Chapter Two, "The Massacre River"

from Chapter One, "Roosters"

    On the western, Haitian end of Hispaniola, roosters are all over the walls of the labyrinth of alleys that make up Bel Air, a dust-, smoke- and exhaust-clogged slum that perches on a hill in downtown Port-au-Prince.  It is February 1995, five months after a flock of American helicopters and planes escorted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back from three years of exile in the United States, the nation he once disparagingly called "that big northern country that casts so many long, dark shadows into our hemisphere."

    The residents of Bel Air, in tribute to their returned President, adorned the walls with paintings of Aristide and his political symbol, the kok kalite, the champion fighting rooster.  The variety of renditions seemed endless: stenciled red roosters, alone and within circles, paired next to stenciled black-and-tan depictions of the bespectacled President Aristide; speckled blue and red roosters painted in the naive Haitian style; generously plumed roosters bursting with color; crossed American and Haitian flags painted behind a giant fierce red-and-brown cock.   

    Two brown roosters painted on white cinder block stare each other down across a wall peppered with red paint splotches that look as if they are meant to depict spatters of blood or bullet holes.  A painted Haitian flag, blue on top, red on the bottom, sports a pink-and-blue rooster in the white center instead of the palm tree, cannons, drums and swords that are on the actual flag.  The hand-lettered message below reads, Vox Aristide, Vox Populi, above the name "Bob Marley."

    The most detailed image, drawn over and over again in varied styles, is that of a hand placing an egg back in a chicken, accompanied by notes declaring: "Li rantre!"  "Yes, it goes back in!"  After Haiti's military packed Aristide into exile in September 1991, soldiers smugly insisted that once a hen laid an egg, you couldn't put the egg back in the chicken.  Now Aristide had proved them wrong: he had come back to Haiti, and the murals were celebrating his seemingly impossible feat.

    Blood drips from the yellow beak of a proud black-and-red rooster painted on a wall behind a fried-meat-and-plantain stand; below the rooster is a dead gray guinea-hen, representing the old Duvalier dictatorship, which had used the guinea-hen as its political symbol.  "Kok la ak bib la, se 2 lavalas," reads one mural: "the rooster and the Bible are both lavalas."  That is, they are both symbols of Aristide's Lavalas political movement, named for the cleansing flash flood that his backers promised would wash over Haiti with his election.

    Things did not end up that way.  Aristide lasted barely eight months in office.  The powers that be in modern Haiti hadn't much liked him in the first place.  When he failed to reassure them that he would protect their privileges and deter violence against them, they sent him packing to Washington via Caracas and returned the country to military dictatorship.  There was nothing new, nothing washed away but hope.

    Haiti is a place where reality sometimes seems far away.  To explain their world, Haitians often speak in proverbs, translating their daily life into symbols and images rather than attempting the impossible task of dissecting it.  Analyses of Haiti's labyrinthine politics, of its shifting alliances and the personages that change on the surface of the country's leadership but nothing more, tend to collapse under their own weight.  After Duvalier and before Aristide, five governments came and went.

    On one level, the scraggly fighting rooster makes sense as a politician's symbol: politics, after all, is a battle of strategy, endurance and aggression played out on a national stage.  It inspires the same emotion and scheming that the cockfight does in spectators and gamblers.  Look closer, however, and the political rooster dissolves into other images with entirely different meanings in religion and daily life. 

    In other contexts, the rooster of aggression becomes a bird of sustenance, a symbol of the dawn and new beginnings, and, most importantly, a guardian of territory. In the Bel Air cockfighting arena (gagè or gagaire, as Haitian cockfighting arenas are called), tucked among the slum's labyrinthine alleys, a fight begins.  The crowd is screaming in Haitian Kreyol. 

    The money they are betting is gourdes not pesos.  The accommodations are poorer than in Santo Domingo, even in the bajo mundo.  The color of the Haitian cockers' skin is darker.

    But the game is the same as the ones that take place on the eastern half of the island.  Two scruffy roosters face off across a packed-dirt ring a few paces wide.  In the dim light, spectators hang into the ring over the low circular concrete wall that separates them from the ring; it is painted pale blue, scratched and stained with dirt and dried blood from many past battles.

    The birds pace warily around the edge of the circle.  The red-brown of their feathers matching the color of the dirt, they eye each other and menacingly raise their neck feathers, then run headlong to the center and jump into the air.  The air cracks with the impact of stiffened feathers as each bird tries to push the other to the ground. 

