A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Author and anthropologist Rich Benjamin's maternal grandfather, Daniel Fignole, was the president of Haiti for 19 days in 1957. His short-lived presidency ended when the Haitian armed forces broke into the presidential chambers, forced him at gunpoint to sign a resignation letter and then exiled him to New York City. Soon after, the brutal reign of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier took over Haiti. Now, despite his grandfather being the leader of a nation, Benjamin didn't know much about him. The desire to fill in those gaps are the core of Benjamin's new family memoir, "Talk To Me." Rich Benjamin joins us now. So, Rich, let's begin actually where your book ends. You rushed to Haiti soon after the earthquake in 2010. How much did you know at that point about your grandfather?
RICH BENJAMIN: I had known relatively little about my grandfather by the time I rushed to Haiti in 2010. I had vague snippets here and there. He had been president. He had been the leader of several labor unions. But I didn't know much about his personal life. I didn't know that much about his family, how he was raised or what led to his ejection from his country.
MARTÍNEZ: So what led to your grandfather being a person of interest for the CIA? I mean, what was the reason for it?
BENJAMIN: So at the time, beginning in 1946, my grandfather was the leader of labor unions in Haiti. And when I say labor unions, he represented sugar harvesters. He represented people who worked in the fruit industry. He represented people who were in factories, people who cut sugarcane. And often, these people were working for multinational or U.S. corporations, such as the Haitian American Sugar Corporation or Standard Fruit. So he was very effective at his job. He helped workers raise their salaries, he helped workers get better conditions, and so he was a big person of interest. And what I found in the record is U.S. corporate executives contacting Washington or contacting the embassy in Haiti saying very explicitly, we don't like this guy.
MARTÍNEZ: Don't like him because what, he's a threat to their profits?
BENJAMIN: He's a threat to their profits. He's a threat to their domination of the Haitian labor industry. He's causing too much trouble. Rabble-rouser is the word they used in these confidential reports. And one of the more comical confidential memos I discovered was sugar executive telegrammed the White House and said begrudgingly, sure, he's not exactly a communist, but he's a fellow traveler.
MARTÍNEZ: Were you ever told anything through other family members? I mean, did nothing else kind of seep in?
BENJAMIN: Nothing seeped in from my family members. And looking back, it feels surprising to me, too, that nothing got through. But there was a real tight wall of silence, particularly coming from my mother - that once I realized that wouldn't be broken, I had to find my grandfather in other places, like the archive and like in Haiti itself.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. So when you get back from that trip, I mean, you begin this very long fight to declassify State Department files on your family. So tell us about that process. I mean, what did you find, and what remains classified to this day?
BENJAMIN: Well, I found over 150 pages of documents where U.S. operatives in Port-au-Prince were spying on him - his activities, his goings, his speeches - and reporting back to Washington at the time. And when I found them, some of those documents were declassified, but four of them still remain redacted. So I did what anybody did, which is to sue, and then my appeal was rejected. So I had to go to federal district court and sue to have more of those reports unredacted.
MARTÍNEZ: Just thinking about Haiti and its history, how colonialism has really maybe stunted its growth, even though it's been an independent nation for over 200 years.
BENJAMIN: Most people don't understand that dire history. So first and foremost, once Haiti was free in the 1800s, France made it pay, through the force of violence and gunboats, what they called an independence debt. Also, Haiti's Constitution, when the U.S. started colonizing it in 1915, was organized in a way - the banks, the tariffs, its economic output was organized in a way to profit U.S. business interests. And so we do see these ramifications to this day, even as we see mistakes that Haiti has made on its own since.
MARTÍNEZ: So then when I think of the full title of your book, "Talk To Me: Lessons From A Family Forged In History," I mean, that history is something that I think, maybe in this case, is difficult to put in the rearview mirror.
BENJAMIN: One of the things I would love readers to take away from this book is always to be cognizant that history is happening as we live our lives - history is always happening as we are busy, so just not to sleepwalk through our lives and to kind of take certain political developments as a fait accompli. No, they are history. We are active agents in history. We're not kind of just passive victims of the news. We're not passive victims of elections. We're not passive victims of inaction by our leaders. And we are all constantly being forged by history.
MARTÍNEZ: Would you in some ways, or is it fair, Rich, to describe your book to be about silence and about the things that we hold back and don't tell the next generation about?
BENJAMIN: Yes, it's about silence. It's about silences between a mother and son. It's about silences between a grandfather and a mother. It's about state-sanctioned silences through the CIA and the way that silences build upon each other, compound each other and make each other worse. And so what does it mean when you tell a political force or a family member, talk to me?
MARTÍNEZ: Rich Benjamin is a cultural anthropologist. His latest book is titled "Talk To Me." Rich, thank you for sharing.
BENJAMIN: Thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF WEBERT SICOT'S "LA HISTORIA DE UN AMOR") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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