The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  ‘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.

  On the night of 27 June my wife and I attended a diplomatic party at the house of Vince Blocker, the US Embassy’s CIA man in charge of keeping an eye on the Haitian exiles. I was privy to the invasion plans but said nothing. I stayed late at Blocker’s house and watched the clock. I knew that if anything happened his police sources would notify him.

  That night twenty-nine Kamoken were loaded into a van and taken from the chicken farm to a cocktail party at Pierre Rigaud’s apartment on Avenida Independencia. The men ate hors d’oeuvres and mingled until late into the night. Then they were loaded back into the van and driven to the coast near the airport, where they were ferried by a small boat to the Johnny Express.

  As the freighter got under way the guerrillas broke out the weapons from Miami. They were stunned. The arms the Cuban had sold them were antique First World War British-made Enfield rifles.

  A Dominican patrol boat fired a warning shot over the bow of the Johnny Express, but they managed to escape. The following day, in heavy seas, the freighter drew as close as it could to the Haitian coast near the town of Saltrou.

  The landing proved difficult and costly for the guerrillas. Two men drowned, and most of the detonators for the explosives were lost. The invasion was saved when a fisherman brought his battered boat alongside the Johnny Express and helped the others disembark.

  Immediately after landing two Kamoken deserted, but the fisherman agreed to join the group and helped carry the munitions. They were a poorly armed force of twenty-five, and their US olive fatigues confused the Haitian peasants, who thought they were members of Papa Doc’s army or militia.


  The following day Duvalier was informed of the presence of the rebels in the Belle Anse area. The response was terrifying and typical of Papa Doc’s repression. Anyone in the area believed to be anti-Duvalier was taken from their home and killed. Sixty-seven people were executed in the town square. Because one of the Kamoken was identified as Adrien Fandal the Macoutes hunted down and killed anyone in the area with that name. They seized land from the victims, and for years the killers and the relatives of the victims had to live side by side in Belle Anse.

  In Port-au-Prince Papa Doc took personal command of the armed forces. A detachment from the Dessalines battalion was sent to hunt down the Kamoken. They pummelled the mountains with mortar rounds, but the guerrillas were not there. Duvalier’s small air force made daily sorties, and truckloads of militiamen were sent into the mountains. The invasion appeared to evolve into a sustained campaign. The helpless mountain peasants who were caught in the crossfire endured three weeks of terror. If they welcomed the Kamoken they would be executed by the army or Macoutes. If the Kamoken suspected them of being Macoutes they would likewise be executed.

  Haiti’s Foreign Minister, René Chalmers, complained to the UN Security Council, accusing the Dominican Republic of aggression. He claimed the invasion force was made up of Haitian and Dominican elements armed with automatic weapons, grenades, wireless receivers and a large store of ammunition. He said the invaders planned to dynamite bridges and gasoline tanks and accused prominent exiles of being behind the invasion.

  I, too, was also denounced at the UN for providing the Kamoken with identifications. I immediately received a call from Manny Friedman, the foreign editor at the New York Times, asking me if I had dropped journalism and become a guerrilla.

  When the Dominican government received news of the invasion, President Reid Cabral countered Duvalier’s charges with his own, accusing Papa Doc of lying and declaring that no invasion force had left from Dominican territory.

  The President summoned me to the Palace. He was in a good mood, pleased at how he’d rebuffed Duvalier. Then he looked at me and asked, ‘Those Haitians are still in Villa Mella, right?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Goddamn it.’ Reid Cabral was furious. ‘I just protested to the OAS [Organization of American States]. How the hell did they do it?’

  Meanwhile the small rebellion continued. Duvalier’s forces were reluctant to venture into the mountains and face a guerrilla force of unknown strength. The army and Macoutes contented themselves with occupying marketplaces and wreaking vengeance on anyone they suspected of helping the rebels. A member of the Kamoken who ventured into a market wearing combat boots was spotted and executed on the spot.

  The guerrillas took over the village of Mapou. Someone accused the local shopkeeper of being a Macoute. The Kamoken ransacked the shop, distributing goods and cash to the peasants. They confiscated a bundle of mortgage notes and IOUs from the store and burned them in a formal ceremony. Then they killed the owner.

  The Kamoken were forced to discourage recruits because they had no arms or food to offer them. The peasants in the mountains were dirt poor. Many couldn’t even afford a machete and had to cultivate their land with their hands, scratching between the rocks to plant millet.

  Water was also a problem for the guerrillas. During the sixteen days it took to cross Morne La Selle and other rocky mountains, they found little food or water to purchase. To quench their thirst and hunger some of the rebels ate chocolate-coated laxatives with disastrous results.

  Baptiste was a tough leader, but he was also paranoid. He forced his men to move miles at a time and forbade them to drink from waterholes, fearing they were poisoned. Towards the end of July the Kamoken were astride the Haitian—Dominican border. Baptiste ordered the men to cross back into the Dominican Republic to find rations, but Gérard Lafontant resisted, adamant they remain in Haitian territory. Baptiste became angry at Lafontant’s insubordination, which he likened to an act of mutiny. He levelled his rifle at Lafontant’s head at point-blank range and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The gun misfired.

  In the end, the sick and hungry guerrillas buried their weapons and walked across the border on to Dominican soil, where they were promptly taken prisoner by an army patrol. Two weeks later they were released back in the mountainous region along the border.