    Round the ring, the Haitian men shout across to each other and wave dirty wads of gourdes in the air, seeking bets.  A meeting of the eyes, a nod of the head and flash of fingers, a simple code, is enough to cement a wager that will bind both partners till the end of the match.

    Soon, the feathers of both cocks are slick with blood and the fight slows to methodical pecks and lunges instead of the more dramatic airborne jabbing that began the combat.  The birds here fight with their own spurs instead of the steel or tortoiseshell gaffs that cockers in other Caribbean countries attach to rooster legs.  Fights here often last as long as a half-hour since it is difficult for a bird to inflict a mortal, or even incapacitating, wound on its enemy.  When it appears one bird is gaining the advantage, the pitch of the gambling rises again.  Yelling new odds, the wagerers who bet on the losing bird are trying to cover their losses.

    The spectators lean forward, a few so close they could touch the birds.  A few times, the men jerk back sharply as the cocks rise into the air right in front of them and threaten to hurl themselves over the concrete barrier into the crowd.  Men who are not trying to bet watch intently, narrowing their eyes in concentration.  A few cover their foreheads with their hands; others gesture, as if to transmit energy and advice across the ring to the birds. 

    The fight slows further as the roosters tire.  Finally, the loser walks listlessly away from the stronger bird.  The crowd groans in disappointment.  The owners pull the blood-soaked animals from the ring and the spectators step into the circle to settle their wagers before the next match begins.

    Combat continues all afternoon, the same ritual over and over: the handlers agitate the birds and place them in the ring, the gamblers line up and the birds fight.  Finally, one man and his cock walk away victorious.  The winner has a few extra gourdes in his pocket, and his humiliated opponent will trudge home. 

    When today is over, the cockers simply wait until tomorrow or a few days from now.  The details vary only slightly: different owners, winners and losers.  But the community of cockers and their premise remains the same.

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    Smooth, sweet Dominican rum was poured liberally at the festivities in the border town of Dajabón on the night of October 2, 1937.  Doña Isabel Mayer, a wealthy Dominican who owned much of the surrounding land, was giving a banquet at her home in honor of the president himself, Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, Great Benefactor of the Nation and Father of the New Dominion. 

    For Trujillo, the trip was a break from the headaches of the capital.  He had just received reports that opponents of his regime were plotting against him.  In his own sinister way, Trujillo had sent out his spies and gunmen to satisfy himself that he was not materially threatened.

    Still, the incidents troubled him.  This trip was his second to the remote northwest border.  It took place just two months after he had gone there in August to inspect the beginnings of the new International Highway, the centerpoint of his grand plan to link the north and south and to fortify the Dominican presence on the border.  So little work had been accomplished on the highway that he and his entourage had had to ride in on mule-back to get to the project that drew a line between two points through nowhere.

    The border itself was officially only eight years old.  When President Vásquez and Haiti's President, Louis Borno, in 1929 drew a permanent border, the strokes of their pens had created a large foreign population on Dominican land.  After so many years of ambiguity, the people who lived in the central regions and now arbitrarily assigned a new country, were not about to move just so they could live on Haitian or Dominican territory.  Haitians did not stop speaking Kreyol even though the land they lived on now happened to be Dominican. 

    With time, the people might have begun to match the nationalities the new boundary assigned them.  But for Trujillo, this was not enough.

    A decade earlier, waves of Haitians had crossed into the Dominican Republic to find work cutting cane on the vast sugar plantations, which were pushing to export more and more to a market that paid more than twenty cents a pound for the sweet white stuff.  But in 1929, when Black Monday hit, catapulting world markets into the Great Depression, sugar fell immediately to just four cents a pound, then later to two. 

    With the market all but destroyed for Dominicans' biggest export, Haitian workers were no longer needed.  Throughout the 1930s, therefore, Dominicans had been seeking ways to send the Haitians packing. 

    In July 1937, a new law forced foreigners to register with migration officials. Later that summer, Dominican authorities deported eight thousand Haitians who did not have proper papers.  But these deportations barely assuaged the Dominicans who were angry about the country's economic straits. 

    For six years, Trujillo had ordered local military posts to submit to him thrice-monthly reports of the results of their patrols of the Dominican-Haitian border. On his first trip to the border in August, Trujillo was surprised to see so many Haitians around, even though a thousand or more had been coerced into working on the new highway.  It also struck him as strange that there were no cattle on the grassy expanses in the valley around Pedro Santana. 

