Behind the bar of a once derelict warehouse turned boutique hotel, Georges Boursiquot is dressed in his signature Brooks Brothers shirt, mixing a cocktail made with a dark rum — “handcrafted in small batches” — he bottles under the brand Bomuzack. Across the room, a birthday celebration is underway in what’s a rare busy night at L’auberge Du Vieux Port hotel as diners enjoy meals of fried pork and roasted fish with fried plantains and sorghum in the small dining area to the soothing sounds of Haitian . Ten years ago, Boursiquot and his wife Marguerite Baril-Boursiquot, both Haitian, did what many in the country’s burgeoning diaspora long dreamed of: They permanently moved back to Haiti.
With personal savings from the sale of their Brooklyn brownstone andloans from banks and the U.S. Agency for International Development to encourage investments in a post-quake Haiti, they bought a former coffee warehouse along Jacmel’s famous Rue du Commerce.
Over three years, they worked at transforming its centuries old French-style architecture into a modern-day boutique hotel with 12 rooms named after some of Jacmel’s most famous attractions, and a bar made from the original warehouse’st 326-year-old trusses. But what began as a mission to “come back home and do the right thing,” after spending most of his life outside of Haiti after fleeing under the brutal Duvalier dictatorship regime, has since turned into “an economic disaster,” says Boursiquot, 71. He now f.