ABSTRACT
on that day in November 1963, I may have been the only tourist in the Republic of Haiti, which had enjoyed a brief flowering as a visitor’s paradise before the crumbling into near chaos of the Duvalier regime. Now the predatory tontons macoutes—or “bogeymen”—wandered this desolated tropical paradox, their guns cradled sleepily in the crooks of their arms, gaining revenge for history through small extortions, frequent beatings, occasional murders. On the theory that they owed everything to him, and that his fall would result in their slaughter, and that therefore they could be both trusted and indulged, the Chef de la Nation, François Duvalier, had disarmed the police and the Army and developed this militia of his personal pets. They fed on the scorched poverty of the land. The beauty of sky and sun, bay and mountains, now had its traditional accompaniment of idle violence. The time of human sacrifice, absent in Haiti except as legend, had returned in a parody of a European fascism under the so-called Government of National Renovation.
