President for Life

We’d been working hard laying the foundations for the new sugar mill over the summer. It was still the rainy season, and an occasional cloudburst would flood the whole site, obscuring the massive grade beams we’d installed.
It seemed that in Haiti the 22nd of every month was some sort of holiday. Haitian patriot Jean-Jacques Dessalines named himself Emperor of Haiti (in 1804) on September 22, so that week we finally got a day off. We still had to go to the mill site in the morning, to get a few things ready for the coming week. The place was never deserted. There were many people who lived nearby, and the whole site was open to anyone who wanted to walk in.

We had our own watchman, the local "mayor," Romer Destiné, who walked around with a machete. Although he usually had a broad grin on his face, his appearance was intimidating because his face was hideously disfigured with pockmarks from a bout with smallpox when he was younger. It was rumored that earlier that year he had beheaded a man who was stealing gasoline, but the corpus dilecti had been removed before sunup. Whether this was an apocryphal tale spread by Romer himself to enhance his reputation or something that had actually happened I never found out. As Doug Gaines used to say, "You can hear anything you want to hear in Haiti."

Beside Jim O’Brien and me the only other person from our company at the site that morning was a mechanic who had been sent out from Port-au-Prince to work of some of the equipment. He was a Korean fellow by the name of Yi. He was a man of few words, but I was told he was actually from North Korea, that he’d been in their military and had escaped to the south while on some kind of offshore military expedition. You could tell he’d had a hard life, and that he was one tough son of a bitch.

Toward the end of the summer a strange figure had appeared at the job site from time to time, standing silently with his back to a building, watching. He was large, more than six feet tall, and well-dressed. In spite of the tropical heat he wore a three-piece suit, a black fedora and dark sunglasses. He carried a small square leather case, and didn’t speak to anyone. He was a member of "Duvalier’s dreaded secret police," a tonton macoute. (More on this subject later.) I thought it was strange that this morning, when there were very few people around, he was back.

Our office was on a slight hill where you could see the approach to the site. I saw Yi squinting in the distance. Then he said, "Oh, no. Oh, no. Big s–t coming! No place for me! I go! I go!" and he disappeared toward the area where we kept the equipment. In the distance was a caravan of vehicles approaching at high speed, led by something that is now more commonplace but at the time the first one I had ever seen, a white Mercedes SUV.

Taking a cue from Yi, I moved out of sight between two of the cinder block buildings. I decided to prepare myself for the coming excitement by taking a leak against one of the walls. To my surprise I looked up and there was the white Mercedes stopped in the space between the two buildings. A light-skinned woman was staring at me. At the wheel of the SUV was a chubby guy in a khaki shirt and trousers. It was Michelle Bennet Duvalier and her husband, Président à Vie de la Republique, Jean-Claude Duvalier himself. Uh-oh.

I zipped up hurriedly and walked around one of the buildings to watch the entourage. There were guys in military uniforms, business suits, and even a couple of what appeared to be clergymen. Amid much hoopla and discussion they began to inspect the site. Jim O’Brien walked over and shook hands with the president. Overall, despite the stories we had heard, he did not seem to exude evil, but gave the impression that under different circumstances he might actually have been a decent sort. (Some portray Michelle as an eager Jezebel to Jean-Claude’s reluctant Ahab, thus the source of his undoing). But as he viewed the scope of our work, he did not seem happy. Apparently he had been led to believe that progress on the project had advanced far more than it actually had. He came there expecting to see a sugar mill capable of full production within a matter of months. Instead he was treated to the bleak sight of a few rebars sticking up out of the mud.
Right after that visit things changed. We were authorized to hire more people, and to bring in several more Americans with the skills needed to put the project into high gear. The government finance people were ordered to cut loose more funds. And indeed within a couple of days one of the Ministers did deliver the first installment: a briefcase full of freshly printed Haitian gourdes.
Next installment: "The Wild West."

Nap Boule! Passing the Test

Once again we woke up in the dark and at breakneck speed headed down the hill into Port-au-Prince for the first real day of work. I met the carpenters I’d be working with, all of whose names seemed totally incomprehensible to me at the time. I tried to write them down. Just recently I discovered an old tattered notebook I’d tucked away. In it was the simplified list I’d made that day: Stripe Shirt, Green Cap, Red Hard Hat, Cowboy Hat, Blue Cap, Straw Hat, and Blue Shirt, and so on. And of course there was the interpreter, Bobby MacBean, an impish fellow in his fifties who had lost all his teeth along the way. The men called him S.D.N. They said it stood for sans dents net, "completely without teeth."

Eventually I mastered all their names, however difficult they seemed at first. This was something that stood us in good stead months later, when some serious labor problems developed.