    Peasants and town officials at each little town along the new highway responded that Haitians had stolen their livestock.  Trujillo called Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Emilio "Niñí" Castillo, chief military official of the North of the Dominican Republic, to meet him in Dajabón to discuss the alleged Haitian incursions across the border.

    By October, rumors were flying about "incidents" concerning Haitians.  A few days before Trujillo's visit the Montecristi provincial governor had complained that three hundred deported Haitians had returned to the hills around Montecristi.  In response, the interior ministry had been alerted and the army mobilized.  Whispers passed that just south of Dajabón, Dominican soldiers killed a group of Haitians. 

    In Sabaneta, it was said, Haitians had died.  Other reports circulated of deaths in confrontations between Dominican soldiers and Haitians awaiting deportation from barbed-wire detention camps.

    The tension did not dampen the festivities surrounding Trujillo's visit; indeed, they seemed to heighten the revelry.  Amid the jovial atmosphere at Doña Isabel's banquet for him, Trujillo assured the guests: "I have learned here that the Haitians have been robbing food and cattle from the ranchers.

    To you, Dominicans, who have complained of this pillaging committed by the Haitians who live among you, I answer: I will solve the problem.  Indeed, we have already begun.  Around three hundred Haitians were killed in Bánica.  The solution must continue." 

    For emphasis, the drunken dictator banged his fist on the table.

    In the wee hours of October 3, the formal killing of Haitians began.  No longer a series of isolated "incidents," the confrontation on the border became a massacre.  "That day, such horrors took place under the torrential rain that your mouth tasted of ashes, that the air was bitter to breathe, that shame weighed down on your heart, and the flavor of all life indeed was repugnant.  You would never have imagined that such things could come to pass on Dominican soil," the Haitian author Jacques Stephen Alexis wrote later in his novel about the massacre, Compère Général Soleil.  (Alexis himself became a martyr in 1961, stoned to death in Haiti for his efforts to unseat François Duvalier.)

    Trujillo's soldiers used their guns to intimidate, but not to kill.  For that, they used machetes, knives, picks and shovels so as not to leave bullets in the corpses.  Bullet-riddled bodies would have made it obvious that the murderers were government soldiers, who unlike most Dominicans had guns.  But death by machete can be blamed on peasants, on simple men of the countryside rising up to defend their cattle and lands.  Even a bayonet leaves wounds like enough to those of a simple knife that the true authors of the crime can be masked. 

    This elaborate façade left out one crucial detail: if the massacre was, indeed, the result of a Dominican peasant uprising against the Haitians, why were there no casualties on the Dominican side?  And why did a number of Dominicans, at a great risk to their own lives and livelihoods, hide Haitians in efforts to protect them from Trujillo's murderers?

    In the early fall of 1937, the border patrols were heightened; yet reports that came in every ten days failed to mention their sinister achievements at Manzanillo Bay, Tierra Sucia, Capotillo, El Aguacate, La Peñita, El Cajuil, Santiago de La Cruz.  But the tales of survivors brought out the truth.

    Trujillo's men searched the houses and estates of the region one by one, rounded up Haitians and initiated deportation proceedings against them; once the paperwork was done, the Dominican government had "proof" that the Haitians had been sent back to Haiti.  The Haitians then were transported like cattle to isolated killing grounds, where the soldiers slaughtered them at night, carried the corpses to the Atlantic port at Montecristi and threw the bodies to the sharks.  For days, the waves carried uneaten body parts back onto Hispaniola's beaches.

    Often, the soldiers did not even bother with the charade of covering up their crimes.  Entire families were mutilated in their homes.  For Haitians not actually in their homes -in the streets or in the fields - the soldiers applied a simple test.  They would accost any person with dark skin.  Holding up sprigs of parsley, Trujillo's men would query their prospective victims: "¿Cómo se llama ésto?" ("What is this thing called?") 

    The terrified victim's fate lay in the pronunciation of the answer.  Haitians, whose Kreyol uses a wide, flat "R", find it difficult to pronounce the trilled "R" in the Spanish word for parsley, "perejil."  If the word came out as the Haitian "pe'sil," or a bastardized Spanish "pewehí" the victim was condemned to die. 

    The Dominicans would later nickname the massacre "El Corte," the Harvest: so many human beings cut down like mere stalks of sugar cane at harvest time.

