1977, April 22 – August 16: (Jean-Claudism Born, the Three-Year Drought, Haiti’s Dirt Ring in the Blue Caribbean, the Régie du Tabac as Private Piggy Bank, L…

1977, April 22 – August 16: (Jean-Claudism Born, the Three-Year Drought, Haiti’s Dirt Ring in the Blue Caribbean, the Régie du Tabac as Private Piggy Bank, Le Monde’s Blank Check Series, Rigaud’s Daring Escape from Fort Dimanche, Ambassador Young Blasts Haiti’s Human Rights, and the First Boat People in the New York Times): Even as the palace residents sought otherworldly help in their power struggles, the gods continued to frown on Haiti’s Northwest — by 1977 baking in a third year of drought. Péligre’s catch basins were at their lowest level in twenty years, forcing EDH to cut power in Port-au-Prince to five hours a day. Observers worried that permanent climate change had been wrought by progressive deforestation, as precious moisture-retaining soil washed into the sea — Haiti, remarked one observer, had a big brown dirt mark around it in the blue Caribbean, like a dirt ring in a bathtub, the topsoil going to sea. Into the breach poured aid organizations, but their penetration of all levels of Haitian society, while buying temporary peace, mortgaged even further the autonomy François Duvalier had so zealously guarded. High on the international hit list was the Régie du Tabac, that piece of fiscal flypaper to which a portion of all revenues seemed to adhere and then disappear; despite promises of reform and fiscalization made as early as 1971, the Duvaliers continued to operate it as their private piggy bank. Even the French expressed impatience with a regime collecting $12 million a year in taxes earmarked for the president’s discretionary fund; one World Bank report announced that approximately half of the 1975 government revenues of $95 million were credited to special accounts whose purposes were unclear; a Le Monde series entitled Blank Check for Haiti lashed out at administrative carelessness, incompetence, peculation, and the reliance on torture. On the sixth anniversary of his father’s death, April 22, Jean-Claude startled the country by abandoning the stuffy set pieces prepared for him and addressing the nation in Creole, announcing the birth of a new ideology — Jean-Claudism — whose goal was to complement the political liberation of the masses achieved under his father with economic progress; in one sense his mission was already accomplished, as Haiti’s political and economic maturation were in no danger of outpacing one another — both were in an appalling state. A foreign agricultural expert observed that you could give money to everyone in Haiti to buy food and some would come home empty-handed, for the country’s food production was now insufficient to feed its masses — underlining that statement was the stark fact that Haiti, which in the eighteenth century had provided all of France’s sugar and much of that needed by the rest of Europe, was now forced to import sugar for domestic needs. Lucien Rigaud, instrumental in opening the U.S. aid spigot three years earlier, had by 1977 himself fallen prey to the system he had helped bolster — imprisoned on a trumped-up murder charge, he was luckier than most, with bribes securing a better diet, and in early 1977 he obtained a temporary transfer to the General Hospital prison wing, where using drug-laced soft drinks and bribes supplied by his Swiss wife, he managed a daring escape and bolted for the Mexican embassy, taking with him documents related to the projects and individuals whose fortunes he had helped advance. Ambassador Isham gave a valedictory press conference on July 6 bemoaning the gulf between foreign perceptions and reality; his replacement, William Jones — Black, forty-nine, a career diplomat from UNESCO in Paris — was indeed unlikely to be another Clinton Knox. Andrew Young, the Carter administration’s UN ambassador and human rights tribune, arrived in Port-au-Prince on August 16 as part of a hemispheric tour; the government launched what was dubbed Operation Bluff — more prisoners freed, the press screws loosened — but Young, after spending his first night on Haitian soil with a Baptist preacher, blasted Haiti’s human rights record at a candid press conference, declaring that the imprisonment of voices of dissent and denial of the most fundamental due process could no longer be tolerated. That same morning, the New York Times carried an image destined to become familiar to the world but then novel: a rickety wooden sailboat crammed to the gunwales with Haitian refugees being towed by the Coast Guard into Miami — sixty-one people at sea for a month. Impatient with diplomacy, the boat people of Haiti had begun turning up, unbidden and unwelcome, on America’s shores.