How Tourist Agencies Are Scamming Vacationers to Cuba
Twenty years after her first idyllic trip to Cuba, Marina, from Spain, discovers a devastated country and deplorable service in 5-star hotels.
HAVANA TIMES – Piles of garbage on street corners, blackouts, expensive hotels without enough food, hole-ridden towels, mosquito infestations, beggars, desolate streets, and people everywhere with only one plan in mind: to leave Cuba. The Island that Marina visited this summer with her family bore little resemblance to the one she knew in 2004.
With that idyllic memory still fresh, she booked a trip this past August—including Havana and Cayo Santa María (Villa Clara)—through a travel agency in her native Andalusian town, whose name she prefers not to disclose. The experience, however, was so disastrous that upon returning, the group filed a complaint with the tour operator.
To start with, they were greeted at the Jose Marti International Airport by a blackout, something she had not expected to encounter in the terminal itself, and which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. In Havana, they were shocked by the uncollected trash everywhere. “The stench is unbearable,” she told 14ymedio. “And it’s a breeding ground for disease.”
The visible hunger also unsettled her, particularly the line of elderly people, women, and children outside El Asturianito, waiting for employees of the popular restaurant across from the Capitolio building to hand out customers’ leftovers. “We didn’t see that the last time—not at all.”
Marina never imagined that in two decades, the historic center would not only fail to improve but would worsen to the extreme. Nor that Havana would no longer be the city where old Cuban music sprang from every corner: “Havana used to have live musicians playing everywhere all day long, and now we only saw that at the Floridita and La Bodeguita del Medio bars, and that was it.” LIkewise they would hardly encounter any foreign visitors.
“We asked what was going on, why everything was so neglected, and people told us that tourism is now run directly by the Armed Forces, and since they took over, everything has gone downhill,” says Marina, without knowing for sure that in 2016 the military indeed took over the most profitable businesses from Habaguanex, which had been run by the Office of the Historian under Eusebio Leal, and placed them under the GAESA business conglomerate.
The absence of tourists was especially noticeable at the Hotel Nacional, where they stayed—just as they had on their first trip to Cuba, when Cubans themselves were barred from such establishments. The lack of international guests contrasted with the number of Havana residents who “came to have a drink, listen to music, and quite a few who went to the pool.” Their guides explained that these occasional clients were “mostly government supporters.”
Not just anyone can pay the 6,000 pesos per person (almost 14 USD at the informal exchange rate) for access to the Nacional’s pool when the average monthly salary barely reaches 7,000.
Dollarization also struck Marina, who said money changers even approached them inside the hotel. “People would come up and say, ‘If you want to exchange, I’ll give you the rate,’” she explains. And that “rate” matched the daily numbers published by El Toque. How was it possible that in a state hotel foreign currency was being traded on the side? Marina described the atmosphere as “tense”: “We felt the weight of the State everywhere—people were silent, we tried to talk to them, but they were tight-lipped.” That, she said, was the same as twenty years ago.
But it was very different with Cubans on the street, who—unlike in 2004—now dare to talk about everything. “They knew by heart what was happening in Spain, because they all want to go there, and they complained bitterly that life in Cuba is unbearable.”
“Every few minutes we’d meet someone who said, ‘I’m leaving for Spain on such-and-such a date,’ or, ‘I’ve already got my flight, I’m going to Huelva, my wife’s been there two months already and my daughter’s in school,’ or, ‘I’ve got a job as a glassworker thanks to some friends there,’” Marina recalls. Such being evidence of the exodus spurred by Spain’s Democratic Memory Law, which grants nationality to descendants of emigrants and whose application window closes this month. “People were desperate to speed up the paperwork because the deadline is October.”
The stories people told her also made sense of something she noticed on the flight to and from Madrid: “There were far more Cubans than tourists.”
