The Cuban Regime’s New Strategy to Attract Foreign Currency
HAVANA TIMES – Facing a liquidity crisis and a growing loss of financial credibility, the Cuban government has launched a new strategy to attract fresh foreign currency: granting greater autonomy to foreign companies in the tourism sector.
The first visible step of this shift was announced on October 17, 2025, when Spain’s EFE news agency confirmed the signing of the first hotel lease agreement between the regime and Iberostar for the Origin Laguna Azul Hotel in the Varadero resort area.
For the first time, a foreign chain will directly lease a state-owned property and manage it autonomously. According to the EFE report, the agreement will take effect on January 1, 2026.
According to Cuban economist Pavel Vidal, this shift by the regime seeks to offer international investors a framework of greater legal and operational security.
“In the face of a loss of financial credibility, they are trying to create arrangements that give more autonomy to foreign companies. They’re starting with tourism because they believe this sector has potential, and it’s where they’ve made multimillion-dollar investments that haven’t been recovered. Moreover, it’s where they could most quickly generate fresh foreign currency to ease the crisis,” Vidal told El Toque.
This year, several international media outlets have confirmed the regime’s multimillion-dollar debts to countries such as Spain, China, and Argentina.
In June 2025, the Catalan business association Foment del Treball denounced the serious situation facing nearly 300 Spanish companies — mostly small and microenterprises — due to the Cuban government’s nonpayment for its imports, which already amounts to more than 350 million euros.
The Mirage of the “Locomotive” Tourism Sector
At the FITCuba 2025 tourism fair held in April, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero told the accredited press that one of the most “audacious” measures to revive the depressed tourism industry would be “the leasing of state-owned tourist facilities.”
This mechanism means that the government becomes the owner-landlord, while the foreign chains assume full operation of the business in exchange for payment in foreign currency. The move is an attempt to stop the hemorrhaging of hard currency and to overhaul a sector that, far from being the economic engine promised by the authorities, has become an economic burden.
Cuba has invested billions of dollars in new hotels in recent years, even during the worst moments of the pandemic and energy crisis, sacrificing investment in essential sectors such as food production and community services.
However, the results have been dismal. According to official data, the country closed 2024 with 2.2 million international visitors, far from the 4.7 million reached in 2018. Projections for 2025 point to about 1.8 million — the worst figure of this century, excluding the pandemic years.
In August 2025, official statistics confirmed an alarming hotel occupancy rate of 21.5%, a drop across four strategic tourism indicators, and a stagnation trend that Cuban economist Pedro Monreal described as “the sixth consecutive bad year.” Monreal, one of the most followed voices in Cuban economic analysis, has been critical of the regime’s investment policy in hotels.
In October 2025, he mocked on social media the tourism minister’s claim that “conceptually, tourism remains the country’s economic locomotive,” questioning what that statement really means given the sector’s decline. “Investment in hotels, business services, and real estate accounted for half of all investment in Havana in 2023 — ten times more than in electricity, gas, and water supply, and more than seventy times more than in community services. What could possibly go wrong?” the economist wrote on his Facebook profile.
Without stable fuel, with widespread blackouts, and with restrictions on international flights from key markets, tourism investment has resulted in losses and underused facilities.
A Survival Strategy
The new model seeks to attract foreign currency not only through fixed rents but also by revitalizing the island’s tourism marketing, which has deteriorated due to years of poor service, shortages, and traveler complaints.
“The tourists who come — almost none are repeat visitors (…). The first shock is the deplorable state of the country’s infrastructure (…). Another thing that surprises them is the large number of Cubans wandering the streets at all hours of the day. The endless stretches of land where absolutely nothing is being produced are another shocking sight (…). Added to that are security problems: thefts, assaults, and scams,” a Havana tour guide told El Toque..
Sources in the sector confirmed to EFE that negotiations with hotel chains are being conducted confidentially, case by case, with no public tariffs or timelines. The first trials will take place in Varadero, Havana, and the northern keys.
More than a structural reform, the measure appears to be an urgent response to the crisis. Cuba faces not only a tourism slump but also a domestic production collapse and an alarming lack of liquidity that threatens basic food and fuel imports.
Far from being a sign of planned openness, this new step seems to be an admission of failure. Cuba bet everything on tourism and now seeks to survive by turning that bet into rental income to ease the foreign currency shortage.
The question is whether this new strategy will be enough to restore investors’ confidence — or if it will merely serve as a brief respite in a crisis that shows no immediate way out.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.
How can a country be allowed to treat their people like this ? I hate the way the government there treats their own people.