Black History Month 2014: The Real Power Behind Baby Doc

Haiti's first family, 1980
Haiti’s first family, 1980

Haiti

In 1986, CBS aired a piece by Ed Bradley on the fall of Haiti’s “President-for-Life,” Jean-Claude Duvalier.

“Baby Doc,” who ruled Haiti from 1971 until 1986, was probably the first leader in world history to be overthrown by a popular uprising triggered by his mulatto wife, Michèle Bennett, the First Lady of Haiti, who went on a whirlwind shopping spree at designer shops in New York, London, and Paris where she requested and spent $1.7 million dollars from the Haitian treasury on fancy outfits:

“She would buy truckloads of dresses from Valentino. She had Boucheron, the Paris jeweler, fly to Haiti to sell jewels to her—not $200,000 worth but millions, millions,” says a Haitian socialite. Another friend tells of buying dozens of pairs of $500 Susan Bennis Warren Edwards shoes for Michèle during a shopping foray on Park Avenue. “She wore earrings that looked like lanterns,” says Suzanne Seitz, a Port-au-Prince hotel owner.”

An acquaintance of her interior decorator reports, “She once saw a rare Louis XV chandelier and insisted on having several. She got 12.” Others talk of a $50,000-a-month flower order from Miami to decorate the palace and the President’s four villas.”

Bennett had a $75,000 refrigerated room installed in the National Palace to preserve in a tropical environment the fur coats she bought in Europe.

In 1980, the Duvaliers spent $3 million dollars on their lavish wedding which was televised live across Haiti to a population living on less than $200 a year. $100,000 was spent on the fireworks alone. Michèle imported a Givenchy gown and a hairdresser from Paris for the ceremony. It entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the most expensive wedding ever held.

Under “Baby Doc,” rail transport ceased to operate in Haiti:

“In the 1910s, Haiti had built at great expense a railroad intended to link Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haïtien. The line was never completed, but three sections provided service in the plains. The regime ordered the line dismantled between Port-au-Prince and Verrettes, sold the tracks, and pocketed the money. The bank accounts of well-connected cronies grew by a few hundred thousand dollars; meanwhile, Haiti’s transportation network moved back half a century.” (Philippe Gerard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History – From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation, p.112)

In Haiti, only about 12.5 percent of the population has access to electricity. In rural areas, Haitians depend upon charcoal for light, heat, and cooking – charcoal which is produced by cutting down trees, which is why 97 percent of Haiti is deforested. This is one of the many legacies of The Duvalierest Revolution:

“Bébé Doc, who still did not understand in the 1970s what Roumain had foreseen in the 1940s, did nothing to address this environmental catastrophe. Deforestation, fueled by a dual dynamic, reached an alarming rate under his rule. Overpopulation forced young farmers to clear ever more lands, even those substandard plots on Haiti’s steep hills; meanwhile, poverty pushed peasants to cut down trees and sell the charcoal that was Haiti’s favorite source of energy. The drought-ridden Northwest first experienced the full consequences of deforestation. After the last trees were cut, the soil turned to a baked crust under the brutal sun; rain became ever rarer, for clouds rarely formed over the deserted countryside; when a tropical downpour finally came, it washed away the rich topsoil that was no longer held together by roots. Within years, the Northwest became a desolate landscape of rocky outcrops led bare by water erosion. Other, more prosperous regions would follow suit a few years later.” (Philippe Gerard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History – From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation, p.110)

In spite of “the legacy of slavery,” 88 percent of the population in the Dominican Republic has access to electricity, 92 percent of the population in Jamaica, 97 percent of the population in Cuba, 100 percent of the population in Puerto Rico, and 93 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole.