They did not experience blackouts in Havana, she says, something hotel staff had already assured them: “They told us their power cuts were minimal because they had their own generators, unlike other places. In fact, on the second day we saw the Capri Hotel completely dark at around 9 pm. I imagine the guests there were badly affected.”
As for hotel conditions, her group kept saying among themselves: “Look at what we paid, and this feels like a three- or four-star, because while maintenance is okay, it’s not what it should be.” They could not have imagined the worst was yet to come in Cayo Santa María, where they stayed not in just any hotel, but one marketed as five-star: the Iberostar Selection Ensenachos. “The Nacional is ultra-luxury compared to this!” Marina insists.
“We were shocked by the total neglect,” she says. Like a litany, she enumerates: “Gardens with green puddles swarming with mosquitoes biting viciously, blue mangrove crabs invading the whole complex, tiny black birds like little crows [totíes] snatching food from tables…”
For a Spanish hotel, she complains, “European standards aren’t being met at all.” The contrast with her first stay at the same resort was glaring. “Back then everything was clean, very proper. Now, no: now they cover a dish with a piece of plastic wrap. No proper refrigeration. We were eating warm yogurt and completely melted ice cream.” The poor presentation of food—and nobody to fix it—was the least of their problems.
There wasn’t even enough food at the buffet. “When we arrived at the restaurant, they told us: everything’s gone, only two sausages and two hamburgers are left.” There were six in their group. Each day it was the same: hamburgers, sausages, chicken, occasionally some fish. “What changed were the sauces and colors, but it was always the same junk food,” she says. “One day I ordered a salad, and I swear it looked like they pulled it from the trash bin and put it on my plate, it was disgusting.” The group’s greatest fear was getting gastroenteritis or, worse, dengue.
Marina goes on with more horror stories: “Everywhere was filthy. Towels with holes. In the bathroom, a tiny bar of soap, not even wrapped. In a five-star hotel!” In a way, she understood: “They don’t have staff. Four miserable workers keep the place running, clearly fed up and unmotivated.”
By the second day, they were thinking of leaving, and by the third, they contacted their agency in Spain to cut the stay short. The night they skipped at Ensenachos, per their package, they paid out of pocket to stay at the Nacional instead—over 200 euros.
“We’ve asked our agency to at least refund us for that night we skipped in the Cayos,” she laments. “And we also told them that what happened to us, what they’re doing to tourists, is a scam.” A small agency, she adds, cannot afford to send clients to such places without warning. “Why do tour operators keep selling packages knowing there are blackouts, food shortages, and abandoned resorts?”
Abandoned “like ghost ships,” she says, citing the Iberostar Selection Hotel in Havana, which occupies the city’s tallest building, the controversial Torre K. “We were told it was built with government money, millions of dollars, and handed to Iberostar to manage. But from the outside it looked closed, no activity,” Marina says. “I would never, ever set foot in there, it scares me, it’s a horrible place.”
She admits she had read in the press that things were bad in Cuba, “but not this bad.” Her testimony to 14ymedio nonetheless puts flesh and blood on the official statistics that show month by month the decline in tourism. Between January and August this year, Cuba received a total of 1,259,972 international visitors—21.64% fewer than in the same period of 2024. In the boom years between 2015 and 2019, the Island welcomed more than double that figure.
Her story also illustrates the difficult situation faced by Spanish hotel chains in Cuba, especially Melia and Iberostar, which Cinco Días reported on harshly last month. For that financial daily, these tourism giants—who, despite all warnings, “continue to double down on staying and growing in Cuba”—have found themselves caught in a “perfect storm.” There is simply no way to make the numbers add up on the Island.
In this context, the Barceló group, also Spanish, rewarded 400 of its travel agents from Spain and Portugal this past September with a trip to Cuba for boosting sales to the Island since the start of the year. A piece of news that may answer Marina’s questions about tour operators’ practices.
Still, she insists she will return. “Because I love it, because the nature is fantastic, because that’s Cuba’s future,” she explains. “But of course, I’ll come back when they stop scamming me.”
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.