Sol Melia Hotel Chain Opens 25th Hotel in Cuba
HAVANA TIMES, Nov. 22 – Spain’s Sol Meliá chain will open the Buenavista Hotel in December, the 25th on the list of hotel installations managed by that company in Cuba, Juan Carlos López, city hotel sales head of the Marketing Department on the island, announced. The new five-star, 105-room all-inclusive is located on Cayo Santa María, on the northern central coast, reported IPS.
Grady…I have no clue how many times you’ve been to Cuba before…What can you expect from a country where entrepreneurship was equal to 0,nothing 25 years ago.The state was the one and only entrepreneur ,with time things have changed though, like my family could run a small butchery business, It was not until the late 90’s when the state decided that it’s sugar industry was declining and bet for let in foreign companies and tourism, ex. 49% of the business in Cuba belongs to Melia Group and they owned the 51%.
In socialist Cuba will take some time for employee owned cooperative hotels to appear , maybe farming cooperative that we have but not in our main tourism industry, I think you missing a big part in how the macro-environment works in socialist Cuba in the Political,Legal and Economical sites they are in control by the mighty government, but since they took power in 1959,so better to worry and target that as priority number one and then talk about enterprises , self owned businesses or any form of market economy working in cuba,thats my idea!In my honest opinion will take more than a decade to see that.
Ivan: A very interesting comment. Here in the US we’ve wrestled with the problem of employee-owned enterprise remaining one-horse operations that cannot proliferate throughout the economy. Meanwhile, capitalistic entrepreneurs have established chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, and the workers are still wage serfs.
The niche that could have been filled by socialist cooperative entrepreneurial chains has been filled instead by non-employee-owned chains. This is maddening! The problem seems to be that the role of the entrepreneur is moralistically misunderstood and smugly disrespected on the Left. This silly moralistic attitude should change, in the US and in socialist Cuba.
Any further ideas?
Thats exactly why I dropped out my B social science degree to study Tourism management ,because something great might come along the way and hopefully there will be direct ownership of enterprise. The way I see it the Spanish Sol Melia is already a big player in the Caribbean.
Where are the employee-owned cooperative hotels? The monopolist Cuban state apparently will go for anything except direct ownership of enterprise by those who do the work.