Fantasy Island: Royal Caribbean parcels off a piece of Haiti.

An enormous ship rises over the horizon, ten stories high. Fishermen pause to watch from their rafts as the thing they call the "sea monster" sails into the secluded harbor, lets down its dinghies, and deposits 2,000 tourists on the shores of the hemisphere's poorest island.

It's Haiti. but not to the passengers. There is no stamp on their passports and most of them don't know where they are. the Royal Caribbean Cruise Liner's flier said they'd be arriving at "LABADEE" -- which is part of Haiti, say small letters buried in the flier's text. A reservation agent for Royal Caribbean tells tourists that the ships sail to "our private island" (a description echoed by the tape recording potential tourists hear if she places them on hold). When pressed, the agent adds that "the island" is located "off the coast of Hispaniola."

In fact, the beach is part of Haiti's mainland -- a destination hard to market to tourists. Tour groups have booked it as "Magic Island." Caribbean cruise charts routinely leave Haiti unnamed, or erase it from the map altogether. Resort letterhead sometimes fudges geography: Ibo Beach gave its return address as "Cacique Island. The Caribbean" until the resort was burned down a few years ago.

At Labadee, the deception is buttressed by physical barriers. Thick jungle surrounds the beach. Beyond that a ten-foot-high iron wall, watched by armed guards, spans the accessible perimeter.

Access by land is difficult, as I found out. I took a seven-hour ride over a potholed road from the capital; another hour of pummeling turns on a winding, rocky throughway from Cap Haitian, Haiti's second-largest town, finally, I descended a quarter-mile on foot to the ocean to hitch a ride on a rowboat around the bay with a man named Lesevye ("The Savior." in Haitian creole). At the gate, there is an entry fee of thirty dollars, about one-eighth an average Haitian's annual income.

Large engines hum in the background as a Haitian kompa band strikes up a number and passengers meander down the pier. Local waiters form a phalanx on the shore. armed with trays of coco locos. Plastic floaties set off a brief commotion as tourists sort themselves into those who prefer to lie prostrate in the lukewarm, knee-deep surf and those who belly-up on the sand. The sun is gold. The beach shines like silver. Alcohol and suntan oil are flowing.

It's picture-perfect until you look closer. The ship's buffet waiters are neither Haitian nor black, but white and from places like Croatia and Slovakia. They earn minimum wage. one of them tells me. But their attire and duties indicate they are higher up on the ship's food chain than the local staff. (Royal Caribbean spokesman Rich Steck says that the ship hires staff from fifty-two countries. He adds that the ship-deck bar waiters are all West Indian.)

As I'm pondering the staff hierarchy, around the bend comes a sinewy Haitian staffer, panting as he pushes a woman uphill on a neon plastic vehicle with an attached beach umbrella. She wears beetle sunglasses and a muu-muu. She's got an ice-cream bar in one hand. In the other. she's carrying one of those generic wooden black-man-in-a-barrel knick-knacks sold in Caribbean tourist markets. (Pull the man out of the barrel and up pops an erection on a spring.) They arrive under a tree and she stands up. "Oh, this is DEE-lightful!" she says.

By noon the beach is awash with food, reclining foreigners, and genuflecting Haitian waiters, an alarming vision on the shores of a nation born from the only successful slave revolution in world history. Here are mesmerizing banquets of beef and gravy, stacks upon stacks of honeybuns, and a Haagen-Dazs stand in the surf. According to Royal Caribbean, on a typical seven-day cruise the ship's passengers will consume 50,000 pounds of food and 12,000 gallons of alcohol for a total of 49 million calories -- enough to sustain 35,000 Haitians for the week.

Royal Caribbean has been quietly docking on Haiti's north coast since January 23, 1995, when it became the first company with a major investment in Haiti to return after civilian government replaced military rule on October 15. 1994. The timing was opportune. Plagued by a ravaged economy, residual political unrest, and 7,000 unemployed soldiers, the Haitian government was willing to bargain.

Under the resulting deal, Royal Caribbean got dirt-cheap entry, minimal regulation, and tactful silence. The Haitian government earns less than $30,000 a week from the ship, but, as Haiti's minister of tourism, Maryse Penette, says, "We need to start somewhere. With no tourism cachet and fewer than 800 operative hotel rooms in the nation, the Royal Caribbean's floating infrastructure is Haiti's best choice." (The United States may have been encouraging, too. U.S. Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Bernard Aronson, who formed U.S. policy with the Caribbean during the coup years, left his post in July 1993 and became a director of Royal Caribbean Cruises.)

On the other end of the deal, while paying a tax of $6 per passenger -- a pittance compared with $65 per head in Bermuda -- Royal Caribbean charges up to $300 a day per passenger. With its fleet of eleven ships. the company raked in profits of nearly $150 million in 1995 and revenues of more than $1 billion in 1996.