An excavation crew had already dug out the spaces for the grade beams of the huge main building for the sugar mill equipment. Concrete workers had laid down a "mud slab" of low grade concrete as a base on which to set the reinforcing steel.

I discovered that since Haiti is theoretically prone to earthquakes, the Haitian government had ordered the specifications for the building to be increased for that possibility. It was obvious that a tremendous amount of steel and concrete would be needed to build this thing. And as might be expected, the concrete and steel were to be supplied by companies connected to the Haitian government.

Our job was to set up the forms for the first run of grade beam. That was simple enough. We had plywood and 2 x 4's, So far, so good. Then I found out that all the blueprints were in the metric system. So a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood would measure 122 x 244 centimeters, or close to it. We set to work to build some forms.

MacBean was helpful getting the message across, and the men seemed to know what they were doing. I wondered at one point how they felt about having a foreigner telling them what to do. I was soon to find out.

I’d basically been just working alongside them, as we built a dozen or so forms, supervising the cutting of the 2 x 4's in an economic manner, and showing them to set them at 40 centimeters on center, more or less. A couple of them seemed to be grumbling about something. Then more of them joined in and I noticed that they were looking over at me. I asked MacBean what was going on. He said, "Oh, Boss, you got a problem now. The say the way this work, you the big s–t, and they the n----rs!"

Hoo-boy, the defining moment of any job: the moment that will determine how things will go with your co-workers from then on out, a fork in the road leading to heaven or hell. I prayed for the right words. Suddenly I remembered the story of Nehemiah rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem. The murmuring stopped, and the crew waited for my reply.

"Tell them this," I said. "If any one of them can show me that he knows more about building a building like this than I do, then he can show us how to do it, and I’ll be one of the laborers. No problem." They seemed satisfied with my answer, and the crisis passed.

One other thing happened that increased my "props" with that crew, and I still don’t completely understand how it happened. A couple of them (Red Hard Hat and Straw Hat–wow, I just remembered their real names: Yves Caillot and Andre Decaille) were very large men, and a couple of years older than I was. Now it’s a psychological fact that we humans, no matter what our condition, feel superior in some way to the majority of the people we meet, even if it’s through a contrived comparison of our own devising. I noticed that Andre Decaille was about to replace a circular saw blade the wrong way, and pointed it out. He turned to the others, and although I couldn’t understand him at the time, you could tell he was probably saying I was just about the dumbest son-of-a-b---h he’d ever met. I stood back and watched.

To prove his point, he picked up a piece of wood, lifted the saw with a flourish, and started to cut. Of course the blade was in backward. What happened next was something I’d never seen before, or since for that matter. The blade heated up and the teeth melted right before our eyes. He stopped the saw. The teeth had extruded out into elongated points with a gob of molten metal on the end.

I don’t know where the company got those saw blades. When installed properly they seemed to work fine. I had never seen a piece of steel melt from the mere friction of running it through soft wood. I shook my head in wonderment and moved on to something else.

I’m sure Andre must have thought that I’d worked some voodoo on the blade just to prove a point. Even though he turned out to be one of our best workers, he never had much to say after that day.

For an informative look at Haitian customs and religion, check this out.

Things continued smoothly for the rest of the summer. Although we were working six 12 hour days per week, I eventually got to know some of the locals. Most of the grade beams for the main building were now in place. We’d actually done a great deal of work, although little of it showed, because most of it was below ground level.

The job site was in a rural area, and unfenced, so there were always people we didn’t know on the periphery. Some of these were job seekers, wives of the men, or people trying to sell things. Toward the end of one week a strange figure appeared several times, each time standing silently with his back to a building, watching. He was a large man, over six feet tall, and well-dressed. In spite of the heat he was wearing a gray three-piece suit, a black hat and dark glasses. He carried a black leather case, and didn’t speak to anyone.

We were about to get a visitor.

More Haiti: Nou Komanse Travay -- We Start Work

After a scant three hours sleep, five o’clock came around fast. It was still dark, but it was time to get on the road. The Ford pickup was out of alignment, due to a bent tie rod from the accident the night before, but Jim O’Brien still drove like a madman down the narrow, twisting mountain road. It was important to get to the job on time, hopefully before Doug got there.

On the way down I got a fleeting glimpse of our new environment, signs in French and Creole, women walking downhill from the mountains to market with enormous, artfully arranged baskets of vegetables carried on their heads.