“Before they fled the country they had plundered and brutalized, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, 34, Haiti’s shy and weak-willed “President-for-Life,” and Michèle Bennett Duvalier, 35, his beautiful and flamboyant wife, threw one last party. They invited their closest friends to the elegant white National Palace for a final midnight champagne toast, and then hopped into a BMW for a ride to the airport that was named after Baby Doc’s father, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the notorious dictator who had ruled with voodoo and violence for 14 years before his death in 1971. At the airport the Duvaliers drove through a gauntlet of photographers. Baby Doc, at the wheel, was characteristically impassive, but Michèle, wearing a chic white turban, flicked the cigarette she held in her long fingers and exhaled theatrically for the paparazzi. And then, after a perfunctory ceremony, they stepped aboard a U.S. Air Force C-141 cargo plane and flew to France.”

Jean-Claude and Michèle fled to live a life in exile in the French Riveria where they had stashed anywhere between $300 to $800 million dollars:

“Duvalier reportedly had a residence outside Paris, a villa on the French Riviera, speedboats, and sports cars in his first years in France. The Wall Street Journal, in a 2003 article that interviews a – by then – down-and-out Duvalier, details the lavish life that he lived until losing much of his fortune in a 1993 divorce to his wife, Michele. “Home was a villa in Mougins in the hills above Cannes. He and his family drove through the French Riviera in a BMW and a Ferrari Testarossa and shopped at expensive boutiques. They owned a chateau outside Paris and two apartments in the city.”

In 1993, the happy couple divorced and Michèle, one of the biggest gold diggers in world history, took Jean-Claude for all he was worth. In 2011, “Baby Doc” returned to Haiti to assist the reconstruction effort following the 2010 earthquake.



About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

22 Comments

  1. Why does the comparison of one “Michelle’ to another “Michelle” -both of them Black, both of them B- errr, ‘witches,’ and both of them illegally ensconced as’wives’ of ‘leaders’ of their respective nations, IMMEDIATELY come to mind?

    Sheer coincidence, yes?

    NO.

  2. Baby Doc’s wasting of Haiti’s and his own ‘personal’ wealth shows why the phrase “nigger rich” was invented.

  3. Good comment, about ‘The Two Michelles’, Fr John.

    The Obamas and Duvaliers are not unusual. All African kings, presidents and other dictators, and their women, naturally do the same thing.

    Doesn’t all this ‘Black Run Haiti and America’ stuff tend to distract us from the REAL enemy?

    • Paul Kersey has 83 reviews on Amazon on his book about Detroit:

      http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Detroit-Collapse-Americas-Metropolis/product-reviews/1468138537/ref=sr_1_1_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

      Several of those reviews have been posted in recent days. Through his research, Kersey has made a lasting contribution to what racialists and non-racialists know about Detroit. Plus, it seems that people are still buying his book, so he is making money off his work, too.

      If Mosin wants to pursue his obsession with theology or Jews or whatever, he is free to go after the “REAL ENEMY” elsewhere.

      • I should add here that my own personal circumstances have a lot to do with why I want to write a book:

        – My wife is entering the later stages of pregnancy. The baby will be born in early June.

        – The reality of having a very pregnant wife and a newborn son after June means that my ability to participate in activism will be put on ice very shortly.

        – It’s also the dead of winter. There’s not much to do outside. It is just a good time to work on this.

  4. Hunter, it would be better not to use Talmudic, psychologising terms like ‘obsession’ and ‘obsessive’, when you simply don’t agree that ‘theology’ is vitally important or that Talmudism is the chief enemy.

    • I don’t believe that Talmudism is the chief enemy.

      My view is that the sorriness of White Nationalists – their own bad habits, which range from endless navel-gazing to attention whoring to blaming others to hiding out on the internet to waiting on “the collapse,” and so on – is the chief impediment to their progress. It’s true that Jews are powerful and have a lot of negative influence in our culture, but that is mainly because of the unwillingness or inability of their opposition to properly organize and oppose their agenda.

      It’s like a football game … when the opposing team doesn’t even bother to show up on the field, the home team wins by default. It’s not that the home team is omnipotent. They just don’t have any competition because WNs are too busy venting about Jews, safely and anonymously, in their virtual reality ghettos on the internet.

