1961: (Duvalierville: Cambronne’s Shakedown, the Cockpit as Impressive as the Coliseum, Soulouque’s Tollbooths Reborn, and the Canceled Check Endorsed by the…

1961: (Duvalierville: Cambronne’s Shakedown, the Cockpit as Impressive as the Coliseum, Soulouque’s Tollbooths Reborn, and the Canceled Check Endorsed by the Mistress): The ultimate institutionalization of the business shakedown came in early 1961 with the launching, under sponsorship of Luckner Cambronne, of a nationwide Mouvement de Rénovation Nationale. It was Cambronne who told the legislature that a good Duvalierist is ready to kill his children, or children to kill their parents. The project most closely associated with the MRN was the building of Duvalierville, a pilot city adjacent to Cabaret — just as 157 years earlier Marchand had been renamed Dessalines. After four years of building, Graham Greene remembered the place: on the flat shoddy plain between the hills and the sea a few white one-room boxes had been constructed, a cement playground, and an enormous cockpit which among the houses looked as impressive as the Coliseum, standing together in a bowl of dust. As a fund-raising device, Duvalierville was more impressive: not only businessmen but government employees, schoolchildren, the military, and legislators were solicited for monthly contributions — Cambronne set $5,000 apiece as the starting price in Port-au-Prince business circles, with $1,000 in the provinces. One contributor found on his canceled check the endorsement of Cambronne’s mistress. Like Soulouque’s zinglins before them, tonton macoutes put up tollbooths on the highway at Cabaret to help finance Duvalierville. The collection effort, even against foreigners, was merciless — when Britain’s ambassador Gerard Corley-Smith protested maltreatment of foreigners, he was summarily expelled, ostensibly for having uttered the still unutterable phrase tonton macoute in the teeth of the macoute Foreign Minister.