1958–1969: (Duvalier and the Communists: Paul and Jules Blanchet in the Inner Circle, Alexis Stoned to Death by the Peasants He Came to Save, the PEP and the…

1958–1969: (Duvalier and the Communists: Paul and Jules Blanchet in the Inner Circle, Alexis Stoned to Death by the Peasants He Came to Save, the PEP and the PPLN, and the Unified PUCH Born on March 31, 1969): Duvalier’s relationship with Haitian communists remained as ambivalent as ever. From the beginning he maintained communists in his cabinet and inner circle — Paul and Jules Blanchet and Hervé Boyer — while countenancing continuing clandestine contacts between the regime and Fidel Castro and with the French and Mexican Communist Parties. Duvalier made skilled use of these connections to needle Washington: Lucien Daumec was allowed to attend a propaganda school in Romania, while in November 1961 Duvalier sent Jules Blanchet on a secret mission to Warsaw and Vienna to negotiate Russian aid for Haiti. The American ambassador aptly characterized the tactics in a 1963 interview: he did not believe Duvalier himself was a communist, but he found it useful to throw them in Washington’s face and so far seemed to have them under control. A State Department spokesman put it more bluntly: Haitian communists came from two sources — the people’s misery and Duvalier’s extraordinary tolerance of them. Yet Duvalier never tolerated communists when he perceived a threat. In April 1961, noir authentique Jacques Alexis — son of Stephen Alexis, author of Le Nègre Masqué — who had traveled to Moscow, Peking, and Cuba as representative of the Parti Entente Populaire, sailed from Baracoa with four Haitians and $20,000 in cash and landed at the Môle. Instead of being greeted as liberators, the revolutionaries were trussed up by peasants, handed over to the garrison, and thrown into the slime-coated oubliettes at Fort St. George. After several days of beating and torture, the five were led out under the ramparts and, on orders from the president, stoned to death by the very peasants they had come to save. Meanwhile, domestically, communist activity had been tacitly sanctioned: besides the PEP, the mulâtre elite headed by René Depestre organized in 1958 their own Parti Populaire pour la Libération Nationale. Like Estimé, Duvalier toyed with both, shutting his eyes when it suited him while killing Alexis and, in 1966, PPLN leaders Mario Rameau and Jacques Ambroise. In December 1968, the two parties finally merged to form a single Parti Unifié Communiste Haïtien — the PUCH — which on March 31, 1969, proclaimed that the united party would guide the struggle of the proletariat to seize power and build socialism in Haiti. The stoning of Alexis — a revolutionary intellectual murdered by the peasantry he had devoted his life to liberating, on orders from a president who claimed to embody that same peasantry — was the most devastating parable of the Duvalierist condition: a state in which the instruments of popular sovereignty had been so thoroughly colonized by one man’s power that the people themselves became the executioners of their own champions, the revolutionary tradition of 1804 transformed from a weapon of liberation into a weapon of repression turned inward upon itself.