These figures are climbing. This year. Royal Caribbean saw one of its heaviest booking seasons ever (in January, it booked a company record of 102.430 passengers in a single week -- 2.5 a second). And of all the cruise ship's stopover ports. Labadee is the company's ideal: "It's super-cheap, it's pretty, and there's minimal contact," says Michelle, a Royal Caribbean diving instructor. "Contact is disturbing to the passengers."

It's no wonder. Happily ensconced on the shores of paradise, many of these tourists have no idea that just over the walls are shanty-towns, hunger, and death-squad alumni roaming free more than two years after U.S. and U.N. soldiers helped dislodge the military regime. Nor do they know that not far away lie some of the hemisphere's most notorious sweatshops. And Royal Caribbean hasn't taken pains to tell them about the refugee boats and the cocaine shipments that share their seas.

Tourists -- some on their first holiday in years -- might not want to hear such disturbing news about their vacation spot. Royal Caribbean banks on this assumption -- especially when the disturbances are its own doing. A federal grand jury indicted the company in December for dumping thousands of tons of oily sewage water into the Caribbean seas. and Royal Caribbean may face millions of dollars in fines. Royal Caribbean was not only charged with dumping over a period of four years. but also with systematically altering log books to cover it up. and lying to federal investigators. So. in the general spirit of fantasy. that is its expertise, when Royal Caribbean first learned it was being investigated two years ago, it created an environmental front-program and made its crew wear Save The Waves buttons. It even told passengers not to throw anything overboard.

After lunch Lesevye takes me out to sea to meet some fishermen. As we approach, I see that one of their sails is a tattered imitation of an American flag. On deck, a few fish lie in a plastic bucket. The men claim that the ship scared off the fish and they describe the ongoing battle over their crawfish traps: They set them on the ocean floor each day. and every now and then the ship staff dive down with knives and rip them up. (The traps ruin the snorkeling, according to Doug, one of the dive instructors.) It's a symbolic but otherwise pointless quarrel. since the locals tell me they never catch much in the traps. and it's not a great beach for snorkeling anyway.

Every so often the territorial battle heats up. "One day I went too close to the ship beach," says one of the fishermen. The guards handcuffed me and put me in the jail. You know what that means in Haiti. I didn't get out for three days." The men begin to denounce the ship -- it took their beach, they say; it only hires the local boss's friends; the fish are all gone.

But when I ask what they'd like to see change, the men agree: more ships to Labadee.

Over the course of ten years, many of the locals have come to depend on the ship. It first landed here January 25, 1986, just weeks before the dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier -- who had leased the land to Royal Caribbean -- fled to France. British journalist James Ferguson writes that on the ship's inaugural visit, "several thousand demonstrators openly confronted troops and police in the largest expression of defiance yet seen" in the north. The resort, he writes, "was believed to be the lucrative creation of the disgraced finance minister. Frantz Merceron."

Soon. however, the ship became a provider of jobs and a carrier of wishes. and when an embargo was placed on Haiti's military regime between 1991 and 1994, the villagers say that Labadee was hit especially hard. "When the ship finally returned," says Lesevye, "it was like the return of hope."

Jacques Bartoli, a crafts and art collector based in Port-au-Prince who promotes Haitian culture through festivals and shows of Haitian art abroad, sums up the general relief of the business community. "We were trying and hoping so hard, and when at last the ship decided to come back. we were like -- whew! Finally."

Today, in a land of 85 percent unemployment. Royal Caribbean provides sixty coveted jobs to locals. But otherwise Royal Caribbean's fortune doesn't spread far beyond the beach. The food and drink -- even the tropical fruits and vegetables -- come from Miami. Several dozen craftsmen sell their goods at the ship-site craft market just off the beach, but most tourist dollars are spent on board in the casinos and in the boutiques that sell Caribbean crafts and clothes. Labadee has no roads, no schools, no hospital, and no clean water. The children are pot-bellied from malnutrition.

Norm, a goat-bearded U.S. expatriate who lives on a nearby beach, has watched Labadee's transition from fishing village to company town. He defends Royal Caribbean, recalling that ten years ago the rooftops of the village were thatch, not sheet-metal, and there was no electricity at all.

Lesevye is generally consistent in his praise of the ship, but when he hears what Norm says, he wonders aloud whether the ship hasn't made enough money off of Labadee to provide more than a few light bulbs.

Royal Caribbean spokesman Rich Steck points out that the cruise line is the largest employer on Haiti's northern peninsula, and that the company pays its employees well above Haiti's minimum wage.

"There are no complaints from the workers," he says. "In fact, I just don't understand how they are always so sweet and amenable."