  5. One should look at the instruments that broke the more viable organizations like the KKK revival in the1920s.

    Of course one cannot ignore the problem of mobilization for ww2.

  6. Speaking of football.

    One thing white people ought to do is stop watching football. Subsidizing 300 pound gorillas is counter productive and tantamount to being a cuckold.

  7. Boycott Football?

    It’s interesting to see the conspiracy minded Alex Jones is calling for the boycott. It could be a good implicitly white way to organize. Defunding the owners, TV and the thug players would be a victory with long term consequences.

    Rome indoctrinated subjects and the colonized via bread and circus, same with the union.

    Apologies for being a killjoy.

  8. ‘It’s like a football game…when the opposing team doesn’t even bother to show up on the field, the home team wins by default’

    That is a perfect expression of the ‘Mainstreaming’ movement!

    They may be ‘the home team’, but we the original, indigenous white population don’t need to, and shouldn’t, play games with them.

  9. We might play games and dance at family and folk gatherings, but mostly we have our own WORK to do, rooted in our own soil, customs and faith, NOT trying to win in the rat race of rootless cosmopolitans.

  10. “It’s true that Jews are powerful and have a lot of negative influence in our culture, but that is mainly because of the unwillingness or inability of their opposition to properly organize and oppose their agenda.”

    And why are people unwilling to oppose or organize against them? Oh yeah, they have organizations that focus on preventing that, too. Anyone who does not see their ENORMOUSLY disproportionate power and negative influence is fooling themselves (or just scared to pick a fight with them)….Camera, JINSA, JTA, SPLC, Simon Weisenthal Center, JWC, CUFI (led by a Jew), Emergency Committee for the Defense of Israel, the New York Times, CNN, all Hollywood Studios, and on and on – and that doesn’t even begin to count the foreign organisations.

    “My view is that the sorriness of White Nationalists – their own bad habits”

    Sorry, but that’s just wrong outright. First, there are very few White Nationalists as a percentage of the white population. In order to make any real difference, ordinary white Southerners must be reached. It’s hard to do that when the entire media is against you. And you’re certainly not going to do that with yahoos like Heimbach who is so dense and untalented that he could not smell an obvious trap by ABC, regardless of his habits. Second, your logic concerning the reasons for WN’s bad habits is flawed. They do not have bad habits because they just happen to have bad habits. They have bad habits because white nationalism skims from the bottom of the talent pool – the smarter and more talented supporters have been scared off by attacks from the establishment. Trying to reform WN habits is like trying to reform convicted serial criminals – most will revert to their old, genetically determined ways at some point. It’s natural for them, not learned or environmental. You attract superior talent and ability by building organisations that have 1) a stated purpose 2) a stated goal or goals 3) shields supporters from retaliation and imply retaliation of your own if attacked 4) makes supporters feel morally or intellectually superior to the opposition.

    At the end of the day, the only way to obtain power is to challenge those with it and take it from them. Otherwise, you can continue to protest with a few dozen followers to absolutely no effect (and I mean none because there hasn’t been any – just like I thought) or you can realise the logic in that statement and begin building foundations for taking power for yourselves. Otherwise, watch more and more of the South peel away and go forever Democrat. By then, it will be too late. You will live in a North American version of South Africa with no ability to change anything but endless time to complain about it and ask what went wrong.

  11. Eventually space can’t be traded for time.

    At some point you will have your backs to the wall and will need to fight back quite hard. The only thing to fear are Pension Lifers and DWL who are true fanatics.

    The herd does eventually follow the resolute.

  12. A typical liberal interpretation of current events and twentieth century developments.

    However the content is pretty handy.

    For example a face beats a logo. Be among the people but elevated. Your face and body must show resolute force. You must publicly mask your aims with soothing iconography.

  13. Having seen the Deadliest Roads: Congo ep. I have to say the DRC looks a lot nicer than Haiti. At least the people there work together and have enough common sense to to cut down all the forests in their country; and from their portrayal they at least seem nicer.

    In either case, no Whites, no roads.

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