1890s–1971: (The Macoutes Go to Ground and Cambronne’s Empire: The Léopards Created, the New York Times Reports the TTMs Disbanded, Cambronne Exports Cadaver…

1890s–1971: (The Macoutes Go to Ground and Cambronne’s Empire: The Léopards Created, the New York Times Reports the TTMs Disbanded, Cambronne Exports Cadavers and Plasma, the Railroad Sold for Scrap, and the Cannabis Plantation Near Arcahaie): Knox and other Duvalier advocates in the international arena were aided by demonstrable changes in the government’s tone. The fiercest tonton macoutes kept low profiles, at least in public — the New York Times reported optimistically that they had been partially disbanded. To serve as an adjunct to the Garde Présidentielle, a new brigade of elite counter-terrorist troops, the Léopards, began training and were part of the formal army structure. Yet those who thought the macoutes had been tamed were wrong — they had gone to ground, but like pythons napping after ingesting a particularly plump goat, they were for the moment too busy participating in the new prosperity to overtly revert to old ways. Cambronne’s hand was everywhere. Some went so far as to say it often touched that of the so-called First Lady of the Revolution, Simone Duvalier. Strong with the Chauffeurs-Guides — who now had tourists to chauffeur and guide — he owned travel agencies and plantations and was instrumental in establishing a thriving trade in the export of Haitian cadavers for use by foreign medical schools; the cadavers were said to be much prized in the U.S. and Canada because their lack of fat made them easier for medical students to dissect. Not even the few remaining operating spurs of the Chemin de Fer National escaped his predations: passenger service had long been abandoned, but cane was still hauled by train from as far west as Léogâne through Carrefour along the waterfront into the HASCO refinery, and the track to St. Marc and Croix-des-Bouquets still saw occasional use — to the north, just outside the Cap where the railroad station had once stood, sat in lonely majesty the hulk of one steam locomotive, sole remnant of the line that had run all the way to Bahon only fifty years earlier. The rail system that had been a horn of plenty for so many over eighty years provided one final opportunity for peculation: with Simone Duvalier’s blessing, the rolling stock and anything usable was sold, mostly abroad — some of the rails today serve as fence posts on beachfront villas on the road north to St. Marc. In addition to the cadaver business, a new line — plasma sales — had been developed: every morning, lines of the poorest of the poor formed in front of the Port-au-Prince offices of a company called Hemo Caribbean, from whose blood was extracted plasma for which they were paid a few dollars before the products were exported to the U.S. at a handsome profit, netting Cambronne an estimated $25,000 a month. One Haitian doctor observed to a writer that the plasma cows were rather tired, but they didn’t have jobs anyway. On a well-tended plantation near Arcahaie, peasants busily cultivated high-grade cannabis both for local consumption and the beginnings of what would become a lucrative export trade.