“We make no pretense of where we are…The real question is ‘Where is Haiti?’ — and ‘What is Haiti?’ If you are honest, even if you tell them, most passengers don’t know where they are, usually.”

Royal Caribbean International promises Caribbean cruises filled with blue skies, palm trees, and…abject poverty? As Danna Harman reports for the Christian Science Monitor, Royal Caribbean cruise ships dock at the Labadee beach in Haiti to disgorge passengers eager for jet skiing and sunbathing, not unlike Royal Caribbean’s stops in the Bahamas or Bermuda. But somehow Haiti doesn’t have quite the same ring as some of the Caribbean’s more prosperous islands. The cruise line identifies the location as “Labadee, Hispaniola” on its website and describes it as a private, secret destination.

The only real secret about Labadee is the poverty surrounding it. The real Haiti looks like this and like this — a country with the highest HIV seroprevalence rate in the Western hemisphere and a history of United States involvement and homegrown despotism. After driving to Labadee through the hilly countryside of Haiti’s northern coast, I found that the most striking thing about the beach was not its pristine vistas or palm trees, but the cement laid down under the sand to mask the land erosion resulting from overfarming. And while I found it easy to scorn the cruise boat tourists who disembarked, believing they were in Hispaniola, the missionaries quoted in the Christian Science Monitor article are correct. It’s only through tourism and marketing that Haiti will ever recover from its deep economic depression. In a way, the country must hide its true identity in order to sell itself to the clueless consumers who can save it.

llouison