1907–1971: (The Heinl Epitaph: Profoundly Haitian in the Mold of Toussaint and Dessalines, the Symphonist of Human Weakness, the Mighty Ozymandias Whose Monu…

1907–1971: (The Heinl Epitaph: Profoundly Haitian in the Mold of Toussaint and Dessalines, the Symphonist of Human Weakness, the Mighty Ozymandias Whose Monument Was Misery, and the Betrayal of People, Aspirations, and Himself): Duvalier was in every respect a remarkable man. Like no predecessor save Pétion and Riché, he served his full term and died naturally in the palace. He was a master of calculated obscurity, a connoisseur of human weakness and contradictions whose unsleeping suspicion played ceaselessly on people and governments like radar sweeping the skies. It was to sleepless suspicion that Duvalier owed his full term in office — and, of course, to betrayal: he readily forgot friends but never an enemy. The comparison with Adolf Hitler would have surprised even Duvalier, yet the two dictators — one white and racist, the other Black and racist — shared much in common: cruelty, suspicion, fanaticism, superstition, racism, and megalomania. Power — yes, that was the thing: Papa Doc never had enough of it. There was also another thing — Duvalier knew everyone and everyone’s secrets. Most of the peasants and not a few oungan believed the lwa had made Papa Doc their familiar; possibly indeed the lwa did. Speaking to foreigners, whom he delighted in misleading, Duvalier would refer to himself as an ethnologist and to Vodou as folklore — but no Haitian could ever truly dismiss Vodou as mere folklore, for Vodou was in Haiti’s bones, and Haiti was in the bones of Duvalier. He was unbelievably cruel while ruling a simple, kind, cheerful people; negative and destructive in many acts and policies; a symphonist who consummately orchestrated human divisions, weakness, venality, and cynicism. He was a xenophobe who duped the great powers and their UN and OAS — a mighty Ozymandias whose monument proved to be misery and ruins. But Duvalier was a profoundly Haitian figure in the historic mold of Toussaint and of Dessalines — Black, as so many of the titans had been, and not a mulâtre, and touched too with madness, knowing his people better than they knew themselves. Duvalier breathed and articulated the aspirations of his countrymen. It was their tragedy and his and Haiti’s that he betrayed them all — people, aspirations, and himself. The Heinl epitaph — its final sentence locating Duvalier’s crime not in tyranny but in betrayal, not in the seizure of power but in the corruption of the aspirations that had brought him to power — rendered the most devastating judgment a historian could pronounce on a Haitian leader: that Duvalier had understood his people’s deepest longings more completely than any predecessor, had voiced those longings more eloquently, and had then turned them into the instrument of their own subjugation, so that the noir masses who had invested in his presidency their century-old hope for dignity and recognition found themselves, after fourteen years, more profoundly betrayed than any elite could have betrayed them — because the betrayal came not from the traditional enemy above but from the proclaimed champion within, and the aspirations that Duvalier articulated so perfectly were the same aspirations his regime existed to extinguish.