1975: (The Stamp Fraud Show Trial, the Drought, the $3–5 Million Empty Mausoleum, and the U.S.

1975: (The Stamp Fraud Show Trial, the Drought, the $3–5 Million Empty Mausoleum, and the U.S. Embassy’s Proprietary Claim on the President: He’s Mine): Word of the stamp fraud began to leak out and a show trial was held which purported to identify and punish the malefactors. Port-au-Prince was riveted by the process and wondered how close to the palace prosecutorial zeal would take the investigators — none of the principal culprits were fingered, and those who actually did time were later rewarded for their silence. One factor in the decision to lift the curtain on the affair was a severe drought taking its toll on already dwindling agricultural exports such as coffee and sugar and causing failures of the rice and corn harvests; the government, more dependent than ever on its international benefactors, was forced to listen to advice from various foreign chancelleries. Some foreign missions had inserted themselves deep into the running of the government — just how proprietary official Washington was about its links to the Palais was starkly illustrated to one young Foreign Service officer posted to Haiti, the third generation in his family to have served there either in the Marines or the diplomatic corps. In his first week he was summoned by a senior official in the embassy who minced no words: I know you knew the president when he was a boy — you are not to contact him or approach him in any way — he’s mine. In a 1975 meeting with one of the authors, Jean-Claude Duvalier asked after this individual and his brothers by name and, looking puzzled and a bit hurt, said he had never gotten in touch, but I know he’s here. That same year, drought — aside from showing the world pictures of swollen-bellied children suffering from malnutrition, with an estimated seventy-five percent of school-age children affected to some degree — also reduced electricity generated by Péligre; oil-powered generators partially filled the gap, but the return of occasional blackouts reminded observers how thin the veneer of prosperity was. At odds with the image of drought and poverty was an odd new subterranean structure with volcano-like roof vents one block from the Palais, finished in mid-1975 at a reported cost of between three and five million dollars. Intended as a mausoleum for Papa Doc, it sat empty for months, generating speculation about the palace’s reasons for not wanting to disturb the old man’s remains — some said he had never been buried in the cemetery at all, that his corpse was kept in the palace in the event a quick exit was required by the living. Sitting unused in a city teeming with humanity, it provided ironic commentary on the regime’s claims about the economic miracles of Duvalierism. One businessman told the New York Times, not for attribution of course — liberalization had its limits — that a few people were making a lot of money, but very little spilled over to the masses, and you couldn’t really talk about economic recovery.