Duvalier à l'ombre de la guerre froide. Les Dessous de la politique étrangère d'Haïti (1957–1963) by Wien Weibert Arthus, and: Les Grandes dates de l'histoire diplomatique d'Haïti, de la période fondatrice à nos jours by Wien Weibert Arthus (review)

Wien Weibert Arthus, in these two recent works, gives us a global view on Haitian foreign policy and international relations. In Duvalier à l'ombre de la Guerre Froide, he defines his focus in the book's subtitle, Les Dessous de la politique étrangère d'Haïti (1957–1963).¹ His 2017 book Les Grandes dates de l'histoire diplomatique d'Haïti, de la période fondatrice à nos jours provides a compendium of Haitian diplomatic history, a short cut in the form of vignettes, that will prove useful to Haitianists.

The author makes his intent clear, in both works, with a sentiment that unites him to most Haitian scholars before him, by citing Eduardo Galeano in his epigraph: "Vale la pena repetirlo una vez más, para que los sordos escuchen: Haití fue el país fundador de la independencia de América y el primero que derrotó la esclavitud en el mundo. Merece mucho más que la notoriedad nacida de sus desgracias." Haitians have always believed this to be true, a vérité de La Palice, as it were, if few others did or have. Arthus—and Galeano—would argue that Haiti's misfortune, its dysfunction, ses malheurs, are a result, intended and unintended, of domestic and international conflicts. Hence the need for the present texts.

In three parts and fourteen chapters replete with information, Duvalier à l'ombre de la Guerre Froide brought back painful memories from my youth, as I recall each and every situation he described. My childhood, in an intensely political family, was no barrier to knowing. I am both grateful and saddened to be forced to remember what we have suffered, which has marked my life deeply.

My reading of Arthus tells me that a paramount distinction between 1957–1963 and the agitated period of 1934–1957 was that Francois Duvalier's foreign policy was deeply personal.² It was irremediably tied to staying in power: not ideological, not connected to lofty ideals of middle-class rule or to earlier politics of les authentiques, the authenticity of Black power, and the primacy of Haitian culture of President Dumarsais Estimé. That earlier period, 1934–1957, saw the consolidation of elite/upper-class/bourgeois power rendered possible by the United States' Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934. As it turned out, l'occupation, which brought Haiti into its twentieth century, exacerbated the acrimonious relations that had existed between social classes since the state's creation in 1804. Of course, foreign nations contributed, as Arthus's analysis shows, and so did the Roman Catholic hierarchy that favored the upper class, as it did elsewhere in Latin America. France—the former colonial power—was the perennial enemy, as well as the Vatican, the Dominican Republic, and especially the United States: each played their role, as could be predicted, against a marginalized nation-state.

In earlier days, Haitian diplomacy and diplomats, controlled by a Westernizing elite, had to respond to a primary impulse: ne pas faire honte au pays, to not shame the country. In fact, the concept of honte—shame—influences all areas of Haitian culture. That Haitians were right in being leery is illustrated in a statement by France's ambassador to Haiti, when Duvalier eschewed the niceties that hitherto applied: "La conception que le Président de la République [Duvalier] a du pouvoir, diffère assez peu de celle que pouvait avoir un roi nègre du 18ème siècle." Duvalier never quite cared about what...