A Tourist’s Look at the Cuban Tourism Industry

Ken Hiebert*

HAVANA TIMES — According to our tour guide, the biggest source of foreign exchange for Cuba is tourism.  Another Cuban, a critic of the government, disagreed. He told me that the biggest source of foreign exchange is the export of medical personnel. Whatever the truth of this, tourism is a big part of the Cuban economy.

Our tour guide put the number of tourist arrivals each year over 2,000,000 (Wikipedia puts it near 3,000,000). If each one of these people bring $1,000.00 into Cuba, that’s over two billion dollars.

So tourism is vital to the survival of Cuba. But it is a source of tension as well. Cubans are confronted with people who may or may not be in sympathy with the Revolution, but who clearly have more money and more material goods than the average Cuban.

It must be galling to know that some places in Cuba are reserved for foreigners, even if this is part of an effort to bring in more income from tourism.

Not surprisingly, many Cubans who come into contact with tourists want to sell them something.  A few are willing to engage in scams. These are the hustlers or jineteros.

I discussed this in another posting and it provoked some angry responses.  So the meeting of Cubans and tourists is not without stress.

There are numerous sub-categories of tourism in Cuba.  You can bicycle from one end of Cuba to the other. http://travellingtwo.com/13318  There are tours for sports groups and musical groups.  http://canadacuba.com/faq/.

Some people go to Cuba to study (http://www.topuniversities.com/).  “As of 2007, 28,889 international students were studying in Cuba…”  Some of these, at least, are heavily subsidized by the Cuban government and could hardly be said to bring in foreign exchange.

According to one Cuban we spoke to, a woman who was teaching Spanish to foreign visitors, some visitors sign up for classes just to get a longer visa. She had a class of retirees from Italy as well as one person from Croatia. They were not working hard on their Spanish, preferring to hang out with their friends in sidewalk restaurants.

According to our tour guide the biggest group of tourists comes from Canada. And I thought she said the next largest group comes from Argentina, but I have been unable to confirm that.  We ran into some visitors from Brazil and even some from the US.

With certain exceptions Americans are barred from going to Cuba. But we met a family from Georgia who had been visiting in Costa Rica and came to Cuba from there. The Cubans do not stamp their passports and so they can return to the US without US Customs & Immigration being any the wiser. As long as they do not make the news or get into trouble.

Our tour guide was personable and she was willing to be quite frank. She described the tourism of the ’90s as mainly sex tourism. When a choir member asked her why it seemed that Che Guevera was more popular than Castro she started out by saying, “He’s dead.” Then she went on to tell us of his important role in the revolutionary struggle and in the first years after the revolution. She ended by saying, “…and he was good looking.”

We had an amusing experience with what I think the Cubans call “secretism.” The same Cuban man came to a series of our concerts. One of our choir leaders approached him and asked him who he was.  It turned out that he was the Cuban official in charge of our tour and he was the supervisor of our tour guide. Why they couldn’t have said that from the beginning is not clear to me. In any case we had a great time with the two of them. They heard our songs so many times that by the end of our week they were both singing with us.

Whatever stresses are placed on Cuba now could be multiplied if Americans are allowed to travel to Cuba in greater numbers. A television documentary here quoted a high ranking Cuban official to the effect that Cuba would need many more golf courses to accommodate an expanded tourist industry.

Who could have predicted that more than 50 years after the Cuban Revolution, Cuba would be dependent on tourists from wealthy countries?  Marx, Engels, Lenin, Marti, etc. did not write anything on how to deal with such a challenge. The Cubans will be obliged to figure it out for themselves.
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(*) A Canadian tourist who reads HT.