped further up the road. They decided to make the police post in the small holiday village of Kenscoff their alternate target. They stopped a car driven by a well-known Syrian-Haitian merchant Antoine Izméry and ordered him to drive them up the mountain.

They attacked the police station, killing three policemen and two militiamen and making off with arms and munitions. The little town was in turmoil. The road was blocked, and the militia began a house-to-house search; then they began to comb the mountains. As they neared the summit of Morne Godet they were greeted by gunfire.

Near the top of the mountain there was a strategically situated cave, easily defended. Within hours government reinforcements arrived in Kenscoff and moved into battle positions, but every time a soldier or member of the militia got close to the summit and became exposed a shot from the cave sent him reeling down the mountain dead or wounded.

The authorities believed the cave was defended by a group of well-trained sharpshooters. As the number of casualties grew, the US Marine-trained Casernes Dessalines battalion was ordered to join the war with mortars and grenades. It was becoming an embarrassment to the Palace. The entire country was alive with exciting rumours of a battle that Papa Doc was actually losing.

The firefight continued for three days. Then on the afternoon of Friday 19 July the cave fell silent. The government feared it was a trick. The soldiers didn't dare approach the cave. The following day the police arrived with Hector Riobé's mother. They put her on a horse and made her ride up to the cave calling out her son's name as they followed close behind, using her as a human shield. There was no reply.

When Papa Doc's forces finally reached the cave they were astonished to find there wasn't a squad of sharpshooters but a single gunman. Hector Riobé lay dead, a bullet through his head — by his own hand.

‘That's amazing,' Graham said.

‘But when I reported the story it was only a short blurb. I didn't have all the facts, and since no Americans were involved it wasn't important.'

‘What happened to the others?'

‘All except one were captured and tortured to death.'

Graham said nothing. He looked away for a moment as we passed an open stall where a woman was selling fruit and vegetables on the side of the road.

‘Life under Papa Doc,' I said quietly.

‘Indeed,' he said. ‘And what about this group we're going to see now, the Kamo …'

‘Kamoken,' I said. ‘Their situation's just as dire as everyone else's.' ‘But you're helping them.'

I thought about this. I wanted to introduce Graham to all the characters I knew. I wanted him to know everything Duvalier was doing. He understood the problem with Haiti and the tyranny of Duvalier, but I imagined there had to be some things that would be better left untold. It was a fine line for me to navigate, and I was afraid of having breached journalistic ethics. I was as conflicted as any man fighting for a cause. I thought of Riobé and how what Papa Doc had done to his father had driven him on his suicidal mission. Events propel us into action. I did not want to be a guerrilla, but I had been forced to do something.

I explained to Graham about the Kamoken. Their official name was the Haitian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARH), and their leader was Fred Baptiste, a former schoolteacher from Jacmel who believed Duvalier had stolen the presidential election. He was an intense, highly strung individual. In 1959 he attacked an army post at a small grass airstrip in Jacmel. Baptiste escaped, but his brother Renel was captured and spent four months in prison. In late 1962 the two brothers crossed into the Dominican Republic and joined other exiles in the struggle against Duvalier.

Baptiste had no political ideology. The Haitian Marxists thought he was a loose cannon, and the right-wing exiles led by Louis Déjoie called him a dangerous Communist.

The group had a small camp at Dajabón. When the Dominican army broke up the camp in May 1963 the exiles moved into a tiny shack on an embankment in Santo Domingo. They had no money and no support until early 1964 when Baptiste accepted the formal patronage of Father Jean-Baptiste Georges and ex-Haitian army officer and diplomat Pierre L. Rigaud.

Father Georges found an abandoned chicken farm in Villa Mella, about twelve miles south of Santo Domingo, where the rebels could stay. The troops slept in the chicken coops and learned the art of guerrilla warfare on the blackboard. There were no firearms on the farm. At night the rebels played war games with sticks. They had no radio communications, medical unit or supplies. Every morning they raised the Haitian flag and sang the anthem of the FARH.

One night I received a call from the officer assigned to the US Military Assistance Group in the Dominican Republic. ‘General Wessin y Wessin is on to your Haitian friends,' he warned. Elías Wessin y Wessin had been the leader of the coup that overthrew Juan Bosch the year before. ‘Be prepared. I'm sure the General's men are going to pay the camp a visit pretty soon.'

The Haitian opposition movements were fractured and constantly denouncing one another. It had been Déjoie who told Wessin y Wessin, an anti-Communist zealot, that the Kamoken were allied with Castro and Duvalier.

I made a quick visit to the US Information Office and picked up a number of pamphlets and brochures promoting President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress programme for the Americas. Then I drove out to the chicken farm and distributed the literature to the rebels. A couple of days later Wessin y Wessin's men raided the camp and arrested everyone, including a number of Haitians living in the Hotel Europa and two French soldiers of fortune.

I drove out to Villa Mella with my wife and our infant son, but as we came up to the police station along the route a policeman shouted,
‘Ahi viene el hombre del carrito'
(‘Here comes the man with the little car.') They arrested us and took us to the National Police Headquarters. My wife and son were left waiting in the Volkswagen for two hours in the noon heat. Finally, at my urging, an officer agreed to allow my wife to return home rather than suffer heatstroke in the police yard.

I was not held in the same cell as the Haitians. A few hours later a high-ranking officer appeared and escorted me not to the jail but to President Donald Reid Cabral's residence.

I explained the situation to the President, and he immediately sent someone to retrieve the evidence from Wessin y Wessin. Then we sat down to a drink. In a moment the telephone rang. It was the British Ambassador. Apparently he'd heard that I had been arrested.

‘Diederich?' Reid Cabral said into the receiver and winked at me. ‘Yes. He's
been arrested. I have him right here. I'm torturing him with Johnny Walker.'

When the messenger arrived with the ‘Communist' literature confiscated at the camp, Reid Cabral flipped through the pamphlets and discovered the publisher: US Information Service. The following day, on the President's orders, the Kamoken were released.

Just as the rebels were settling back on the chicken farm, Father Georges arranged to purchase rifles, munitions and explosives from an anti-Castro Cuban in Miami. One of the guerrillas, Gérard Lafontant, was assigned to take delivery of the weapons in Miami and move them to a safe house near the Miami river.

The Cuban delivered the weapons and loaned Lafontant a garbage truck to transport them to the safe house. As he drove south on I-95 the truck ran out of petrol. A Florida highway patrolman arrived at the scene, and Lafontant, who did not have a driving licence, told him he was taking the truck to Haiti. Amazingly, the patrolman didn't ask to see a licence or peer into the back of the truck. Lafontant delivered the arms, which were loaded aboard the 235-foot freighter
Johnny Express.

The Kamoken also paid $2,000 to a member of the Jeune Haiti movement (an organization comprised mostly of young Haitian exiles, thirteen of whom later landed in southern Haiti to fight Papa Doc) in New York for the purchase of NATO-issued automatic FAL rifles. The arms arrived by ship, concealed inside the insulation of refrigerators, and the ammunition was hidden inside car batteries. The men unloaded the arms, but a few days later they were claimed by a pair of long-time Haitian exiles. At first the Kamoken refused to hand over the weapons but complied after the men threatened to blow up the house where the munitions were stored.