Haiti for Lifestyle Magazines

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 04.21.08 | 1:00 PM ET

Jason Wilson reconsiders a magazine story he wrote a decade ago about Haiti, in which he predicted Haitian-grown gourmet coffee offered the struggling country hope. “Ten years later, I now freely admit that this was typical lifestyle-magazine hyperbole,” he writes in The Smart Set. “My excuse? I wanted badly to write a positive story about Haiti, quite possibly the only positive story about Haiti that would appear in the American press that year, or in any year. Looking back on my visit now, I realize how misguided my plans turned out to be.”