The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Contending with flight cancellations, he arrived in Havana on 25 July 1963, remaining there until 8 August. Shortly after his arrival, he listened to a three-hour speech by Castro, an event that seemed a family outing for those who attended. Greene found Castro’s style utterly unlike that of Hitler, as he seemed to be thinking aloud, and when he repeated himself it was to modify or give nuance to something he had said before.

  That night, Greene went to the Tropicana with the British chargé and some others. Owing to the holiday, the place was nearly empty, and they found themselves sitting at the next table to the Soviet ambassador and Alexei Adzhubei, a jovial journalist who happened to be Khrushchev’s son-in-law and a powerbroker in the Kremlin.8 Adzhubei asked a woman in the British party to dance, and while he was two-stepping Greene shouted to him, ‘How did you get on with Pope John?’ The man ‘made a long nose’ and kept dancing. A little later Greene got a straight answer: ‘The Pope told me we were following different paths to the same end.’ Greene replied, ‘Yes. To death, I suppose.’9

  As always, Greene liked Havana – it had an air of fun that reminded him of Brighton10 – but consumer goods were hard to come by owing to the embargo. At the Floridita, daiquiris ran out because there were no more limes – in his journal Greene referred to this as ‘The real end of the world’.11 Most of the louche night clubs had been closed down, and the roulette tables were gone, but then so too was Meyer Lansky.

  Greene could see that Ché Guevara was running his economic ministry on Soviet lines, and this was at odds with what the novelist admired in post-revolutionary Cuba – its air of constant debate that reminded him of Ancient Greece. Greene’s article ‘Return to Cuba’ came out in the Sunday Telegraph,12 and it contained no reference to the hundreds of political executions that had taken place there, or to other human rights abuses – by 1963 it was no longer only the former henchmen of Batista who were facing the people’s justice. As his father Evelyn had done from time to time, the young Auberon Waugh promptly challenged Greene about this gap in his thinking and pointed out that thousands of people were even then imprisoned in Cuba on purely political grounds. An admirer of the younger Waugh, Greene accepted the criticism, and in later visits to the island made private appeals for the release of dissidents.13

  Cuba was in the headlines in 1963, but so too was Haiti, a country Greene had known in better days. In 1957, the rural physician François Duvalier had emerged as Haiti’s president after the exile of the relatively benign dictator, Paul Magloire.14 The self-styled ‘Papa Doc’ spoke vaguely and in rather mystical terms, and the military thought he might be a useful puppet. Following a murderous election campaign, which involved a coup against the brief-serving interim president Daniel Fignolé, Duvalier, who had his own thugs and bomb-makers, won a six-year term on 22 September 1957 – the army obliged by stuffing the ballot boxes. In a country where small differences of skin colour had social meaning, Duvalier, a dark-skinned man, appealed to the black majority, in particular the lower middle class. He won without the usually decisive support of the Americans, who stood behind one of his opponents, the dapper Louis Déjoie, a representative of the lighter-skinned elite.15

  Both Déjoie and Fignolé went into exile, and another of Duvalier’s opponents in the 1957 election, the accomplished Clément Jumelle, an economist who might have modernized Haiti, went to ground. His two brothers were hunted down and shot. Extremely ill, Jumelle sought refuge in the Cuban embassy in early 1959 and died there. Learning that the government was going to seize the body, the ambassador had it dressed in a suit and placed upright in his car; making a show of conversation with the corpse, he drove past Duvalier’s men and conveyed it to Jumelle’s mother. A large funeral was planned, with a number of Haitian writers and intellectuals in attendance, but the police put a stop to that. Brandishing Tommy guns, they blocked the hearse and made off with the corpse, burying it without ceremony in a distant graveyard.16 In The Comedians, Greene describes just such a scene, with Duvalier’s enforcers seizing the coffin of the fallen cabinet minister, Dr Philipot. The death of Jumelle caused the final disillusionment of some senators and other honourable public figures who had once supported Papa Doc.17

  Although the regular army had helped him gain power, Duvalier did not trust the officer class, so surrounded himself with militias, a presidential guard, and especially the paramilitary group known as the Tontons Macoutes after a figure of fear from Vodou tradition.18 The Tontons Macoutes, usually wearing dark glasses, swaggered about Haiti, menacing or killing supposed dissidents and collecting on lucrative protection rackets. Duvalier’s security was overseen by a particularly efficient torturer and killer named Clément Barbot.