We passed though the upscale suburb of Petionville, past the offices of the Voluntaires pour la Securite National (the Tontons Macoutes), and into Port-au-Prince itself. The city was already awake and bustling, despite the early hour. Once downtown, we headed west through the coastal settlements called Carrefour, where Wirkus’ contingent of Marines had come ashore sixty years before. The road was large enough for three vehicles to drive abreast, but sometimes there seemed to be two lanes going in one direction, then two lanes in the other direction, with traffic dodging handcarts and pedestrians in what seemed a haphazard pattern.

After a while we were outside the built-up areas and into the countryside. We passed what looked like an abandoned factory. Jim said it was an uncompleted sugar mill started by Cubans some time before. At length we left the paved highway, and went on a dirt road for a few miles toward the small village of Darbonne. Sugar cane was growing on both sides of the road.

At the end of the road was the job site, several acres that had been bulldozed flat, exposing the river bed rock and gravel that underlay the whole plain where the mill was to be located. On a small hill overlooking the site was our "office," a small cinder block building with a tin roof. Outside a silver Peugeot 504 was parked. Doug was already there. Nearby there was a crowd of about 200 men, so many that they kicked up a cloud of dust as they headed toward the office. We parked and hurried inside, just before they caught up with us.

"Gentlemen, what kept you?" said Doug, spitting Skoal juice into a paper cup. Apparently word had gotten out that we were stepping up construction activities, and that we would be hiring more people. Word travels fast in Haiti, even without the advent of modern communication. It’s said that when the revolution that led to Haitian independence broke out on the northern peninsula in 1791, the message to revolt-- spread by word of mouth, conch horn, and drum-- reached the southern peninsula within twenty-four hours, quick enough to make Paul Revere look like a slowpoke. By this time the office was surrounded by people. I can even remember one man who pressed his face against the office’s one window, with one eyeball looking in, as if that act would guarantee him a job ahead of the others.

Amid the chaos we made arrangements for the welders on the job to straighten out the tie rod on the Ford. (They fixed it in an hour’s time–no lack of talent there!) Little by little we managed to sort out the prospective job applicants, arranging them into several groups according to the skills that they claimed to have. We already had a steel foreman, and we let him pick out his crew. We had a surveyor, who was told to hire a few helpers. We had a head mason, and he also had his crew lined up. A few of the applicants actually brought tools–most of these were hired as carpenters.

All of these people were actually going to be signed on as "temporary" workers, employed by our company’s Haitian counterpart. (This "temporary" designation was something that was going to cause trouble later. In most of the world, designation as an employee means far more than the casual, duration-of-the-job relationship that was common in the construction industry back home.)

There was another group of carpenters who had come down from Cap Haitien in the north. Our Haitian partners’ company set the rate of pay for the workers. Laborers would get $3 per day, for example, and carpenters $5 or $6, depending on their skills. The Cap Haitien men wanted at least $15 per day, and acted as an organized unit. Doug explained that he wasn’t authorized to pay that much. "No way, fella!" The Cap Haitien men stood their ground, and said that was their price, that they were worth it, and that if we wouldn’t pay them that much, then they were leaving. People from the Cap, I found out, have a reputation for being hardheaded, especially among the people in the south. O’Brien surmised later that we should have hired them, (the situation being a little like the story in the book of Judges about Gideon’s winnowing down his forces from 32,000 to 300 –quality over quantity). But the company wouldn’t pay more than the "going rate," so they left en masse.

We also hired a few who had references as equipment operators, a couple who were electricians, a few specialized helpers, including one guy whose nickname was "Easy Money" as a general factotum. The rest were signed up as laborers. Before the day was over, O’Brien also hired a man who had been pestering him for weeks, an older guy who was originally from Jamaica and fluent in English, with the improbable name of Bobby MacBean. MacBean was to be my assistant and interpreter.

Later in the day Doug had me ride with him into Port-au-Prince to meet the people at our Haitian partners’ offices, and to fill out some paperwork. As we dodged through the traffic of Carrefour, he commented on the merits of the occasional female form ("Look at the ass on that one!"), occasionally spitting tobacco juice out the window, and offering me a drink of "sipping rum" from a bottle he kept in the glove box of the Peugeot. I never knew either Doug or O’Brien to be affected by what normal people would call a hangover. And both of them seemed capable of going for days without normal amounts of sleep, or food. It was apparent that I had left one Marathon for another.

