“Breaking the Thermometer to Hide the Fever”: The Repression and Survival of Radio Haiti and Its Archive

In November 1980, Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, emboldened by Reagan's presidential victory, ordered his notorious Macoutes to attack Haiti’s free press and human rights activists. Most of the staff of Radio Haiti, the country’s most prominent independent radio station, were arrested, imprisoned, and exiled. The dictatorship wrongly believed that silencing the free press would quell popular dissent. But “radio stations like Radio Haiti are the thermometer of the people’s fever,” the station’s director Jean Dominique would later say. “We’re just the thermometer!...Breaking the thermometer doesn’t mean that the fever has gone down.” The Macoutes ransacked the station, stealing whatever equipment they thought they could sell. As Jean’s daughter recalled, the Macoutes did not realize that Radio Haiti’s greatest treasure was its audio archives. They left them scattered where they lay, filthy and exposed to the humidity and dust, but not destroyed. When Duvalier fell in 1986, the calendar on the wall still said 1980, and the archives were still there. In the following months, Radio Haiti was rebuilt, thanks to the solidarity and care of thousands of ordinary Haitians.

Forty years after Duvalier’s fall, the Radio Haiti Archive––a tool in the war against erasure and forgetting, perhaps even a tool in present and future resistance––is itself in exile. The same conditions that Radio Haiti reported on make it impossible for the archive to be physically safe in the country that created it. This paper describes the unlikely survival of the Radio Haiti Archive and discusses the process of remediating, processing, digitizing, and making this archive publicly available. It explores archival work as an act of solidarity and care for the surviving members of Radio Haiti’s staff; for public memory; for listeners, past, present, and future; and for all the voices in the archive, living and dead.