MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica (Reuters) – The sun-splashed Caribbean’s growing sex tourism industry is contributing to one of the region’s grimmest problems — the world’s second-highest rate of AIDS infection.
Prostitution catering to sex-seeking tourists and a growing trend called “rent-a-dread” has helped push the Caribbean AIDS/HIV infection rate higher than in any area of the world save sub-Saharan Africa, regional experts say.
The Caribbean AIDS crisis is an ominous one for the tourism industry, the region’s leading moneymaker built and marketed on sun, sand, sea and sex.
Sex tourism involves men traveling to poor Caribbean nations, where the regional average annual income is about $3,000, in search of prostitutes.
The beach boy, or “rent-a-dread,” phenomenon sees fair-skinned North American and European women seeking exotic, dark-skinned Jamaican men wearing dreadlock hairstyles for sex, Ian Edwards, a Washington-based spokesman for the Organization of American States, said at a recent conference on sustainable tourism held in Jamaica.
“There’s a mystique that apparently comes attached with the dreadlocks. I’ve seen it here and I’ve seen it in Barbados and it is not rare,” Edwards said.
In the Caribbean 2.4 percent of people aged 15-49 live with the HIV virus or AIDS itself, according to 2002 figures from the World Health Organization. That infection rate trails only sub-Saharan Africa, where 29.4 million people — including 8.8 percent of people in that age bracket — are infected.
By comparison, the infection rate in western Europe is 0.3 percent and in North America is 0.6 percent in the same age group, according to U.N. figures.
More than 501,500 Caribbean residents have the AIDS virus, according to the Caribbean Epidemiology Center, or CAREC, in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.
“Sex tourism is a growing reality and denying it won’t make it go away,” said Lelei LeLaulu, president of Washington-based Counterpart International, a nonprofit group. “It’s tourism that’s designed and packaged for direct physical contact with a local or locals as opposed to eco-tourism.”
THREAT TO DEVELOPMENT
Nations in the region heavily dependent on tourism and most affected by the AIDS epidemic include the Bahamas, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos, Jamaica, St. Martin and Tobago, according to CAREC research.
“The spread of AIDS has become a threat to regional development and regional security in the Caribbean,” Anthony Bryan, a Caribbean analyst at the University of Miami, wrote in a research paper.
Researchers say cultural factors contribute to the spread of AIDS in the region. Caribbean men typically have multiple sexual partners and do not like to use condoms, they say, and some infected Caribbean women are middle-aged, married for many years and unable to ask their husbands to use condoms.
“It is an enormous health issue. It affects lost revenue, general health, the local communities and local culture,” LeLaulu said.
But sex tourism is believed to have little impact on the AIDS spread in Haiti, the worst hit Caribbean country, or communist Cuba.
Haiti has about half of Caribbean AIDS/HIV infections and is plagued by poor education and poor health care, but has few tourists.
Cuba has the lowest rate of AIDS in the Caribbean thanks to a harsh policy of locking infected people away in sanatoriums and the near-absence of hard drugs.
Cuba has become the main Caribbean destination for sexual tourism since the collapse of Soviet communism plunged the island’s economy into crisis and forced many Cuban women to work the streets for dollars, risking disease.
Flights from Europe are packed with men, mainly Italians, seeking sex or romance with Cuban women in Havana. But experts say sexual tourism is not the main cause of AIDS in Cuba since the trade is mainly heterosexual and 70 percent of the 4,000 AIDS cases are among the gay community.
“Sexual tourism is not the main problem. Male tourists from Europe come with their own condoms,” said Pamela Faura, of Population Services International, a U.S.-based organization that promotes safe sex in Cuba with European funding.
But Faura said young Cubans are at risk because they are promiscuous and shun the use of condoms.
By Laura Myers, Reuters
