The Seeds of Fiction by Richard Greene, Bernard Diederich

were astonished to find there wasn’t a squad of sharpshooters but a single gunman. Hector Riobé lay dead, a bullet through his head — by his own hand.
    â€˜That’s amazing,’ Graham said.
    â€˜But when I reported the story it was only a short blurb. I didn’t have all the facts, and since no Americans were involved it wasn’t important.’
    â€˜What happened to the others?’
    â€˜All except one were captured and tortured to death.’
    Graham said nothing. He looked away for a moment as we passed an open stall where a woman was selling fruit and vegetables on the side of the road.
    â€˜Life under Papa Doc,’ I said quietly.
    â€˜Indeed,’ he said. ‘And what about this group we’re going to see now, the Kamo …’
    â€˜Kamoken,’ I said. ‘Their situation’s just as dire as everyone else’s.’ ‘But you’re helping them.’
    I thought about this. I wanted to introduce Graham to all the characters I knew. I wanted him to know everything Duvalier was doing. He understood the problem with Haiti and the tyranny of Duvalier, but I imagined there had to be some things that would be better left untold. It was a fine line for me to navigate, and I was afraid of having breached journalistic ethics. I was as conflicted as any man fighting for a cause. I thought of Riobé and how what Papa Doc had done to his father had driven him on his suicidal mission. Events propel us into action. I did not want to be a guerrilla, but I had been forced to do something.
    I explained to Graham about the Kamoken. Their official name was the Haitian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARH), and their leader was Fred Baptiste, a former schoolteacher from Jacmel who believed Duvalier had stolen the presidential election. He was an intense, highly strung individual. In 1959 he attacked an army post at a small grass airstrip in Jacmel. Baptiste escaped, but his brother Renel was captured and spent four months in prison. In late 1962 the two brothers crossed into the Dominican Republic and joined other exiles in the struggle against Duvalier.
    Baptiste had no political ideology. The Haitian Marxists thought he was a loose cannon, and the right-wing exiles led by Louis Déjoie called him a dangerous Communist.
    The group had a small camp at Dajabón. When the Dominican army broke up the camp in May 1963 the exiles moved into a tiny shack on an embankment in Santo Domingo. They had no money and no support until early 1964 when Baptiste accepted the formal patronage of Father Jean-Baptiste Georges and ex-Haitian army officer and diplomat Pierre L. Rigaud.
    Father Georges found an abandoned chicken farm in Villa Mella, about twelve miles south of Santo Domingo, where the rebels could stay. The troops slept in the chicken coops and learned the art of guerrilla warfare on the blackboard. There were no firearms on the farm. At night the rebels played war games with sticks. They had no radio communications, medical unit or supplies. Every morning they raised the Haitian flag and sang the anthem of the FARH.
    One night I received a call from the officer assigned to the US Military Assistance Group in the Dominican Republic. ‘General Wessin y Wessin is on to your Haitian friends,’ he warned. Elías Wessin y Wessin had been the leader of the coup that overthrew Juan Bosch the year before. ‘Be prepared. I’m sure the General’s men are going to pay the camp a visit pretty soon.’
    The Haitian opposition movements were fractured and constantly denouncing one another. It had been Déjoie who told Wessin y Wessin, an anti-Communist zealot, that the Kamoken were allied with Castro and Duvalier.
    I made a quick visit to the US Information Office and picked up a number of pamphlets and brochures promoting President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress programme for the Americas. Then I drove out to the chicken farm and distributed the