NY Times on Tourism in Haiti
Today's New York Times has an article about Labadie, a fenced and heavily guarded tourist resort that 20 minutes to the west of my hometown of Cap-Haitien, Haiti. The article brings out the complexities of trying to build any sort of viable tourism in a nation that has seen such perennial instability, namely, that the only way to build anything attractive to first-world visitors is to completely isolate it from the reality of what the country is actually like. Visitors to Labadie see nothing but green hills, white sand, and smiling merchants. They do not see the houses to which the merchants return in the evening, nor do they seem to care about the squalid, sprawling city that lies behind the hills.
The article encourages and discourages me at the same time.
On the one hand, it is good to see that the Haitian government, which has an "inch-thick master plan for turning Haiti into a big-league destination," is looking to capitalize and expand on what little tourism still flows into the country. On the other hand, it is disheartening because anyone who has lived in Haiti long enough can predict what will probably happen next: The government will reinvest a small part of their profits, pocket the rest, and none of it -- none -- will reach the people who need it most, the ones who desperately need their government to come through and improve the nation's sanitation, education, and health care.
posted by John Adams @ 1:08 PM
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