1957: (Duvalier’s Mixed Team: Price-Mars and the Griots, the Blanchet Communists, Barbot the Robespierre, Fuentes the Cuban Bomber, Luckner Cambronne the Bag…

1957: (Duvalier’s Mixed Team: Price-Mars and the Griots, the Blanchet Communists, Barbot the Robespierre, Fuentes the Cuban Bomber, Luckner Cambronne the Bagman, and the Foreign Legion): For a simple country doctor — so he still called himself to foreign reporters — Duvalier had assembled a decidedly mixed team. Basking in the sunlight were his fellow griots headed by the venerable Jean Price-Mars, as well as long-time medical colleagues like Dr. Aurèle Joseph who had fought yaws beside Duvalier in the 1940s. There was a brain trust including Roger Dorsinville and Lucien Daumec, Duvalier’s brother-in-law and speechwriter, and there were communists — the Blanchet brothers Jules and Paul, Hervé Boyer, and until 1960 René Depestre. The army had a fervent Duvalier cell headed by Major Jacques Laroche with Captain Claude Raymond not far behind; among the Haitian clergy were priests who secretly applauded the president’s strictures against a Church still dominated by Frenchmen. Clémard-Joseph Charles, who had found the $46,000 to pay off Cantave’s soldiers in May 1957, was banker and bagman; another bagman was the young député from Cabaret, Luckner Cambronne. Besides all these, Duvalier’s men had from the beginning included a hard-eyed fringe: Temístocles Fuentes-Rivera, a Cuban terrorist and explosives technician; the Dominican Johnny Abbés-García, who slipped in and out of Port-au-Prince on orders from Ciudad Trujillo; and a foreign legion including Gérard de Catalogne the Corsican publicist, the American Herbert Morrison known as Ti Barbe — whose real name was Jerome Breitman — and Dr. Elmer Loughlin, severed from the U.S. Public Health Service. Atop all these was one man who could be called the president’s alter ego — a St. Marc noir named Clément Barbot, slim, fine-featured former schoolteacher who as a boy had been caned by a French priest for daring to defend Dessalines as Haiti’s greatest hero, the Frenchman grunting Dessalines! Dessalines! at each stroke of the rod. Clément Barbot never forgot — Robespierre of the Duvalier revolution, nationalist to the core, noir of noirs, capable of any deed yet man of his word and kindly father and husband, he would in the end prove how true it is that revolution devours its children.