Transporting citizenship

By January 1986, Jean-Claude Duvalier's days were numbered. Although his pudgy cheeks and youth had earned him the nickname Baby Doc, the brutality of his rule, the antithesis of childlike innocence, contributed greatly to his downfall. In 1970, Jean-Claude had been named to succeed his father François, who had been "president for life" since 1957. After François (known as Papa Doc) died the following year, Jean-Claude ruled for another fifteen years until 1986, when in the face of political disarray and popular discontent he boarded an airplane for France, where he still resides. The combined Duvalier regime is remembered by many as a devastating and cruel era, one in which a small, corrupt elite clung to their wealth and power while most Haitians fought against extreme poverty and tried to shield themselves from the violence of the notorious Tonton Macoutes, Duvalier's private, brutal police force.

Baby Doc left under inauspicious circumstances. Although he tried to leave surreptitiously, the entire city of Port-au-Prince knew that the airplane that took off at 4 a.m. on 7 February 1986 was his. And they started to celebrate. These celebrations spread quickly to Miami, New York, Montreal, and Boston, where thousands of Haitians had been glued to their radios. They spread more slowly to the rest of Haiti, where communications were less instantaneous. In France, where Baby Doc, his wife Michèle Bennet, and a party of twenty-two others were headed, government officials gritted their teeth and announced that he would be allowed to remain only for eight days.

The former dictator's fortunes crumbled as thoroughly as his legitimacy. He first took up residence in a luxury hotel, a converted monastery near Grenoble. When he arrived, he owned two apartments in Paris and a chateau just outside the city. He and his family lived in a villa in Mougins, near Cannes. Since he owned property in France, officials were forced to allow him to remain there. Initially, he and his wife allegedly spent $168,780 a month on clothing and indulged themselves with baubles such as a $68,500 clock. Several attempts by Haitians to track down and recover the money he was believed to have embezzled led to revelations of extravagant spending but nothing else. Eventually, however, he lost everything; he and his wife divorced in 1993 and she is thought to have kept most of the assets, although the details have never been clear. As of 2003 Jeane-Claude Duvalier resided in a one-bedroom apartment in Paris. The rent, $1,000 a month, was paid by a friend of his girlfriend.

This story begins at the end of this era, when Baby Doc became, if the most notorious, only one of millions of Haitians abroad. Over the next twenty years a succession of military governments and democratic regimes, along with continuous pressure for neoliberal reforms on the part of international aid institutions, both drove Haitians away from the island and made them determined to participate in events from afar. As new emigrants joined established communities abroad and the state abdicated its role as provider of social services, the nature of the Haitian diaspora changed. In the process Haitians expanded and changed the meaning of citizenship: they became transnational citizens. Some observers claim that up to 2 million Haitians, or one-quarter of the entire population, reside abroad, in Canada, the United States, France, and on various Caribbean islands, as well as the neighboring Dominican Republic. In their transnational condition they reflect and reproduce the inequalities that characterized their lives at home. While wealthy emigrants have been enormously influential in domestic politics, acting as proxies for the state in the provision of social services, and wielding power and money in electoral politics, poorer emigrants in search of work cross the Dominican border on an almost daily basis, struggling to take advantage of wage differentials whenever possible. Opposition groups huddle abroad and plan their next seizure of power. The history of the past twenty years cannot be told without attending to those Haitians who have left. Before proceeding to their stories, it may be useful to give a brief account of Haiti's history and post-Duvalier politics.

Haiti was once the wealthiest of the French Antillean colonies, producing more sugar during the eighteenth century than any of the other European possessions. But sugar was produced on the backs of slaves, who at the height of sugar production constituted the majority of the population. A slave revolt in 1791 in the midst of the upheaval precipitated by the French Revolution was followed by a series of struggles and reversals on the island of Hispaniola, the outcome of which was an independent Haiti and the emancipation of its slaves. Suddenly it was the poorest country rather than the wealthiest colony, as much of the sugar production halted, diplomatic recognition by the United States and Europe took years to materialize, and the French demanded reparations for property destroyed during the war.

During the nineteenth century, the country was relatively prosperous, and flexed its muscles with an invasion of neighboring Santo Domingo. Divisions between Haitians who identified as black and those who identified as mulatto continued to shape the political sphere. Mulatto elites tended to control Port-au-Prince and the southern part of the country, while black elites who tended to think of themselves as representing the peasant majority centered their power in the rural areas and the north. Fierce competition over domination of state machinery facilitated the involvement of the United States, as each side invited foreign intervention as a way to further weaken their opponents.

A US occupation between 1915 and 1934 expanded the military and made it a feasible route for upward mobility. In addition, it briefly united the upper classes against the American presence. But it also tightened the financial relationship as the USA controlled the revenues from the customs houses even after they terminated the occupation. The rest of the twentieth century, until 1986, was shaped by the Duvalier regime.

Haiti shares the history of US presence followed by a dictatorship with other Caribbean countries, including the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Cuba. In all these places, US occupations bolstered military institutions and created the trappings of modernization, including roads, schools, and sanitation. The dictators rose up through the military ranks and stepped into positions in which their power depended in part on maintaining high levels of patronage already set in the days of the US occupations. Throughout the cold war they were useful allies, with Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Duvalier staking anti-communist territory for long periods, while Cuba's Fulgencio Batista did so more briefly, until forces led by Castro ran him out of the country.

The Duvalier regime has been variously described as populist, kleptocratic,...