1980–1981: (The Bennett Clan Takes Over: Ernest Bennett Rides High, Mexican Oil Sold to South Africa, Bennett Corners the Coffee Crop, Michèle’s $100,000 Mon…

1980–1981: (The Bennett Clan Takes Over: Ernest Bennett Rides High, Mexican Oil Sold to South Africa, Bennett Corners the Coffee Crop, Michèle’s $100,000 Monthly Allowance, Simone Ovide Stripped of First Lady Title, Grandmother Clélie Dies, and Only the U.S. Can Save Haiti from Moscow): Every penny was needed. Already cash-strapped from declining tourism and Hurricane Allen’s crop failures, the government was forced to propitiate the cupidity of the newly empowered Bennett clan. Ernest Bennett, once imprisoned by Papa Doc for shady dealings, was riding high — with a finger in every pie, Bennett and his cronies set about siphoning off what few dollars were left. Oil provided at concessionary prices by Mexico to help Haiti was sold to petroleum-starved South Africa; only an astute guess by Interpol kept the $7 million in profits from going into Bennett’s pocket. Haiti Air, consisting of a 727 wet-leased from Aer Lingus, did a thriving freight and passenger business shuttling between Port-au-Prince and Miami, mysteriously exempt from export taxes that formed the backbone of government revenue. Bennett managed to corner what was left after Hurricane Allen of the coffee crop, buying it cheap from desperate cultivators to hold until world prices recovered — he alone had the credit to do so. In the palace, Michèle Duvalier managed routinely to overspend her $100,000-a-month allowance; palace officials sought to re-package her, teaching the finer points of makeup, decorum, and manners, observed in glacial silence by Simone Ovide, who was forced on all public occasions to share top billing with her new daughter-in-law. The first lady was finding the house in Canapé Vert where her octogenarian mother lived increasingly to her liking. Michèle began issuing ever-lengthening lists of Duvalierist stalwarts denied entry to the palace; deeply unhappy, Simone even refused to eat until coaxed into doing so by her mother. In the conflict Michèle gave no quarter — various members of the Ovide clan, long used to roaming the corridors of power, found themselves keeping company with radicals such as Sylvio Claude on the northbound flight to Miami. Michèle wanted to be not only First Lady in fact but in title; having engineered repeated public snubs to François Duvalier’s widow, she badgered the president until the deputies announced that henceforth the president’s wife would be First Lady and his mother First Lady of the Revolution. The final blow for Simone Ovide was the death of her mother Clélie, a month later — Jean-Claude’s grandmother had refused to give her blessing to the Bennett union. In Washington, Haiti’s new ambassador Georges Léger — grandson of the great lawyer — was finding it heavy going as an increasingly skeptical liberal group on Capitol Hill made common cause with Southern conservatives in demanding conditions on Haitian aid. Haiti was becoming a domestic policy issue for Americans, including sizeable numbers of naturalized Haitians and their children. Agreement with the U.S. gave consolation in the wake of a December Socialist victory in France — Mitterrand roundly condemned the Duvalier government’s rule as catastrophic for Haiti. Veteran Édouard Francisque, leading the Haitian delegation to Washington, announced that they had the feeling that the United States would really cooperate with Haiti, and pushed the Reagan administration’s hot button: only the U.S. can save Haiti from Moscow.