Next: We start to build

On Arrive en Haiti

I called Jim O’Brien in Haiti. The connection was bad, and the telephone call cost $22 (and this was in 1981!) I learned that the only way to call out of Haiti was to call collect. If the calls weren’t billed to an outside party, Ma Bell would have no way of collecting their share from the Haitian TPTC, Travaux Publics, Transports et Communications, a government monopoly. Even if they did pay, the check would be written on a Haitian bank, and the payment made in Haitian gourdes, which, then as now, was not the world's most negotiable currency. Jim said to get a one-way ticket to Port-au-Prince, and that if everything went according to plan, the company would reimburse me. I had only a little more than $300 left, and that ticket cost me $304. That night I had a vivid dream in which I pictured the place where I would be living and some of the things that would happen the first day. Still, it seemed like such a wild-eyed caper that I wasn’t sure what I had agreed to. There was a sense of unreality about the whole thing. Was this really happening?

The next day the phone rang. It was Mindy, Doug Gaines’s daughter, calling from Marathon. "Doug wants you to come up here and pick up a Schmidt hammer to take to Haiti tomorrow." A Schmidt hammer is a gadget used to test the hardness of concrete. Apparently this was really happening. (I found out later that Mindy was definitely a "chip off the old block.")

O’Brien called again. Another $22. "Forget the Schmidt hammer. But pick up two or three cans of Skoal snuff for Doug, and bring them with you." I told him when the plane was supposed to get into Haiti, and he said he would be at the airport.

Jim was at the airport as promised, along with a good ole boy from Greensboro, Horace Rogers. Somewhere I have a picture of my arrival, coming across the steaming tarmac wearing a pair of tennis shoes, a polyester sport coat I had bought at Eagle Army Navy Discount for about $10, carrying a tennis racket and snorkel equipment under one arm, and a few things in my father’s WW II army knapsack in the other. Horace told me later that I looked like the damnedest fool he had ever seen. "This guy’s coming here to work?" he said.

"He, who travels light, travels best," I had always thought, tennis racquet and dive gear to the contrary.

Jim and I went up to a fancy hotel on a mountainside overlooking the city to have dinner. The opulence and cool mountain air were in stark contrast to the slums and heat of the lower elevations. On the walls were pictures of celebrities who had dined there over the years. The only ones I can remember were Leonard Bernstein and Dick Nixon. We had a few drinks. Jim, being an Irishman, was known to enjoy a libation or two. Or three. The dinner was roast guinea hen, a Haitian specialty. It’s all one shade of meat, not dark and white like a chicken or turkey, more like a pheasant.

After we ate, we drove higher up into the mountains. Doug had decided that the only proper place to live was high above Port-au-Prince, and had rented an impressive multi-bedroom house from a prominent Haitian architect. As it turned out, he was right, not so much as to live among the Elite, but because almost all the Americans who lived near the coast got malaria. The house where we would be staying was a little more humble, a short distance away. When we got to the turnoff to our place, I noticed it was just as I had pictured it in the dream a few days before, right down to the little borlette booth at the corner. (Borlette is a Haitian lottery game, similar to bolita in Key West, or boledo in Belize. In some parts of Haiti every third enterprise seemed to be a borlette house. I have noticed that the poorer the country, the more gambling seems to be part of the culture.)

As soon as we got to the house and stashed my few belongings, the telephone rang. It was Doug. He wanted his Skoal. We had been summoned to the throne.

Doug was there alone, with a glass of rum liqueur in his hand. He was short and feisty, with a definite Napoleonic air about him. Smiling but ready to fight at any minute. I had met him once before, so I seemed vaguely familiar.

Over his lifetime Doug had both made and lost considerable amounts of money. A few years earlier he’d run afoul of the environmentalists in the Keys, when he had bulldozed a great area of protected mangroves on Grassy Key. Subsequently he had gone bankrupt. Shortly afterward he had gone to the retail fish market connected to the seafood producer I had been working for, and bought a huge amount of lobster tails and stone crab claws for some big shots he was entertaining. The bill came to about $600 in today’s money. "Put it on my tab," he said, "I’m Doug Gaines!" and walked out. When we sent him an invoice, we received a notice from bankruptcy court, saying we’d have to get in line, so to speak. I wrote him a letter saying, "Since you were already in bankruptcy when you bought the fish, unless you want to rip off a simple fish house, don’t you think you’d better pay it?" He came in and paid it. Then he came into the office to see me, "I just wanted to shake hands with the son-of-a-bitch who wrote that letter!" Of course when I reminded him later about how we met, he had conveniently forgotten the episode.

He seemed delighted to get the cans of Skoal, however, and he treated us to a few more rum drinks. (This sugary liqueur was called Barbancourt, after the famous Haitian rum manufacturer, but was in fact produced by another company, owned by an old German perfumist who had married a distant relative of the original Barbancourts. Through some quirk of Haitian law they were allowed to use the same name. His products were the basic hootch, mixed with plain sugar plus a variety of artificial flavors he had learned to produce in the perfume business. They came in dozens of varieties, e.g., lemon, lime, coconut, cocoa, coffee, hibiscus, peach, papaya, and so on.) Doug talked about his heyday in Marathon and the crowd at the Buccaneer Lodge, what they did, how he’d play backgammon for $10,000 a hand with his buddy Congressman Gallagher and other major players of the era. We left about midnight, thoroughly "wasted." We were expected on the job, about thirty miles away, at 6:30 sharp.

