René Théodore, who has died of lung cancer aged 62, was the unlikely official face of Haitian communism for more than a decade.
The tall, quiet-spoken man who returned from exile in 1968, after the collapse of the Duvalier family's 29-year tyranny, confused his countrymen at first. The regime, the cold war and their Catholic clergy had dinned into them that communists were as good as savages. Six years later, however, Théodore nearly became his country's US-backed prime minister.
Born in the northern border town of Ouanaminthe, the grandson of a president, Théodore followed much of Haiti's intelligentsia into Marxism while still at school. In 1964, at the height of the massacres by President François "Papa Doc" Duvalier's henchmen, he fled abroad, living most of the next two decades in France, Cuba and the Soviet Union. For years, his voice was a rare source of local news for Haitians brave enough to tune in to Radio Moscow's Creole service.
Among Haiti's squabbling opposition factions, the communists stood out as the only ones with any organisation or clear principles. In December 1968, Théodore helped found the Unified Haitian Communist party (Puch), whose members shocked the Duvalier regime four months later by briefly seizing Casale, a village near the capital, Port-au-Prince.
The country clearly needed revolution of some kind, but "Papa Doc" responded by declaring that anyone involved in pursuing communism was committing a capital offence. In July 1969, spies led the president's thugs to a house in Port-au-Prince, where they massacred virtually all the top Puch officials. The exiled Théodore became Puch leader in 1978 under the nom de guerre of Jacques Dorsilien, one of several aliases.
Soon afterwards, the founder of the Haitian trade union movement, Ulrick Joly, brought a compatriot to see me in Paris, introducing him simply as "Lesly". A few days later, having apparently passed muster, I was phoned by the mysterious visitor who revealed himself as Théodore.
His loyalty to Moscow was not to be shaken in exile, but by the time he returned to Haiti, Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost had taken hold, and he was quick to adjust. His reasonableness, pragmatism and calm - qualities in short supply in Haiti in the chaotic years immediately following the fall of the Duvalier regime - won support, and in 1987 he ran for president in elections which the army bloodily cancelled in mid-vote.
Théodore changed the party's name to the more user-friendly Movement for National Reconciliation, and ran against Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the fresh elections of 1990, considering him a dangerous demagogue. But he could not match Aristide's use of implicit divinity to win mass support, and got only 2% of the votes.
The surreal summit of Théodore's political career came three months after army leaders overthrew Aristide in 1991. They were locked in tortuous negotiations to end the international isolation they had brought down on themselves. The reformed communist leader won the backing of the US ambassador Alvin Adams, a steely Donald Rumsfeld lookalike and counter-terrorism expert; Théodore was considered the ablest candidate to head a coalition government to negotiate the return from exile of his old enemy, Aristide, who was to have reduced powers.
Théodore became an incongruous guest at US embassy receptions and, in a rare touch of vanity, after being named as prime minister in January 1992 by international agreement, handed out visiting cards marked "prime minister designate". He waited months - in vain - for a divided parliament to approve him in the face of army opposition, which included the execution of his bodyguard in front of him.
His old comrades in Marxist clandestinity peeled off in different directions. His deputy Max Bourjolly returned to Paris to drive a taxi, the Stalinist newspaper editor Ben Dupuy climbed on and off the lurching populist bandwagon, and economist Gérard Pierre-Charles publicly confessed he had been wrong about Marxism - and, for a time, threw in his lot with Aristide.
In recent years, Théodore had joined the rag-tag anti-Aristide coalition, but the former maths and physics teacher was also absorbed with a small business making fine cheeses to sell to friends and connoisseurs.
He is survived by his second wife and four children.
· René Théodore, politician, born June 23 1940; died June 1 2003.