1971, April 21: (Riding the Tiger: No One Thought He Would Last, the Christophe Precedent, the Regents Who Feared Each Other, Constant’s Failure to Salute, a…

1971, April 21: (Riding the Tiger: No One Thought He Would Last, the Christophe Precedent, the Regents Who Feared Each Other, Constant’s Failure to Salute, and Désinor Stripped for Doubting a Nineteen-Year-Old): No one thought he would last. Emerging groggily from the political stupor into which they had been willed by the master boko, Haiti’s elite — both noir and jaune — began to indulge in the kind of political speculation long proscribed under penalties so draconian that discretion had become instinct. It was not a question of if, most agreed, but rather when Jean-Claude Duvalier would be ousted. The only other Haitian leader audacious enough to publicly anoint an heir had been King Henry Christophe, and his son had been bayoneted and left to rot on a Cap Henry dunghill within twenty-four hours of the king’s death. The regents Duvalier père had appointed — a summons from any one of whom would have induced fear in all save the bravest — concentrated their efforts disparately and without coordination, for Papa Doc had discouraged any coordination below the top of the pyramid. Popular opinion did not matter. Those in the inner circle imprudent enough to show anything less than heartfelt approval of the succession plans had been purged ruthlessly, demonstrating for the last time Duvalier’s maxim that gratitude was cowardice. Constant, who had failed to salute Jean-Claude on Armed Forces Day the preceding November, had been replaced as chief of staff by the more obliging Claude Raymond. Clovis Désinor, too, had voiced misgivings about entrusting the Duvalierist Revolution to a nineteen-year-old and found himself stripped abruptly of his post as Minister of Finance. The opening of the Jean-Claude era — a political class that unanimously predicted the boy’s fall yet lacked the institutional capacity or collective will to bring it about, regents who feared each other more than they feared the teenager they were supposed to guide, and a succession whose only historical precedent had ended in regicide — established from the first hour the structural paradox that would define the next fifteen years: a regime too weak to govern yet too entrenched to overthrow, sustained not by the strength of its new president but by the atomization of every force that might have replaced him.