  Duvalier’s relations with his neighbours could, at different times, resemble a flirtation or a knife fight. Early in his presidency, he particularly wanted American Marines to be in Haiti as a sign of favour that would discourage his rivals, and he proposed that the navy set up a base there. In Bernard Diederich’s view, the conduct of the commander of the American Marines in Haiti was disastrous: this man, Colonel Robert Heinl, persuaded Washington to provide training and weaponry to the Haitian military, then he permitted their old weapons to be passed on to paramilitaries.19

  Obviously, the Americans faced a problem in Haiti. They knew Duvalier’s election was a sham and that he was killing off his enemies. They sent a good deal of aid, most of which disappeared into the pockets of the president and his cronies. Jobs on American-supported construction projects went strictly to Duvalierists. Corruption on all building sites stored up horror for the future – in the earthquake of 2010, many sub-standard buildings from the period collapsed, adding to the vast death toll. The Americans demanded control of how the money was being spent, but Papa Doc insisted that this was an interference with Haitian sovereignty. Once Castro took power in Cuba and moved into the Soviet orbit, the Americans feared Haiti going the same way, so Duvalier dabbled in blackmail, meeting with representatives of Czechoslovakia and other Eastern Bloc countries.20 However, Duvalier and Castro found themselves at odds as opponents of Papa Doc attempted small-scale invasions from Cuba.

  In May 1961, Duvalier, already ruling by decree, did yet another extraordinary thing. On the strength of an assembly election in which he was not a candidate, he claimed a second six-year term in office.21 His first mandate, itself fraudulent, would have expired in May 1963. As that date approached, there was increasing resistance to his rule, something he tried to conceal, but Bernard Diederich’s sometimes unsigned articles in major American newspapers ensured that the world knew what was going on. There were at least two mass resignations from the otherwise docile cabinet, one of them believed to be caused by his refusal to admit to the country a group of human rights investigators from the Organization of American States.22 Papa Doc simply rejected the resignations. Later in 1963, the International Commission of Jurists concluded that Duvalier was indeed running a ‘tyranny’ and that his operatives were arresting, torturing, and killing large numbers of people without any form of legal process.23

  Despite purges of the officer corps, the army still posed a threat to Duvalier. With American encouragement, some officers began plotting to remove Papa Doc. Getting wind of this, he summoned all colonels to the presidential palace on 10 April 1963. Some fled or sought asylum. One, Charles Turnier, refused to hide and was arrested, beaten, and then shot repeatedly. His corpse was dumped on a parade ground to send a message to the rest of the army. This was followed by the purging of another seventy-two officers. Duvalier himself helped prepare lists of men to be arrested and sent to Fort Dimanche, his place of torture and execution.24

  Meanwhile, other threats emerged. In late 1961, Clément Barbot, Duvalier’s security chief, had fallen from favour and been sent to Fort Dimanche without explanation. In the same arbitrary manner, Papa Doc released him and gave him a new car, believing he would devote himself to prayer and penitence. With a claim on the loyalty of many Tontons Macoutes, Barbot had the potent
ial to turn the dictators’ guards into assassins. Resenting injuries done to himself and his family, Barbot went into open and highly publicized rebellion. It was a vulnerable moment, as Papa Doc had also to watch the activities of small groups of exiles undergoing military training in the Dominican Republic, where another dictator, the notorious Rafael Trujillo, had been assassinated two years earlier. One exile group dropped leaflets on Port-au-Prince promising to wipe out the Duvalierists by 15 May – Papa Doc’s response was to declare a national month of gratitude to himself.25

  A crisis came on the morning of 26 April 1963. Barbot’s men tried to kidnap the young Jean-Claude Duvalier, later to rule as ‘Baby Doc’, and his sister Simone as they were being brought to school. Their driver and two bodyguards were shot, but the children themselves escaped harm. Bernard Diederich came upon the scene on the way to work and was told to leave or be shot. He hurriedly wrote up the story and then ran to a telegraph office to get it out to the New York Times and the Associated Press before the censors could stop him.

