Cuba's Tourism ‘Boom’: a curse or a blessing?

Abstract

The recent Cuban tourism boom has attracted great interest on both the left and right because it is perceived as a threat to the island's socialist system. The question is posed as to how far the island can accommodate millions of middle-class tourists from developed capitalist countries without this eroding the socialist values that underpin the revolution. This paper argues that the prevailing views are too pessimistic and offers reasons why Cuba might be able to absorb far more tourists than it presently does without endangering the system. It concludes that Western views of Cuba's tourist expansion do not fully take into account that its planned nature within a centralised state ensures that tourism delivers benefits that outweigh the problems it creates.

Notes

1 Cuban Office of National Statistics, Havana, 2008, at www.one.cu

2 See, for example, Lisa Francesca Nand, ‘Cuban deals: book a package holiday to Castro's stronghold’, Independent, 6 October 2007: “The staff are polite and efficient, though it is difficult to talk to them … They love their country with a passion but many of them, given the chance would leave”; and Vincent Crump, ‘Off the beaten track in Cuba’, Sunday Times, 23 October 2007: “[The Cuban city of] Trinidad is a good place to observe the economic contradictions of a country caught between its flickering Marxist dream and the rapacious tide of tourism…everyone is after your buck.' For a critique of the sex tourism ‘industry’ in Cuba, see Julia O'Connell Davidson, ‘Sex tourism in Cuba’, Race and Class, 38, 1996, pp 39–48.

3 James Petras & Robin Eastman-Abaya, ‘Cuba: continuing revolution and contemporary contradictions’, at http://petras.lahaine.org, 2007.

4 Cornelia Dean, ‘Conserving Cuba, after the embargo’, New York Times, 25 December 2007, at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25cuba.html

5 Anthony Winson, ‘Ecotourism and sustainability in Cuba: does socialism make a difference?’, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 14 (1), 2006, pp 6–23.

6 UK Department for International Development (dfid), Tourism and Poverty Elimination: Untapped Potential, at http://www.propportourism.org.uk/difd_report.pdf.

7 Ecumenical Council on Tourism, ‘Seeking socially responsible tourism’, 2005, at http://www.ecotonline.org/Pages/Campaignsview,asp?key=Seeking:socially:responsible:tourism%2E.

8 Economist Intelligence Unit (eiu), Country Report: Cuba, London: eiu, February 2008, p 14.

9 Nicolás Crespo & Santos Negrón Díaz, ‘Cuban tourism in 2007: economic impact’, Washington, DC: asce, 1997, at http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/asce/cuba7/crespo.pdf

10 Statistics taken from Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorca; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba

11 ‘Upscale Mallorca: luxe hotels and restaurants are changing the island's image’, Business Week, 5 June 2006, at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_23/b3987102.htm

12 Susan Eckstein, Back form the Future: Cuba under Castro, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

13 Since 2006 the dollar has been replaced in circulation by the Cuban convertible peso (cuc).

14 Winson, ‘Ecotourism and sustainability in Cuba’, p 20.

15 ‘Havana historian says old city restoration benefits all Cubans—not just tourists’, International Herald Tribune, 7 December 2007, at http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/07/news/CB-GEN-Cuba-Old-Havana.php

16 Andrea Colantonio & Robert B Potter, Urban Tourism and Development in the Socialist State: Havana during the ‘Special Period’, London: Ashgate, 2006, pp 25–47.

17 Mark M Miller & Tony L Henthorne, Investment in the New Cuban Tourist Industry: A Guide to Entrepreneurial Opportunities, Westport, CT: Quorum/Greenwood Press, 1997; and Winson, ‘Ecotourism and sustainability in Cuba’.

18 Nelson Espinosa Peña, ‘Protecting biodiversity and establishing sustainable development in the Sabana–Camaguey ecosystem’, paper presented at the Global Biodiversity Forum, 2002, available at http://www.gbf.ch/ab_received.asp?no=8&lg=EN&app=&now=6#4.

19 World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report, 2006, p 21, at http://www.panda.org/news_facts/publications/living_planet_report/index.cfm.

