Posted on 10/04/2014 10:43:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Jean-Claude-Duvalier, the self-proclaimed "president for life" of Haiti whose corrupt and brutal regime sparked a popular uprising that sent him into a 25-year exile, died Saturday of a heart attack, his attorney said.
Reynold George said the 63-year-old ex-leader died at his home.
Duvalier, looking somewhat frail, made a surprise return to Haiti in 2011, allowing victims of his regime to pursue legal claims against him and prompting some old allies to rally around him. Neither side gained much support, and the once-feared dictator known as "Baby Doc" spent his late years in relative obscurity in the leafy hills above the Haitian capital.
Duvalier was the son of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, a medical doctor-turned-dictator who promoted "Noirisme," a movement that sought to highlight Haiti's African roots over its European ones while uniting the black majority against a mulatto elite in a country divided by class and color.
The regimes of both leaders tortured and killed political opponents and relied on a dreaded civilian militia known as the Tonton Macoutes.
In 1971, Francois Duvalier suddenly died of an illness and named his son to succeed him. At 19, Jean-Claude Duvalier became the world's youngest president.
The son was regarded as a lackluster student at a prestigious private Catholic school in the capital but his teachers gave him passing grades anyway to avoid fury from the National Palace, according to "Written in Blood" a history of the country by Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl.
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The preferred phrase among blacks (privately) is “high yellow”.
We knew some of his classmates who said that his nicknames in high school were tete-mato (hammer head) and tete-pannye (basket head).
@wardaddy...interesting that you knew Chantal!
We were there in the early 80's (including the time of his departure). Haitians would tell us that they genuinely loved Jean Claude as he was not "as brutal" as Francois, despite leaving the Tonton Macouttes in-place to terrorize and extort the people.
It wasn't until after he married Michelle and the overwhelming financial rape of the people as a whole that he lost the favor of all classes of Haitians...well, except those who had their hands in the till..
End of an error.
And where customs was run by the Tonton Macouts.
I thought he died 30 years ago.
Except I would imagine that the difference between classes wasn't so much color as the extent to which western education and values had penetrated.
I do know that Papa Doc and the tonton macoute were famously involved in voodoo. And he rather famously was a mass murderer in his own right.
Most blacks in America are actually mulatto. The gene mixing started even before the African slaves got off the ships, and continued for over a hundred years, afterwards.
Maybe back in my grandparents' time. In my lifetime, the preferred phrase has always been, 'light skinned'.
Well, it is zombie country --
"Hey, Papa Doc, now that you've died, what are you going to do?"
"Hmmmmmm, I suppose I will name my son to succeed me."
"Where his soul's gone, or how it fares, nobody knows, and nobody cares."
Unfortunately, they present the Communists/Castroites as the saviors of Haiti (as I recall, James Earl Jones plays a Communist doctor). That was always Graham Greene’s preeminent flaw.
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