Just past ten on a sunny morning last month in Port-au-Prince, four men carrying automatic weapons, two of whom wore the green uniforms of the Haitian Army, strolled into the garden of the Hotel Santos, where Haiti's Council of State was meeting with union and business leaders, and asked for Dr. Louis Roy.

On February 7,1986, the day the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife, Michèle Bennett, flew off to exile in France, a crowd of jubilant Haitians invaded the National Cemetery, a vast expanse of concrete crammed with bright-colored tombs — ivory and turquoise and rose --  bearing the names of Haiti's great families.

A few weeks after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, in February, 1986, the statue of Christopher Columbus presiding over the harbor of Port-au-Prince was seized and thrown into the sea by persons unknown, who left fastened on the empty pedestal a sheet of paper with a simple scrawled message: "Pa de blans en Hayti!"

Mornings in Port au-Prince, just before dawn, as the last, scattered gunshots faded in the distance and the outlines of the city began to take shape in the dirty air—tiny houses, painted aqua and salmon; the huge and ghostly National Palace, gleaming white; gray and rust-colored slums, canopied in smoke—my colleagues and I would go off in search of bodies.

Having ferreted out the ''sophisticated rebels'' of Europe from Cardiff to Cracow, H. Stuart Hughes found himself rather nonplussed when asked to suggest their counterparts in the United States.

History, it's said, is written by the winners; but perhaps it's truer to say it belongs to the least reticent. Dean Rusk, on becoming Secretary of State, vowed never to write his memoirs.

On West Germany's ''Day of National Unity'' this summer, a dapper, white-haired, German-born American stood in the Bundestag, facing the President, Prime Minister and other high officials of the West German Government, and spoke about German history.

Three hours out of New York, I start awake to find myself floating over a grotesque landscape - the sickly, reddish-brown hills of Haiti, wave upon wave of blood-dark corrugations, thickly marbled with white sand.

"I don't recognize myself as a satirist,'' said Vladimir Voinovich. ''No, I'm just trying to depict reality.''

This is the first draft of Mark Danner's first feature article about Haiti, written in 1987 for The New York Times Magazine.

It is likely the question was first asked as soon as it could be - that the hope of abolition followed shortly after the task of creation.

Wolfgang Leonhard would seem well qualified to deliver what he promises here -- a ''new policy toward [the] USSR.''

In Haiti, as in many deeply troubled places, it was comforting to identify the national demons with one man, and to assume that his destruction would bring theirs.

An American's distrust of welfare should come as no surprise. Public assistance threatens what is after all the central doctrine of capitalism: that the incentive to work is born of the burning desire to have, and then to have more.

The public schools of America long ago sank to a level of decrepitude guaranteeing them the sort of dogged scrutiny by blue ribbon commissions reserved for a "crisis" both intolerable and permanent.

The immortal power of gossip was already well understood in ancient Greece - "lt too," said Hesiod, "is a kind of divinity" - but it required the particular talents of the present age to make money off it.

Last year Americans spent $30 billion on illegal drugs, while their government spent $1.5 billion trying to shut down their sources of supply.

When a mysterious contagion known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome began to kill large numbers of people a few years ago, various moral authorities took solace in the observation that its victims, most of whom were homosexuals or drug addicts, seemed well chosen for divine retribution.

In an age when the peccadilloes of all the traditional idols, from presidents to Miss Americas, are gleefully exposed, athletes totter on their pedestals as the last American heroes.