1975–1976: (The Odd Stasis, the La Tortue Bribe for Simone’s Widows and Orphans Fund, Jimmy Carter’s Alarming Candidacy, Jack Anderson’s Articles, Gasner Ray…

1975–1976: (The Odd Stasis, the La Tortue Bribe for Simone’s Widows and Orphans Fund, Jimmy Carter’s Alarming Candidacy, Jack Anderson’s Articles, Gasner Raymond Disappears, and the Christmas Amnesty Timed to the American Election): Still, with new roads open to the Cap and the South, foreign aid flowing, tourists pouring in, and generally benign press treatment, those with critical views were dismissed as Cassandras. Life was good for Duvalier and those around him — Simone Duvalier placated the dinosaurs, yet enough liberalization was under way to satisfy Haiti’s international patrons, producing an odd kind of stasis that permitted Jean-Claude to delegate many tiresome chores of ruling to an increasingly light-skinned and young group seasoned here and there by holdovers from his father’s rule. The aptly named Paul Blanchet, one of the most durable dinosaurs though certainly not a noir, found himself without portfolio for the first time as a cabinet shuffle on the eve of the president’s fifth anniversary in office removed him as interior minister. One or two tremors briefly interrupted Port-au-Prince’s agreeable torpor as executives from a Dallas real estate firm testified before the U.S. Senate about the efforts of a small black man who resembled a grade-B Hollywood gangster to extract a $200,000 bribe for the widows and orphans fund of the president in return for permission to proceed with a development scheme for La Tortue — the widow and orphan, the executive revealed, were Simone Duvalier and her son. Disquieting rumblings began to be heard from Washington as the summer of 1976 turned to fall: keen observers of the U.S. political scene, the government watched Jimmy Carter’s candidacy with alarm, reminiscent as he seemed of John Kennedy. Two widely disseminated Jack Anderson articles appearing immediately after the Democratic convention lambasted both the amount of U.S. aid to Haiti and its uses, and revealed that the regime — shades of Hurricane Flora in 1960 — was refusing donations of used clothing on sanitation grounds for the drought-stricken Northwest, by then suffering through a second consecutive year in which the rains had failed. The government had not helped its international image with the July disappearance of Gasner Raymond, a crusading young journalist who had pushed the regime’s tolerance of limited press freedom to its limits with his investigation of labor unrest. With an eye to the north, Duvalier decreed his Christmas amnesty earlier than usual — in early October — announcing that some 261 prisoners would be released on November 17, a few days after the American presidential elections; some were political, the regime announced, prudently declining to give specific figures, as even the innumerate were finding it increasingly difficult to square periodic releases with the insistence that no political prisoners were held.