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IL A 6A6NC LA 8ATMLLC 06 
LA PfiiX. 
“For the good 
of all , he has won the battle 
for peace ’ 
of Papa Doc have been turned upside 
down. The old crone has upturned 
them as a punishment for resisting her 
prayers. Her family, she says, is starv¬ 
ing, her husband has been out of work 
for three years. The week before, they 
drowned their youngest child. He was 
blind in one eye. The boy was four 
years old and weighed under 30 lb. 
Now that most of the crops have 
died, the peasants eat milkstones, 
a soft white local stone, or dirt 
sprinkled with the juice of a lime. “In 
Haiti,” says Alexandre, “herring shit 
is meat.” Sometimes, they mix the dirt 
with the syrupy residue of sugar cane 
to form a kind of porridge. But not 
often. Sugar cane is scarce now. 
“Is your family eating rats?” 
Alexandre inquires. 
“No. No,” she whispers. “There are 
none left.” 
Driving down the mountainside to 
Cap Haitien and the sea, the dust 
begins to rise like a great fog. On 
either side of the road the elegant 
mansions have fallen with the dust; 
only the huge stone portals remain, 
the iron gates padlocked still, pro¬ 
tecting nothing. For the rest - the once 
fabulous city of Cap Haitien, the 
plantation homes, the mosaic palaces, 
Christophe’s ebony court — of this, 
there is no sign. Alexandre’s Promised 
Land is gone. Ahead the ragged town, 
the ridiculous frame houses, stiff and 
skeletal, lean together like schools of 
scarecrows cringing from the sea. 
☆ 
The hotel stands in the hills above 
Cap Haitien. The southern view is of 
the town; the northern terrace over¬ 
looks the sea. It is dark and the temple 
tom-toms rumble far below in the 
town. A group of white-robed initiates 
pass the hotel at dusk; they will return 
at dawn, flushed and sweaty and will 
celebrate Mass before breakfast. One of 
the two mulatto businessmen drinking 
at the hotel bar says he’s seen three 
zombies that evening. No one seems 
particularly interested. He points to an 
old man working in the garden. “There, 
that one, he has no hope of death.” 
The old man looks up, abstractedly, 
and continues to work in the garden. 
The mulatto businessmen have been 
drinking since early evening. One of 
them, wearing Gucci shoes, explains 
he manufactures textiles. The other, 
a tall lank man in a silk suit, owns 
several coffee estates. Members of 
Haiti’s diminishing Creole elite, they 
would, in any other country, occupy 
positions of influence and power. But, 
they are brown and live in a kind 
of netherworld of blame and blackmail, 
exiled among their own. The coffee 
planter lives in a mansion in Petion- 
ville, but comes north once a month 
to oversee his properties. He has had an 
unfortunate year and curses the 
drought. Asked what the rich can do 
in Haiti to avoid another drought, 
another famine, he says he has not 
heard of a famine, but in any case, it 
would be mad to help the peasants. 
They refuse to help themselves. 
“The drought is another matter,” 
he says. “Although it is bad for coffee, 
it is beneficial in other ways. We are 
very overpopulated in Haiti, you 
know.” 
“What can we do?” says his com¬ 
panion. “The drought’s the Govern¬ 
ment’s concern. V m in textiles. 
“And besides,” the coffee planter 
mutters, “the Government is a brig¬ 
and. Help the Government and you 
help a thief” He speaks softly, looking 
over his shoulder to the door. 
In Haiti, there has always been much 
nationalism, but only a few selfless 
patriots. Men of business prefer the 
severities of the current regime, believ¬ 
ing Duvalier’s demise would disrupt 
their businesses. The coffee planter 
looks up from his drink. “It’s the dumb 
who give,” he snaps, “the imbecile 
who doesn’t take.” He looks out the 
window, abjectly. 
Christophe’s Citadel is visible in the 
distance. The businessman points it 
out with pride. Three thousand feet 
above sea level, the Citadel straddles 
a mountain-top. Twenty thousand 
Haitian peasants died dragging up 
its huge stone blocks and heavy cannon. 
Capable of housing 15,000 soldiers, 
it was built to withstand a siege of five 
years. Christophe secured his base and 
waited; the invasion never came. 
The Citadel remains what it always 
was — a lump of stone in the wilderness. 
Built to no purpose, it serves none 
now - a fortress which never garrisoned 
a single soldier, nor fired a shot, re¬ 
pulsed an attack, or withstood a siege- 
a monument to megalomania. But 
Christophe raised his Citadel as surely 
as Duvalier will raise his Himalaya 
of corpses. A reminder of madness, a 
promise of more, they are the gestures 
of men at their wits’ end. 
“It is the eighth wonder of the 
world,” the businessman says. “We 
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