Read Online The Seeds of Fiction by Richard Greene, Bernard Diederich - Free Book Online Page B

and speaking Spanish.
    Only twenty-four Kamoken returned from battle. The fate of the other four was never known. Still, for the Haitian peasants the Kamoken had taken on all the mystical attributes of the nocturnal airborne werewolf, the
lougarwu.
Like that fearful phantom, the Kamoken seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. The Macoutes feared the Kamoken were still in the hills.
    The men were in dire need of medical attention, one for a broken arm and the others for malaria. The prison commandant provided them with a daily ration of twelve pounds of rice from his own prison allotment. The Kamoken cooked the rice at night with a little salt and an occasional plantain. They gradually sold off their clothing and boots to Dominican soldiers. Their home for seven weeks was a dark room filled with the stench of open latrines. They slept on bug-infested mattresses. They had no toothbrushes or soap, and there was no electric light. At dawn and dusk swarms of mosquitoes descended on them.
    I appealed to President Reid Cabral, asking him to release Fred Baptiste for specialized medical treatment. He summoned his army Chief of Staff, who addressed a note to the commander of the Neyba garrison giving me permission to see the Haitian prisoners. As I walked out of the Presidential Palace Reid Cabral stopped me and asked me to report back to him. He wanted to know what else he could do for the Haitians.
    At Neyba the prisoners paraded before me in military fashion. They resembled Second World War concentration-camp victims: emaciated and barefoot. What little clothing they had had been reduced to rags. While none of them complained about their physical state, they were desperate for news of Haiti and inquired when they might be released.
    I drove Baptiste to a private clinic in Santo Domingo and checked him in under a fictitious name. Papa Doc had spies everywhere. Baptiste’s leg was set and placed in a cast. I paid the $180 bill, and when he was released from the hospital he convalesced in my home office, sleeping next to the telex machine and playing with our infant son.
    â€˜So how is it they ended up in this place?’ Graham said as we veered off the road and drove up a narrow dirt driveway to the grounds of the former insane asylum.
    â€˜The conditions at the garrison in Neyba were so bad I asked Reid Cabral to help us out.’
    â€˜And this is the help they got.’
    â€˜This is it.’
    The asylum consisted of a series of long concrete barrack-style buildings set one after the other with a main door and barred windows. When the Kamoken first arrived, the inside of the buildings were filled with mountains of goat shit. They spent days shovelling out the manure and cleaning up.
    The goats remained and roamed freely around the compound and inside the barracks. Adding a touch of the surreal to the scene, a crude barbed-wire fence separated the asylum from an empty field in which a herd of African zebras that had belonged Trujillo were pastured.
    We found Baptiste in one of the buildings, which still reeked of goats. He was lying on a cot, resting his injured leg. When we entered he stood and with the aid of a stick walked with us out to the garden.
    The compound did not look or feel like a guerrilla training centre. The group was using the goat manure as fertilizer to grow vegetables. They had organized a small education centre and invited the children of the Dominican soldiers guarding the property to attend, teaching them to read and write Spanish.
    Graham shook his head. ‘How can they succeed by determination alone?’ The Kamoken were everyday Haitians, taxi drivers, former soldiers, mechanics, farmers, schoolteachers and peasants from different regions of the country. ‘There are so few of them. They have no arms.’
    â€˜Yet this is the insurgency against Papa Doc,’ I said.
    â€˜They’re just going to end up like all the rest. Like Riobé and Pasquet.’
    â€˜They all think