By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, May 18 1999 (IPS)

Around 300 people from all over the world will celebrate the arrival of the new millenium dancing to the rhythm of Caribbean music in a posh hotel in the capital of Cuba, during a week-long stay organised by a London-based business club.

Club Cuba XXI, the promoter of the “fiesta” to kick off on Dec 27 and wind up on Jan 2, 2000, is a group of investors with interests in the Americas, Europe and Asia, according to the United States-Cuba Economic-Commercial Council.

The itinerary will include a drive in classic 1957 Chevrolets through Old Havana, and a visit to the El Floridita restaurant, one of the haunts of late U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway in the years he lived on the island.

The participants will dine by torchlight in the Plaza de la Catedral, enjoy a day at the beach skin-diving or sailing, or playing golf nearby, and attend a reading by Colombian Nobel Literature prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The traditional New Year’s eve dinner and the 21st Century Dance will be held in the gardens of the National Hotel in downtown Havana, to the rhythms of one of the island’s leading pop music bands, Los Van Van.

Jan 1 will begin with a choral mass in the Havana Cathedral, dedicated to “Arriba los Corazones” – a fund-raising campaign to “promote the well-being of all Cuban children.”

But the week of activities will be just one of the myriad options aimed at drawing a veritable flood of tourists to meet the new century in Cuba.

Also expected is a rise in the number of visits by Cubans residing in the United States keen on experiencing the turn-of-the- century with those they left behind in Cuba.

The Club Cuba XXI initiative is just one expression of the consolidation of Cuba as a major tourist centre in the Caribbean, due to its ability to combine sun-and-beach tourism with eco- tourism and historical and cultural attractions.

Cuban Vice-President Carlos Lage said last Friday that the tourist sector was experiencing a boom, and that at an international level, interest in visiting the largest of the Caribbean islands was growing fast.

The Ministry of Tourism reported that in the first quarter of the year, just under half a million – 497,800 – tourists visited the island – a 31.9 percent rise with respect to the same period last year. The main sources of visitors were Canada, Germany, Italy, France and Spain.

Nearly half of all visitors – 45.6 percent – spent some time in Havana. Varadero beach resort, 140 kms from Havana, set a new record in hotel and villa occupation of 17,600 vacationers in a single day.

An increase was also seen in the number of visitors to Vueltabajo, 176 kms east of the capital, where Cuba’s best tobacco is grown, and the site of the Valley of Vinales, dubbed “Cuba’s Natural Cathedral.”

According to Miguel Chang, the representative of the Ministry of Tourism in that region, by late March the number of visitors to Vueltabajo was 43 percent higher than in the same period last year, while tourism to the region had already brought in 4.9 million dollars.

In Vueltabajo, tourists visit tobacco plantations and see how the tobacco that goes into Cuba’s famous cigars is cured, explore caves or climb nearly two kilometres to visit “Los Aguaticos” – a community that lives on a flat-topped hillock, whose members claim to cure everything with water.

The latest expression of the boom in foreign investment was last Friday’s inauguration, 80 kms from Havana, of the Brizeeses Superclub Jibacoa hotel, a 17 million-dollar joint venture of the group Cubanacan SA and Jamaica’s Superclub chain.

The French chain Accor, which operates around 3,000 hotels in 142 countries, announced this week that it would have 10 hotels running on the island by the end of next year, a number that is to rise to 30 according to an agreement with Cuba’s Gran Caribe chain.

Spain’s Sol Melia, Europe’s third-largest hotel chain and a pioneer in foreign investment in Cuba, expects the number of hotels it administers here to rise from 12 to more than 25 by the year 2005.

The tourism sector, which set out on the fast lane to development in 1989, drew 1.4 million visitors last year, and aims to pull in around 1.7 million in 1999.

Next year authorities are banking on two million arrivals, and 10 years later seven million, which means 3.5 billion dollars in goods and services will have to be imported.

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