Tourism or Death!
HAVANA TIMES – While citizens suffer from inflation, the health and food crisis, the Cuban government continues to allocate resources to build hotels that will not be occupied. Official data confirmed that between January and June 2023, seven out of ten hotel rooms remained empty.
Other countries (Intourist) have shown that communism and tourism are incompatible. Under communism, everything is free but out of stock. Cuba has no decent food (or toilet paper) to offer tourists, and no FX to import it. Foreign hotel investors have seen their properties confiscated and destroyed. Property rights? Rule of law? Not under communism. Unless you are a communist yourself, like in my opinion the Nation Magazine’s subscribers, Cuba offers nothing. You will go to the DR or PR instead which offer bountiful food and happy citizens who are well-paid to work in the hospitality sector.
Spot on, again.
Here’s the inescapable dilemma.
Cuban tourism has to compete with the rest of the world, and, in particular, the Caribbean area. And their own statistics show that, given a choice, most tourist aren’t choosing Cuba. Why should they? In general, Cuba is just as expensive as anywhere else, or sometimes more so, and ordinary all-inclusive Cuban hotel food is very poor compared to what is available in other countries. But to improve food for the tourists means they must starve their own people.
Plus there are just too many other annoying systematic inconveniences. Here’s just a couple of obvious minor examples:
Want to take a Viazul bus somewhere? What? You have to book it from outside the country? Why can’t you just walk in and buy a ticket, as in times past?
Want to buy a bag of cheese chips at the airport while waiting for a delayed flight home?
You have to pay in foreign currency at the snack bar, and your change is in Cuban pesos. In February 2023, the posted airport snack bar exchange rate was 23 pesos to the USD. Now there’s systematic theft for you. But that’s not all. Ten minutes later, if you buy a can of cola, you can’t pay for it with the same pesos that they just gave you in change. You must pay with even more foreign currency, and then you get to take more useless Cuban pesos home with you. And that’s the last annoying memory the tourist take home with them from their Cuban vacation.
Tourists may visit once. But twice? No. And most of their friends won’t go there either, because word about stupid stuff like that gets around, especially in the internet age. Welcome to the competitive real world, Communistas. That’s the inescapable dilemma for you, in every situation you face. If tourists have alternatives, they won’t usually choose you, just like your own Cuban people wouldn’t either, if they had any other possible alternatives.
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