1982–1983, January 31: (The 4H Disease: Tourism Dies Overnight from 200,000 to 10,000, Open Your Passport I Don’t Want to Touch It, the Guesthouses Closed, F…

1982–1983, January 31: (The 4H Disease: Tourism Dies Overnight from 200,000 to 10,000, Open Your Passport I Don’t Want to Touch It, the Guesthouses Closed, Farmer’s Epidemiology Proves North-to-South Transmission, the $40 Million Trade Deficit, the New Year’s Eve Bomb, and Nicolas François Jean-Claude Duvalier Born at 7:22 A.M.): Given local anti-Haitian sentiment in South Florida, it took little for the AIDS story to catch fire. Haiti was soon portrayed as a breeding ground of the deadly new disease, and Haitians in the U.S. were asked not to give blood. Cambronne’s plasma farming was noted, as were Vodou practices involving the drinking of blood from freshly slaughtered animals. Tourism, already battered by U.S. inflation, recession, boat people, and human rights publicity, simply died overnight — in the 1982–1983 season, total visitors to Haiti were 10,000, compared with some 200,000 a couple of years earlier. One businessman returning to New York was asked by the passport inspector to open your passport — I don’t want to touch it. With bitter humor, Haitians began calling AIDS “4H” — homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. The government quickly closed the few guesthouses that had catered to foreign gays, but this had more to do with publicity than public health; homosexuality was not common in conservative Haiti, though some young men had resorted to homosexual prostitution with foreign tourists for purely economic reasons. Studies showed that once introduced, transmission models in Haiti most closely followed those of heterosexual urban Africa, and that the virus had most likely come to Haiti from North America rather than the reverse — but logic was in the future, and blaming the messenger, the world began to shun Haiti. Well might Simone Duvalier think that Gédé had turned his back. Importing basic foodstuffs, losing tourism revenues, without the fiscal discipline of Mr. Clean, the government ended 1982 on a dour note — exports and imports were out of balance by some $40 million. A bomb exploded on New Year’s Eve near the palace; out partying, the Duvaliers were unharmed, but the traditional Te Deum the next day was canceled for the first time in memory. Hoping perhaps for divine intervention, the Duvaliers had persuaded the peripatetic Pope John Paul II to include Haiti on a March trip through Latin America — the Curia held out until it got its price: retrocession to the Vatican of the right to name bishops and the archbishop. Port-au-Prince was worth a mass. Michèle threw herself into preparations with gusto, pausing only briefly to deliver an heir on January 31 — the president was gowned, scrubbed, and at his wife’s side as Nicolas François Jean-Claude Duvalier came into the world at 7:22 A.M. The line was secure.