Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I often say, and my parents used to say as well, that I left Haiti, but Haiti didn’t leave me. Twelve is, I think, young enough to transition somewhat easily, but also to have formed so many memories. I had, actually, a big chunk of primary education in Haiti. Having learned both oral history and written history, I brought a lot of that with me to the US, enough that I was curious when I got here to find out more from this side of things. I think it was, in part, a love for Haiti that continued and also a curiosity about history in general, but Haitian history in particular. There’s a shift, I think, in Haitian cultural history. If you think of the 1960s or ’70s, Haitian cultural history is centered in Haiti. You have Mick Jagger, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — they go to Port-au-Prince, Pétion-Ville. They buy paintings. They bring them back. Everything is very Haitian-centered, and that seems to end in the 1980s. Why did that happen? Yes, there was a time, even in the ’50s, where you had cruise ships going to Haiti, which I’ve always found somewhat interesting because all that time that you had the tourism, that high level of tourism, was still during the dictatorship. And so people were going at that time, anyway — the folks you mentioned and others. Then, in the 1980s, during the pandemic of AIDS, Haiti was designated by the CDC as a . . . Haitians were labeled a high-risk group for AIDS, and we were the only ones designated by nationality. It was Haitians, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and homosexuals. That came out of some cases of people who had contracted AIDS and who came to a hospital here in Miami and were reported to the CDC. Really, that designation killed the tourism industry in Haiti. It was later, after much demonstrations, after a lot of research, it was corrected. But it really killed whatever tourism industry there was in Haiti, which was already a strange kind of tourism anyway because people felt happy to go at a time of very strict dictatorship. There was already something a little strange about that, but whatever tourism industry there was, was destroyed by the AIDS epidemic.…

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