The locals are not always so docile. In April, the cruise line suspended its trips to Labadee when Haitians protested the ship's arrival at Labadee by barricading a nearby zone (called Fort Bourgeois) and demanding that the company employ more locals. The problem was resolved, Steck says, when the villagers unblocked the road after Royal Caribbean agreed to increase the number of Haitian employees and to let a local band perform at their site. "We're real pleased that this whole thing got resolved so fast." he says.

The incident does not indicate Haiti's bargaining power so much as it illustrates the country's vulnerability. Royal Caribbean isn't promoting Haiti; it's taking passengers to an imaginary paradise. Under that pretense, it can sail anywhere with good weather, an isolated beach, and an acquiescent government. It can dictate, for the most part, its own terms of entry. And, like the foreign companies that use sweatshops in Port-au-Prince, it can leave without warning.

Labadee is a model of the growing industry of immaculate tourism: luxurious forays by Americans and Europeans into secluded provinces of the Third World, with little or no economic impact. The sites serve as pleasant and unobtrusive backdrops which, by design or coincidence, are often anonymous. And the ports-of-call rarely benefit as much from the deal as do the mega corporations that market and merchandise their shores. Proponents of large-scale tourism argue that resorts and cruise ships bring in much-needed foreign exchange. The World Tourism Organization estimates a global average input of $679 for each tourist's arrival. And the World Travel and Tourism Council in London calculates that international tourism created jobs for one in ten workers on the globe in 1995 and generated 23 percent of total employment in the Caribbean. But perhaps the more salient issue has been who controls the market and who pockets the money.

In 1989, the trend in marketing all-inclusive sites in the Caribbean spurred a four-year battle between Caribbean hoteliers and the cruise lines. The battle ended in 1993 when the Caribbean Hotel Association recommended increased regulation of the cruise industry and higher head taxes. Florida's Caribbean Cruise Association, representing fourteen cruise lines including Royal Caribbean, responded by suspending its association with the Caribbean Tourism Organization.

Long-time hotelier Suzanne Seitz, an American who came to Haiti in the 1960s, insists that if Haiti wants to turn things around, it will have to call Royal Caribbean's bluff, and celebrate its cultural heritage rather than disguising it.

It worked before, Seitz points out. In the 1960s, Haiti attracted the rich, the famous, and the adventurous. Guests like Mick Jagger, Ali MacGraw, Kurt Vonnegut, and Harlem dance legend Katherine Dunham caroused Haitian hideaways like Dunham's sprawling hammock-slung voodoo temple at Habitation Le Clerc, established on the land of Napoleon's brother-in-law; or the Hotel Oloffson, back then the Grand Hotel Oloffson, which Seitz and her husband ran for nearly twenty years. Graham Greene set his novel The Comedians there (Richard Burton played Seitz's husband in the movie) and they once kept alligators in the pool. "That," says Seitz, "was no anonymous Love Boat destination." Seitz now consults with the Ministry of Tourism to promote Haiti's local scene.

Others are less optimistic about the potential of resort tourism to broaden out into the local economy. They suggest small-scale alternatives including ecotourism, study-groups, adventure tours, and retirement communities. Camille Chalmers, head of Haiti's Platform for Alternative Economic Development, sees today's tourist as an ambassador of cultural imperialism. He says that he would opt for no tourism at all over what Haiti has now. At the very least. Chalmers says, "we should make our culture, our history. the selling point of tourism. We have a unique history -- the site of a slave revolution that defeated Napoleon's army and became the globe's first black republic."

Bartoli says, "We should showcase our art. Haitians have a strong craft tradition, unlike anywhere else in the Caribbean, and Haiti is the source of most of the crafts sold from this region." Haiti is also the best seller at auctions of Latin American art in the United States. At a 1991 auction at Christie's, 93 out of 133 paintings in a showing of Latin American works came from Haiti.

Just beyond the Labadee peninsula in the small town of Milot stands a tremendous fortress built by Haiti's first king after the former slaves defeated the French. Moise Jean Charles, mayor of Milot. is struggling to build up tourism to local sites such as this. "We may not make as much money," he says. "but we can be sure that what we do make will go back into our own pockets."

Back on the beach. a horn sounds. Bathers collect themselves and head for the pier. The ship draws in its dinghies one after the other and moves away. On shore. the electric generators stop. and the Haitian staff begins to pick up the litter. check equipment, count tips, and prepare for a return across the water to their out-of-sight village. But first, one of them takes a moment to sort through the rubbish in hopes of some castaway bit of treasure from the blan -- a creole word that means both white and foreigner, and implies privilege.

The way he looks wistfully off into the distance makes me think of a line from Zora Neale Hurston, who traveled in Haiti in the 1930s. "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board." I recite. "Well," he says, "do you know what we say in Haiti? -- `A goat knows it's his only when it's in the stomach."' He laughs and continues to dig through a plastic bag of discarded suntan oils and greasy hamburger buns as the cruise ship glides off into the horizon.