  He had been warned repeatedly about how his news stories were damaging the government’s reputation, so he expected trouble. The next morning the Tontons Macoutes came to his house, arrested him, and placed him in a prison cell. The killing of a journalist with a New Zealand passport entailed tiresome complications, so after two days’ detention he was put on a plane to the Dominican Republic with four cents in his pocket. Still vulnerable to the Tontons Macoutes, his Haitian-born wife Ginette and their baby went into hiding and it took an agonizing three weeks for them to reach safety.26

  Not knowing that the attack was Barbot’s doing, Papa Doc decided to kill all former army officers, beginning with the young Lieutenant François Benoit, a national sporting hero who had competed against American Marines in marksmanship. It was supposed that only he could have taken the shots that brought down the three men. In fact, he had fled from his parents’ house to the Dominican embassy two days before and had nothing to do with the attempted kidnapping. Nonetheless, palace guards and Tontons Macoutes conducted a full-scale assault against that house. They shot his parents, a servant, and a visitor. What remained of the house was set on fire, and the lieutenant’s infant son was lost in the flames.

  The Benoit massacre, which Graham Greene recounted in the first chapter of The Comedians, marked the opening of several days of reprisals against army officers and their families. Scores died, and in many cases funerals were impossible.27 Fifty years later, on 26 April 2013, the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince said a Mass for the disappeared at the Église St Pierre in Pétionville. It was attended by the aged survivors of that bloodbath, and in the midst of them was the tall figure of François Benoit, who had gone on to oppose Duvalier in exile, prospered in business, and entered Haitian politics. He was there with his wife Jacqueline, the mother of the lost child. Bernard Diederich, too, was there – eighty-seven, hunched, white-bearded, and leaning on a carved Maori stick, himself an honoured figure in Haiti. He shook Benoit’s hand with great warmth – they were old friends and something close to comrades.

  The events of late April 1963 nearly led to war on the island of Hispaniola, as some of Papa Doc’s men barged into the Dominican embassy, where twenty-two people had taken asylum. Above all, they wanted to get their hands on Benoit. The new Dominican leader, Juan Bosch, possessed a much stronger army than Duvalier, and he issued an ultimatum. Meanwhile, the Kennedy administration briefly suspended diplomatic relations with Haiti, and sent warships close to shore with Marines at the ready to ensure the safety of American citizens.28 These threats gradually subsided, as neither the Dominican Republic nor the United States had the stomach for invasion.

  For a time, Barbot carried out small attacks and publicly taunted Duvalier. In mid-July he was about to launch an audacious attack on the palace when his hiding place became known. He and his followers were chased into a sugar-cane field which was then set on fire. Those who ran from the flames were gunned down, among them Barbot and his brother. Photographs were taken of the corpses.29

  Graham Greene arrived in Port-au-Prince on 13 August 1963 and he stayed nine days.30 By that time the regime had weathered its most recent troubles. There was still, however, the threat of exiles coming across the Dominican border towards the north, and Greene hoped to witness an attack. He told Yvonne Cloetta that he felt fear going to the country.31 Arriving at night, he found the Grand Hotel Oloffson lit only by oil lamps as a result of frequent power outages. He had known the place as a thriving centre of literary and artistic culture, but now it had just three guests, including an old couple from the United States who sought to help Haiti by teaching its artists the silk-screen process – they probably gave him the idea for the Smiths, a pair of crusading vegetarians in The Comedians. Greene went with them to an entertainment at a brothel, which he recreated in the novel as ‘Mère Catherine’s’. The old man began to sketch the girls, who flocked around him ‘like excited schoolchildren’, while a couple of Tontons Macoutes ‘glared through their dark glasses at this strange spectacle of a fearless happiness and an innocence they couldn’t understand’.32

  There had recently been a change of management at the Oloffson, and with tourism drying up the place was nearly bankrupt. Most of the staff had been let go, though the barman Cesar, the model for Joseph, was still making his famous rum punches.33 This three-storey hotel, with its wooden turrets and balconies and its air of abandonment, would be the setting of Greene’s novel.

