“Bullets and machine guns capable of daunting Duvalier do not exist. They cannot touch me.... I am already an immaterial being. No foreigner is going to tell me what to do!” (Papa Doc Duvalier)

The island of Hispaniola is the second largest island in the Antilles chain behind Cuba, and host to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti covering the western third of the island, is a French-speaking territory, while the Dominican Republic, which occupies the other two thirds, is a Spanish-speaking territory. The Dominican Republic, although classified as a developing nation, has never been struck to the same degree by the malaise of poverty, corruption of its neighbor, languishing in the lower 10 percent of nations ahead only of some of the most conspicuous failed states in Africa. Many historians and analysts have posed the question of why, and the answer seems to lie in Haiti’s uniquely tortured history.

The improbable Haitian Revolution, and in particular the 1804 massacres, lived on to bedevil the West and the process of emancipation in every corner of the slave-owning world, hobbling the progress of the republic and lending substance to calls for a continuation of slavery. During the American Civil War, as the Union closed in on the Confederacy, the specter of the 1804 massacres was regurgitated time and again to rally Southerners to defend their territory and their policies. Southerners insisted that if the door was opened even slightly to admitting blacks into the population of free America, no white man, woman, or child would be safe.

As for Haiti, the potent symbolism of its success in self-emancipation and the establishment of a black republic was not reflected in the forward march of the nation itself. To date, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, and one of the poorest in the world. Numerous government coups have taken place over the years, and insecurity and periodic unrest have been a perpetual blight. Poverty and crime are widespread, and corruption endemic. Besides that, as a weak and impoverished nation, Haiti has been subject to outside interference, both direct and indirect, mainly on the part of the United States, which frequently introduced efforts to destabilize an already unstable political environment, and in the age of the Cold War, to sustain and justify dictatorship in exchange for the nominal loyalty of Haiti in the face of Soviet activities in Cuba.

The 30-year regime of Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, who ruled between 1957 and 1986, was arguably the most repressive in the Western hemisphere. During this period a substantial portion of the Haitian budget was made up of foreign aid, in particular from the United States ($15 million annually), with whom, during the term of President John F. Kennedy, Duvalier had a difficult and often fractious relationship. Millions of dollars of foreign aid was openly appropriated by the Duvalier family, and in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination (which Duvalier claimed was as a result of a curse placed on the president by him), the government of the United States took a pragmatic view of the Duvalier regime as pro-West in the context of the Cold War.

Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier: The Lives and Legacies of Haiti’s Most Notorious Rulers looks at how the father and son duo rose to power, and the results of their tight grip over Haiti.