Haiti has never been the classic Caribbean getaway: Coup d’Etats, looting, natural disaster, terror squads, always a bit on the brink of civil war. But when I was visiting a friend in 2000 in his circular Bauhaus-style mansion  high above Port-au-Prince, life felt good, against all odds. From the concrete-shaped pool, glasses of 15-years-old Rhum Barbancourt at hand, we were gazing over the leafy suburb of Pétion-Ville towards the Caribbean Sea in the distance. Life felt additionally bubbly when we were rocking the world in white rocking chairs downing G&Ts at the white gingerbread mansion of Hotel Oloffson. But here again a dark side opened: The hotel once had been the setting for Grahame Greene’s “The Comedians”, a novel about Haitian dictator Papa Doc and his infamous secret police, first called the Cagoulards, “Hooded Men”, later “Tontons Macoutes”, either known for stoning and burning opponents of the dictator alive.

Hooded men suddenly appeared on the streets of Jacmel, a beachside town on the south-western finger of Haiti, while we were spending a weekend there.   Merengue music was blaring from huge loudspeakers, the air was salty from the nearby ocean, the sky a brilliant blue, everything was brimming with tropical patina. Amid the pastel-colored buildings adorned with intricate French ironwork, men with rippling muscles and bare chests covered entirely in black paint were filling up the streets. All were wearing bull horns above their black hoods and carried whips. Everywhere else in the Americas would have tipped on a simple parade – here it came as a slightly chilling moment until I learned that the hoodmen just followed a tradition of enslaved people who once ridiculed their slave masters with their own mini-carnival being banned from taking part at the real carnival.

Outside of Jacmel, we finally found the classic Caribbean dream: Past palm-fringed beaches and the azure Caribbean Sea we went to Bassin Bleu, where we scrambled among huge boulders and dense vegetation from one striking blue pool to the next, each crowned by a cascading waterfall. No better place to cool off in the hotbed of danger in Haiti.