A heady mix of vice and voodoo

By any standards, Haiti represents a great concentration of misery and dashed hopes. From the air, the Caribbean republic is a sun-scorched clinker; deforestation, caused by a ruinous cutting of timber for charcoal, has destroyed much of the green. Since independence in 1804, moreover, a succession of emperors, kings and presidents-for-life has contrived to instil terror in the people.

François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, dictator of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, entertained more than an anthropological interest in Afro-Caribbean sorcery rituals. His wardrobe of black suits and black homburgs lent him the aspect, says Bernard Diederich, of the voodoo divinity Baron Samedi, who haunts the churchyards in a top hat and tails like a ghoulish Groucho Marx. (James Bond encounters an American version of Baron Samedi in the henchman of Live and Let Die’s dastardly Mr Big, chairman of the New York-based Black Widow Cult.)

The Haitian dictator’s son Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier was no less bizarre. On 5 November 2002, hoping to interview him, I dialled his number from my home in London. The instant he picked up his phone in the south of France, a neighbour let off fireworks beneath my window, and he hung up. Bernard Diederich, a former Time magazine journalist, has also tried but failed to interview Duvalier junior. A series of political convulsions — attempted assassinations, bomb plots — has followed the president’s expulsion from Haiti in 1986 and no doubt he still sees journalists as part of a larger threat. By an irony, Baby Doc lived near Graham Greene in Antibes; Greene had of course delivered a withering attack on the Duvalier tyranny in his Haitian novel The Comedians.

In 1968, by way of retaliation, Papa Doc issued a pamphlet entitled Graham Greene — Finally Exposed, in which he sought to discredit the novelist as, among other things, a ‘benzedrin addict’ and ‘habitué of leper houses’ (the observations were not far wrong).