Haitian tourism falls from 200,000 visitors to 10,000

Haiti had been receiving about 200,000 visitors a year. In the season of 1982 to 1983 it received 10,000. The AIDS story did that, arriving in south Florida among a public already hostile to Haitian boats. Haitians in the United States were asked not to give blood. Newspapers recalled the export of Haitian plasma under the Duvaliers and described ceremonies in which the blood of freshly killed animals is drunk. A businessman flying into New York was told by the passport inspector to open the document himself, because the inspector did not want to touch it. The government closed the few guest houses that had served foreign gay tourists, which was a measure about publicity rather than health. Haiti ended 1982 with imports exceeding exports by some 40 million dollars and no season ahead of it. A bomb went off near the palace on New Year's Eve. The Duvaliers were out and unhurt, and the Te Deum the next day was cancelled for the first time within memory. Their son Nicolas was born on 31 January 1983.

By early 1981 a group of faculty physicians at the University of Miami had worked back through every Haitian patient admitted to Jackson Memorial Hospital over the previous year. What they found fitted neither tuberculosis nor poverty nor hunger. The patients were young, had lived in the United States for a few months to a few years, held ordinary jobs and had been well nourished before falling ill. They arrived with fungal infections in the nervous system, viral infections of the gullet, parasites in the brain, yeast in the mouth, swollen glands in several places and Pneumocystis in the lungs, frequently two or three of these in one person. Pneumocystis appears only where immunity has already failed. One of the group, Margaret, connected the pattern to reports of the same infections in previously healthy gay men. The Miami patients included women and heterosexual men. The condition had no name yet outside a billing category.

The Catholic church in Haiti had long served whoever held the country. It was staffed largely by foreign priests, it educated the elite and neglected everyone else, and after 1966 its bishops were appointed with the approval of Francois Duvalier. The papal visit of March 1983 ended that arrangement in public. Below the hierarchy a different church had been growing for a decade: priests, nuns, catechists and lay organisers working in the slums of Port-au-Prince and in the countryside, running literacy classes and small farming groups, reading scripture with people who had been told for two centuries that their condition was ordained. After 1983 they had cover. One of them was a Salesian named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who preached at St Jean Bosco in one of the poorest quarters of the capital, who was eventually expelled by his own order for his politics, and who was elected president of Haiti in December 1990 with two thirds of the vote.

In July 1981 the government signed a protocol with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture providing for the killing of every pig in Haiti within two years, so that African swine fever should not reach the North American mainland. Peasants were to be compensated and foreign animals brought in afterwards. What the countryside saw was the forced sale, often at distress prices, of the one asset a family could turn into cash in a bad month. Some hid their animals. Others killed them as offerings to the lwa rather than hand them to the blan, and such sacrifices were reported from every part of the country. Within a year registration at rural schools had dropped by thirty percent. On 29 September 1981 Ronald Reagan announced that a Coast Guard cutter would be stationed permanently off Haiti, with other vessels rotating through, to stop boats carrying Haitians toward Florida. The United Nations questioned whether it was legal. Haitian officials spent October in Washington settling their price, and in November American aid was increased.