Jim headed his pickup truck down the steep, curvy road from Doug’s place. There was a heavy dew on the road surface, and the truck was light in the rear end. We fishtailed, and he lost control, with no traction on the slick surface. The right front tire went down into an irrigation ditch and we came to an abrupt halt. I vaguely remember being thrown into the windshield, then the door flew open and I fell out onto the ground. The roadside was covered with stinging nettles, something I had never experienced before. The stinging, and the shock of the accident, quickly sobered me up.

At this point I remembered a story I had heard a few years before from a friend from Long Key. Len was a Ft. Lauderdale insurance man who had a midlife crisis, got a divorce, lost 50 pounds and moved to the Keys to enjoy what was then the simple life. He said he had once met an upper class Haitian who had invited him to his house high in the hills above Port-au-Prince. After dinner, he and his girlfriend decided to take a walk around their host’s sizeable yard. As they walked, they got the feeling that they were being watched. They looked into the woods, and all around the yard, about 10 feet back, were hundreds of people watching them.

I looked up and saw a large number of young Haitian men coming down the rocky hillside through the darkness. By now Jim was out of the truck, looking at the situation. The frame was down on the roadbed, and the tire was suspended in the ditch. Then I remembered the dream I had, and somehow the right words came to me, even though I’d taken only one year of French, fifteen years back. "Nous avons besoins des pierres." We need some rocks. They happily obliged us, and within minutes they filled the ditch with rocks, making a platform so that we could jack the truck up, and drive off on the now-filled ditch.

Then we went home for three hours of sleep. The next day would be the first day of work at the new job in Haiti.

Next: The job begins; we hire some men.

Centre Sucriere de Leogane

Centre Sucriere de Leogane
Originally uploaded by Mangrove Mike

In 1982 there was a recession, especially in the building industry. In order to stem the inflation that had plagued the Ford and Carter years (some say it was caused by the expenditures during the Vietnam era) the Reagan administration tightened lending rates, and the construction industry seemed to crash almost overnight that spring. And as usual, when the rest of the county gets a cold, the Keys got pnemonia.

That spring I got laid off, moved all my wordly possessions to an aluminum storage shed behind my girlfriend's parents' house in Key West, and started to draw unemployment checks, pondering my next move. One afternoon we went to Key West Bight, hoping to buy a fish off of one of the charter boats for a reasonable price, when we ran into Mary White O'Brien, who was working as an agent for Gray Taxidermy out of Fort Lauderdale.

She said her husband, Jim, who was one of my best friends, was trying to get in touch with me. The previous March Jim had gone to Haiti with Doug Gaines, an engineer who had had a construction business in Marathon for many years, on what seemed to me to be some sort of quixotic jaunt. Both of them were men who were known to end up in odd places--not your ususal run-of-the-mill individuals, for sure.

I called Jim at the number in Haiti that Mary had given me. Within a few days I was walking onto the steaming tarmac at Francois Duvalier Airport in Port-au-Prince, the beginning of a most intense couple of years. A small group of Americans, along with a great number of Haitian workmen, was about to construct a new sugar mill in Haiti.

Jim's theory was that a cartel was trying to corner the world sugar market. This was just before the introduction of "high fructose corn syrup," which replaced cane sugar as the primary sweetener in soft drinks (remember the "New Coke"?), a development that possibly thwarted their plans.

The American Consulate's economic attache thought that the idea of building a new sugar mill was absurd. He said that diversified production of foodstuffs on small family plots was the key to Haiti's survival.

We found out later that the Haitians had a "scam" they ran every so often, of building a new sugar mill with foreign money. Whether they produced any sugar or not was irrelevant. In fact, every day as we drove to the jobsite, we passed an unfinished, abandoned, sugar mill that the Cubans had begun twenty years before.

We also learned that the equipment for the mill that we were building had been sold to Uganda, when it was under the control of "Big Daddy" Amin, the dictator whom the Israelis out-foxed in the famous Entebbe raid, and who was later deposed. The Italian company who had made the now obsolescent equipment arranged through European banks to sell it to a third party, in this case the Haitian government, in exchange for a 10 year participation in the anticipated profits.

In the next segment: We hire a bunch of workers, the Job begins, and a surprise visit from Baby Doc.