1967: (Six O’Clock Mass: Raymond Alcide Joseph, Radio Vonvon, the Coalition Haïtienne, the Voice of America’s Discontinued Creole Broadcasts, and Duvalier Ja…

1967: (Six O’Clock Mass: Raymond Alcide Joseph, Radio Vonvon, the Coalition Haïtienne, the Voice of America’s Discontinued Creole Broadcasts, and Duvalier Jams Vonvon but Never Radio Havana): One voice to which Duvalier and thousands of his subjects listened more attentively than any diplomatic protest originated in New York. There, at six in the morning as dawn struck the Caribbean, a young Haitian journalist named Raymond Alcide Joseph would sip strong coffee in the Madison Avenue studio of Station WRUL and broadcast highly informed Haitian news briefs interspersed with sharp jabs at Duvalier and his men. Joseph was the voice and intellectual driving force of the Coalition Haïtienne, a moderate exile group mainly supported by Paul Magloire, which eschewed filibustering and violence — not for them the 1966 Florida Keys fiasco of Operation Nassau, when CBS reporters handed out money and wrote the script while père Georges and Cuban gunrunner Rolando Masferrer were restrained by federal agents from a maladroit invasion attempt on CBS Evening News, an affair whose initial press account fittingly appeared in Variety. No Haitian with a transistor would miss what they called Six O’Clock Mass — broadcast in Creole, Joseph’s program was a hairshirt for Duvalier. Since the Voice of America had on White House instructions discontinued its Creole broadcasts, Radio Vonvon — vonvon meaning flying beetle, Joseph’s signature — for over three years provided the only competition for René Depestre’s two daily hours of Creole over Radio Havana. Using jamming equipment whose export was mysteriously licensed by the U.S. Government, Duvalier worked hard to jam Vonvon but never Radio Havana — a strategic asymmetry that revealed the regime’s true calculus of threat: the moderate exile journalist broadcasting facts in Creole was more dangerous than Havana’s revolutionary propaganda, because Joseph spoke to the Haitian present while Depestre spoke of a Caribbean future, and Duvalier understood that the regime’s most lethal enemy was not ideology but information.