  Greene received daily visits from the local gossip writer Aubelin Jolicoeur,34 whom he had first met with Truman Capote in 1954. Often dressed in a white suit and silk ascot, and sporting a gold-topped cane, he wrote on many subjects but typically reported on social life in Port-au-Prince.35 Greene found him entertaining, but believed him a spy for the Tontons Macoutes – Diederich thought him merely a ‘survivor’.36 He appears in the novel under the thinnest disguise as ‘Petit Pierre’. He is thought to have given Greene the title for his book when he described Haitians as story-tellers or ‘comedians’.37

  Greene’s efforts to arrange an interview with Papa Doc were stymied by the Foreign Minister, René Chalmers, who reminded him of a frog and whom he would later mimic for Diederich: ‘I regret, Monsieur Greene, the President is not receiving the foreign press at this time.’ With similar expressions of regret he told him that for his own safety it would not be possible for him to go to the northern part of the country, but then he denied that any rebel incursions were happening there. On his way out of the office, Greene was told by an indiscreet aide that Chalmers was about to prepare a protest to the United Nations concerning just such an incursion.38

  Chalmers was willing to permit a trip south to the seaport of Les Cayes, where Greene wished to visit some Canadian missionaries. To do it, he needed a laissez-passer to get him past the innumerable roadblocks. At a police station that stank like a urinal, he found himself sitting near a photograph of the bullet-riddled corpses of the Barbot brothers and being stared at by an officer in mirrored glasses – it was at that moment his character Captain Concasseur was born.39 After two days of waiting, Greene was given a permit for two days of travel, but even so he was searched four times while still near the capital. He was frisked one night at a roadblock near the hotel and was particularly annoyed at how the man put his hand under his testicles. Diederich later determined that Greene was shadowed for almost every moment of his visit.

  He went to see Duvalierville, a supposed showcase for the regime undoubtedly inspired by the construction of Brasilia. A small village had been demolished to accommodate a new one made of concrete. It was paid for largely by road tolls, but relatively little of the money received was spent on building. The plan was to house two thousand peasants in one-room houses. When Greene saw it, there were a few concrete structures and nothing really complete except a stadium for cockfights. He heard of another curious project on Kenscoff, the mountain that rises beyond the capital – an officer of the Tontons Macoutes was building an ice ri
nk; in the novel, Captain Concasseur loses money on such a project.

  Over drinks at the Oloffson, Greene gave an interview to the journalist Richard Eder, and while most of his comments were about the antics of the ‘other’ Graham Greene back in Europe, he said he was thinking of writing an entertainment set in Haiti, beginning with a hotel owner returning to find his premises empty.40 In fact, he had begun that book some months before but had made no progress since May as he needed to see for himself what was going on in the country.41 Having lost confidence while writing A Burnt-Out Case, he initially proposed nothing more than an entertainment. One can see the possibility of sad humour in the situation of the hotel owner, but Greene soon decided that to do justice to what he had seen he needed to write a full-scale novel, a thing he had almost despaired of ever doing again. The moral and political urgency of Haiti required him to become ambitious about his art once again.

  Greene sought out troubled places as an escape from boredom, but some of these journeys left him shaken. He knew that at any moment the Tontons Macoutes could knock at his door or prove trigger-happy at a roadblock. Although he often wrote about desiring death, he did experience fear, never more so than on this visit to what he would soon describe as ‘The Nightmare Republic’.42 As he was boarding his plane to Santo Domingo, a stranger asked him to carry a letter to the exiled presidential candidate Louis Déjeoie. Thinking it a trap, he refused.43