1957: (The Four Candidates: Déjoie the Mulâtre Planter, Jumelle the Technocrat, Fignolé the Haitian Castro, and François Duvalier the Apostle of Estimé): The…

1957: (The Four Candidates: Déjoie the Mulâtre Planter, Jumelle the Technocrat, Fignolé the Haitian Castro, and François Duvalier the Apostle of Estimé): The candidates can be quickly described. Louis Déjoie was a wealthy aristocratic mulâtre planter and dealer in essential oils, with extensive holdings outside Cayes and Jacmel, choice of the elite, the South, and one army faction. Clément Jumelle, educated at Fisk and Chicago, was a self-made Artibonite noir, Finance Minister under Magloire and inheritor of Magloirist political assets — a strong believer in planning and development who had at one time been the bureaucratic superior and close friend of François Duvalier, whom Jumelle had sheltered when Duvalier was in hiding in 1954. Daniel Fignolé was a noir Port-au-Prince syndicalist and demagogue whose urban proletarian MOP could at will disrupt the capital and government but had never been able to gain and hold national power — fiery, erratic, stinging in debate, slim and handsome, he has been called a Haitian Castro, his harsh, witty, exciting Creole speeches anticipating by some thirty years those of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in attaining the uttermost limits that piquant language can reach. François Duvalier was a Port-au-Prince noir physician and ethnologist, political and intellectual spokesman of the griots and the folkloristes, and self-proclaimed inheritor and apostle of Dumarsais Estimé. Of the four, two — Fignolé and Duvalier — spoke of their candidacies as revolutionary; to Déjoie, revolution was abhorrent; to Jumelle, distasteful but more to the point, not pertinent. These — together with three soldiers, Cantave, Armand, and Kébreau — were the personalities whose tug and flow and polarization finally combined to produce a solution unforeseeable by any participant save one.