  On 5 August 1964 the Kamoken returned to their old base camp in Haiti’s Morne La Selle, a stone’s throw from the Dominican border post at El Aguacate. The Dominican soldiers had orders from their commander to ignore the Haitian guerrillas if they re-entered the country.

  The ragtag force retrieved their old firearms and began to act like disciplined fighters. Columns went out on forays against Macoutes and military targets. On 11 August they sabotaged the Pine Forest sawmill belonging to Papa Doc’s sister-in-law and her husband who had the timber monopoly. Four days later another column carried out a successful night attack on the Haitian military border post at Savane Zombi. The soldiers and Macoutes fled, leaving behind their equipment and, more importantly, the post’s archives. The guerrillas set fire to the post and two houses belonging to the local Macoute chieftain. That same afternoon another Kamoken column ambushed a truckload of Papa Doc’s militia who were travelling slowly over the rugged mountain road that led from Thiotte to Port-au-Prince, inflicting four casualties.

  Several days later a messenger arrived at my home in Santo Domingo with a request for guerrilla reinforcements, arms, food, medicines and winter wear. We supplied sweaters, which we had dyed dark green, food and medicines, but there were no heavy weapons.

  I volunteered transport. Since my Volkswagen Beetle was too small I asked a friend, the owner of Santo Domingo Motors, if he’d let me borrow a car for the weekend. He said that if I ‘repossessed’ an automobile a Cuban exile had refused to return the car would be mine for the weekend. I took two burly Haitians with me and had no trouble repossessing the late-model American car.

  At midday on 24 August, loaded down with food and clothing, three Haitian friends and I took off for the border. Hurricane Cleo was approaching the south coast of Hispaniola. The sun disappeared behind thick thunderclouds, and the sky was streaked with an eerie yellow light. We raced along the coastal road in gusting winds and heavy rain until we reached the mountain road to El Aguacate. Here the dirt road had turned to thick mud and the going became rough and slow. At times the wheels would spin and the heavy car would slide backwards on the difficult road.

  When we finally drove into the military compound of El Aguacate the sentries ignored us. Fred Baptiste strode out of the mountain fog accompanied by a squad of his men. We handed over to the goods, and they gave us several rolls of film to be developed in Santo Domingo and provided to the media.

  After we finished unloading, Baptiste looked at me with disappointment. ‘Where are the arms?’

  ‘There are none,’ I said.

  Baptiste was crestfallen. He thought Rigaud had convinced the Dominican military to release the guns General Cantave had received in an airdrop at Dajabón.

  ‘You tell Rigaud we need arms and munitions. This is top priority. We plan to go on the offensive.’

  I knew they needed arms, but all I could do was hand over a .45 -calibre automatic pistol I had purchased for $400 from a fixer I knew in Santo Domingo. It was a clean weapon with the serial numbers filed off. Baptiste took the weapon and shrugged as he placed it in his belt. ‘A lot of good this will do.’

  We were out of time. Hurricane Cleo was beginning to turn the mountain road into a river. We made it down safely, but when we arrived in Baní the waters were too high and the car stalled. We had to abandon the vehicle and take a bus back to Santo Domingo.

  Two months later a member of the Kamoken arrived at our door in Santo Domingo with a letter from Fred Baptiste. It said he was hospitalized in the Dominican army barracks in Azua with a fractured leg. The remaining members of his guerrilla force were being held in the army’s fortaleza in Neyba. ‘I must get out
of the Azua fortaleza this week, and the fellows must be moved,’ the note read. ‘Alas, the inaction is killing me; I cannot stay any longer in the Azua fortaleza. Do your best for us. We cannot let go of the struggle … We are young. We will win or die.’

  According to Baptiste, the Kamoken heard voices coming from across the valley on the Dominican side of the border. They decided they were Dominicans. Two hours later one of the sentries saw two dozen men dressed like Dominican soldiers approaching through the pine trees into Haitian territory deployed and preparing to attack. He fired a shot in the air to sound the alarm. The approaching force opened up with a .30-calibre machine-gun. There was no question of fighting the intruders coming from the Dominican side. The only alternative was to split up into small groups and retreat further into Haitian territory. Baptiste fell over a precipice and fractured his left leg in two places.

  The weary Kamoken left their hiding places inside Haiti and straggled in twos and threes back across the Dominican border, and once again they were taken prisoner by the Dominican army. Because of his injuries, Baptiste was transported to the fort in Azua.

  No one knew who had attacked the Kamoken. Speculation focused on Dominican General Elías Wessin y Wessin, who feared that the Haitian guerrillas might cause an escalation of trouble with Papa Doc. At the time the top command of the Dominican armed forces was divided. One group of high-ranking officers supported exiled President Joaquín Balaguer, while another, which had opposed the overthrow of President Bosch, was in favour of a return to constitutional rule. Only Wessin y Wessin gave full support to President Reid Cabral.

  Reid Cabral had ordered reinforcement of the border but refused an army request for additional tanks in the area. He told me he was concerned that rival military groups might be trying to have Wessin y Wessin disperse his tanks around the country in order to weaken his force in Santo Domingo and bring off a coup d’état. In early March 1964 Reid Cabral set off a minor controversy in the Dominican media and military when at the urging of the OAS he suggested it might be a good thing to re-establish relations with Haiti, even at a consular level, to learn what was happening there.