Rebuilding Haiti: Open for business AS IF anyone needed reminding that Haiti is often synonymous with poverty and tragedy, on Christmas Eve more than three dozen emigrants from the country drowned after their overcrowded boat sank off the eastern tip of Cuba. Even before a massive earthquake in January 2010 devastated the capital, Port-au-Prince, Haiti was a stain on the conscience of the Americas. Now Michel Martelly, the new president, wants to change his country's image from basket case to business opportunity. His officials talk up the tourist potential of 1,700km (1,060 miles) of coastline, and the attraction for investors of a productive workforce and tropical crops like mangoes and coffee. "The Haitian people are not looking for handouts, but for a hand up - for jobs and work that will restore their dignity," Mr Martelly told a recent investment conference sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank. Aid officials say that Mr Martelly is the most pro-business president since Haiti moved towards democracy in the 1980s. He has pledged to create 500,000 jobs in three years, which would make a significant dent in an unemployment rate of about 40%. A start has already been made. In November officials cut the ribbon on a $257m industrial park near Cap Haïtien, the second city. Anchored by a South Korean clothing manufacturer, the park will create 80,000 jobs directly and indirectly, they say. Another South Korean firm, LS Cable and System, is mulling setting up a factory. Work is due to start this year on the first new international hotel in Haiti in decades, to be operated by Marriott. The government hopes to cut the steps needed to set up a business from 12 to two and to loosen curbs on foreign ownership of property. Laurent Lamothe, the foreign minister, who is also a telecoms entrepreneur, wants to use Haiti's embassies and consulates as investment advice centres. But the investment drive faces obstacles. The biggest is poor infrastructure. Electricity costs 23 cents a kilowatt-hour, against 14 cents next door in the Dominican Republic. Although Haiti has had some success exporting mangoes, producers still lose up to half their crop on miserable roads. Even basic lodging is expensive. Mr Martelly is a politically inexperienced populist. He will find it hard to get business-friendly reforms through a legislature in which his party has few seats and which rejected his first two choices for prime minister. The government is dithering over whether to renew the mandate of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, a body set up after the earthquake to co-ordinate foreign aid. Mr Martelly may be right that to attract private investment Haiti needs to change its image of eternal aid supplicant into one of a hard-working place. But it also needs to change realities on the ground, and that may be harder.