20 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Sugar and Tobacco, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

21 Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

22 Stanley Terkel, ‘Cuba: tourism thriving despite the US trade embargo’, 13 October 2006, at http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4029105.search?query=cuba+tourism+revenues.

23 Orlando Gutiérrez Castillo & Nélida Gancedo Gaspar, ‘Tourism development for the Cuban economy’, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Winter 2002, at http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/revista/articles/view/58.

24 Patrick Pietroni, ‘Health care in Cuba: from revolution to evolution’, International Institute for the Study of Cuba, London Metropolitan University, 2007, at http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/research-units/cuba/articles/pietroni.cfm.

25 Indira AR Lakshmanan, ‘As Cuba loans doctors abroad, some patients object at home’, Boston Globe, 25 August 2005, at http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2005/08/25/as_cuba_loans_doctors_abroad_some_patients_object_at_home/

26 ‘Free universal healthcare has long been the crowning achievement of this socialist state, but the system is now under fire from Cubans who complain that quality and access are suffering as they lose tens of thousands of medical workers to Venezuela in exchange for cheap oil, which this impoverished country desperately needs’. Ibid.

27 Pat Wood & Chandana Jayawardena, ‘Cuba: a hero of the Caribbean? A profile of its tourism education strategy’, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 15 (3), 2003, pp 151–55, emphasis added.

28 Michael Clancy, ‘The globalization of sex tourism and Cuba: a commodity chains approach’, Studies in Comparative International Development, Winter 2002, p 64.

29 Ibid, pp 82–84. Part of the reputation that Cuba has earned might be as a consequence of naivety. Cuba is a warm tropical country and women dress loosely and provocatively. It is common to see women standing on street corners waiting for motorists to pick them up, but to assume that this amounts to prostitution would be wrong. Hitch-hiking is the way that people get around in the transport-scarce city of Havana and the women standing at road junctions are actually doing nothing more than trying to get home. No matter how strange it may seem to those of us accustomed to living in much more dangerous societies, the level of sex-crime in Cuba is minimal in comparison with ours. Women feel perfectly safe hitching lifts even after dusk on city roads.

30 O'Connell Davidson, ‘Sex tourism in Cuba’.

31 Clancy, ‘The globalization of sex tourism and Cuba’.

32 For example, AV Seaton, ‘Demonstration effects or relative deprivation? The counterrevolutionary pressures of tourism in Cuba’, Progress in Tourism and Hospitality Research, 3, 1997, pp 307–320 states in his abstract: ‘Data from Cuba is used to support the theoretical discussion which suggests an intractable paradox—that governments in poor socialist countries which most need tourism to achieve economic growth, may be those most likely to be subverted by it politically’. But in the article itself he admits: ‘No unequivocal claims can be made for the reliability or validity of the data as a representative indication of public opinion on tourism development in Cuba. It is sketchy and impressionistic because the visit was not made to validate academic hypotheses; rather the hypotheses were generated through the observations, a reversal of the standard empiricist research sequence.’

33 http://www.pcc.cu.

34 eiu, Country Report: Cuba.

35 Gilda Fariñas, ‘Aporte a la vida’, Bohemia (Havana), 4 June 2003, at http://www.bohemia.cu/2003/jun/04semana/sumarios/nacionales/articulo1.html.

36 Iliana Hautrive, ‘Aportan trabajadores del turismo un millón de pesos convertibles para la salud’, Trabajadores (Havana), 19 December 2007, at http://www.trabajadores.cu/news/cuba/cuba-octubre-2007/un-millon-de-pesos-convertibles-para-la-salud/?searchterm=trabajadores.

37 Sergei Krushchev, Tony L Henthorne & Michael S Latour, ‘Cuba at the crossroads: the role of the US hospitality industry in Cuban tourism initiatives’, Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 48, 2007, p 411, at http://cqx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/48/402.

38 Ibid, p 412.

39 Chananda Jayawardena, ‘Revolution to revolution: why is tourism booming in Cuba?’, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 15 (1), 2003, p 57.

40 Gutiérrez Castillo & Gaspar, ‘Tourism development for the Cuban economy’.