Haiti dreams of tourism revival "We're trying to rebrand Haiti," the tourism minister Stephanie Balmir Villedrouin said in an interview, with her toddler in her arms. We're trying to raise the bar a little bit, and so we're bringing Donna here to help us with our vision. Said Karan, as she was sweeping through the abandoned Hotel Jacmelienne - its seaside swimming pool green with algae, and worse, the overgrown gardens littered with broken glass, coconut husks and discarded condoms - "Oh, we can definitely work with this!" As hard as it is for young Haitians to believe, their country was once a tourist destination. Even during the bad old days of the Duvalier dictatorships and their creepy bogeymen, the Tontons Macoutes, the tourists came. Or at least a few: see Graham Greene's 1966 novel "The Comedians," set incidentally at a hotel and based on the real life gingerbread mansion, the Hotel Oloffson in the capital, still in operation but now run by Richard Morse, front man for the voodoo rock band RAM and the new government's special political envoy to the Americas. Today, nobody visits Haiti for fun, except for returning Haitians from the diaspora. The arrivals lounge at the Port-au-Prince airport is filled with Baptist missionaries, U.N. bureaucrats, and American nurses, not a bona fide tourist in sight. Tourist dollars Yet across the Caribbean, revenues from tourism represent about 16 percent of Gross Domestic Product, and many island nations, like the Bahamas, Barbados, Antigua, generate a third of GDP from visitors. For most of the Caribbean, tourist dollars, euros and pesos are the number one source of foreign investment. Haiti allowed its tourist infrastructure to degrade - amid three decades of political instability, violent coups, a U.S. invasion, hurricanes, earthquake and cholera - but the poorest country in the hemisphere has a lot to offer the adventuresome visitor, according to international planners and Haitian officials. The Creole French cuisine here is some of the best in the Caribbean, its artisans of world renown, its blend of African and Spanish music unique. All this, and voodoo, too. The still evolving plans for Haiti 2.0 envisions Jacmel as a stand-alone destination, meaning that tourists would not land in the chaotic, intimidating, impoverished capital, Port-au-Prince, but arrive directly here via air or boat. With development aid from banks and donor governments, the government of former carnival singer and current President Michel Martelly plans to extend the airport runway at Jacmel so it can accommodate small jets that would shuttle from Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Puerto Rico and Guadaloupe. The forlorn port is also scheduled for restoration to allow the piers to dock big cruise ships. In the late 1800s, Jacmel was an important Caribbean crossroads in what was called the "Pearl of the Antilles," and its downtown still harbors the Creole architecture of wrought-iron balconies and shuttered warehouses for coffee, saffron and orange peel. The old town reminds many visitors of the French Quarter in New Orleans, and it hosts one of the best carnivals in the Caribbean, plus a music festival and film festival, now struggling to gain traction again after the 2010 earthquake. Fall catalog Donna Karan knows Jacmel well. She shot her fall catalog here at the Hotel Florita. The New Yorker gamely jumped into the bed of a pickup truck for a tour around town. They stopped at the Manoir Alexandre, once the most prominent building in town, now a ruin that is slowly being restored by Leon Paul, a Haitian American orthopedic surgeon from New York City. "We want to restore the manoir to its former glory, but as you can see - that is a big job," said Paul as he walked Karan through the property, with its peeling wallpaper, holes in the roof, missing stairs, tilting balcony. Paul said his home town of Jacmel will rise from the rubble, and he promised that someday soon, Haitians and visitors would be sitting in his restored mansion, listening to a band, drinking rum and celebrating. As Karan crawled through the ruins, she did not see despair, but hope. Look at this. These are my colors. The rust, yellow and blue. Take a picture. This is perfect!