    Just ahead, a dozen skimpily clad transvestites-for-the-day prance along, jeering at one another and flirting with the men looking on.  Other men dressed up as ugly, large-breasted women tiptoe as others taunt them with shouts of "Roba la gallina!"  (Steal the hen!).  Cracking whips at each other and at the crowd, toros, bulls, surrounded by their entourage stride confidently down the Malecón.

    A group of half-naked men run down the seaside boulevard; some are streaked in paint applied in stripes and patterns meant to look as if they are from traditional African tribes.  A pair of teenage boys are covered entirely in red paint and nothing else as they parade, holler and rush up to spectators, whom they threaten to embrace.  Rustling and shaking, other paraders dance along, too, covered from head to toe in thick clumps of grass or palm fronds.

    A tiny man, his young blue eyes twinkling in a wrinkled face that appears prematurely aged, is dressed in a baggy suit, thick glasses and black fedora: he is a President Balaguer in the midst of his people, with two young mulatto men following him, pretending to be bodyguards dressed in gangster suits and waving guns. 

    Further down the route, a group of teenagers in homeboy pants, New York-style, blast the crowd with hip-hop music from the boom-boxes they brandish.

    At the end of Santo Domingo's carnival parade route, the paraders and crowd swarm around el obelisco macho, one of the many monuments the dictator Rafael Trujillo had built in his honor (though one of the few that remain).  This phallic obelisk has been re-painted with the images of the Mirabal sisters, the three butterflies whose deaths mobilized their country against the dictator more than three decades ago. 

    As evening falls, the parade spills down past the obelisk and into the Colonial Zone.  Wizened old ladies peer out of their windows as the African revelers, the European devils, the mischief-makers, the criminals, and the misfits pass by.  The women rest their wrinkled cheeks on the wrought-iron bars as they watch the tired paraders head home.

    Pigeons roost for the night in the ruins of the hospital of San Nicolás de Bari, where time has stood still since Sir Francis Drake destroyed the structure in the sixteenth century.  Along the Ozama River, the coral walls of Columbus' old home, the Alcázar de Colón, glow orange against the night sky.

    Across the river, the Columbus Lighthouse is covered with dark streaks left by polluted rain, thickened by smoke from Santo Domingo's army of diesel generators.  As the night darkens, the lighthouse's giant beam turns on and traces a ghostly crucifix in the night sky as a reminder of a history that refuses to remain in the past.

    These old and new structures are physical testimony to what has happened over the course of 500 years in Santo Domingo, but the pageant surrounding the annual Carnival and Independence Day celebrations contains the real history of Hispaniola.  The participants have broken their island's story down to represent the groups that have played out events the way they are remembered now: the indigenous Tainos Columbus met on Hispaniola in 1492, the slaves brought from Africa to harvest cane in the New World, the spirits and devils of local legend, the youth of New York. 

    At Carnival, the loudest voices are those of the ones who are usually silent: the strongman president is transformed into a smiling, wizened old man who provokes only laughter, while those who represent the Tainos, the slaves and the misfits are the most powerful and admired paraders.  For a short time, the masses are more powerful than the Great Man.  And men, who the rest of the year pride themselves on their machismo, can show off as women at Carnival.  Briefly, traditional roles are reversed.

    While Carnival symbolically breaks society's rules, it subtly reinforces them. Behind the whole spectacle is an undercurrent of sexual tension, role reversal and the harmless release of violent urges.  In theory it is all in fun, but the underlying message is that the voiceless are only allowed this luxury once a year.  The theater takes place against a backdrop of the constant threat of real violence, whether as the result of political repression, drug wars on the streets of New York, or the increased likelihood of day-to-day conflict brought on by the pressures of poverty and frustration.  (In Haiti, the connection between Carnival and politics was explicit: while President Aristide was in exile, musicians were harassed for performing Carnival songs that openly opposed the violence perpetrated by the military regime.)

    Santo Domingo's national celebration ends several weeks of Carnival gatherings that have taken place across Hispaniola, different in each city and town according to the local customs, and culminating on February 27, which is Dominican Independence Day and sometimes coincides (but more often does not) with the traditional Shrove Tuesday celebration elsewhere in Latin America and Europe.  Santo Domingo's version of Carnival is simply a local adaptation of a universal cultural trope: the celebration of differences and glorification of aggression.

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