TOURISM-CUBA: New Slowdown for Motor of Economy

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Jan 10 2003 (IPS) - The Cuban government continues staking its bets on tourism as the new engine of the economy, even though its goal of drawing an annual two million visitors was frustrated for the third year in a row in 2002.

Arrivals were down five percent last year from 2001 levels, with a total number of 1.7 million foreign tourists. But a slight increase in the past few weeks has local authorities breathing easier.

”The situation today is that the tourism industry has begun to recover,” Cuban Vice-President Carlos Lage told IPS.

”We believe the conditions that we have created and the agreements we have reached will lead to a continuation of that tendency,” he added, pointing out that arrivals and occupancy rates perked up in December.

However, Lage acknowledged the vulnerability of the sector to ”international factors outside of our reach,” that can lead to a modification of any forecast.

Varadero, Cuba’s leading resort town, located 185 kms from Havana, received more than 21,000 visitors a day in late December – considered an excellent, albeit late, start for the local high season for tourism.

Local authorities in Varadero expect 21,000 to 23,000 tourists a day until the end of the high season in late March.

They said they also expected around 50 flights a week from Canada – the top source of foreign visitors – as well as a rise in the inflow of European tourists.

The European Union accounts for 56 percent of the foreign visitors to Cuba, who can pay their expenses in euros, the European bloc’s currency, in Varadero and other important resort towns.

Local authorities attributed the contraction of the tourist industry last year to the impact of the slowdown of the global economy and the Sep 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, which hit airlines and the global tourist industry hard.

The drop in arrivals, which was partly responsible for the fact that the Cuban economy grew just 1.1 percent in 2002, had a heavy impact on private room rentals, which cater to foreign visitors.

”It was a terrible year,” Marta López, who lets rooms to tourists, told IPS. ”Many of us had to pay our taxes (250 dollars a month per room) out of our savings, although the situation began to rally in December.”

Néstor Delgado, who also rents rooms to foreign visitors in Havana, said occupancy rates began to increase in December much later than was normal in the years prior to the Sep 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, which marked a downturn in global tourist flows.

”The normal situation was that by late November or early December, all of the private rooms to let in my neighbourhood were occupied – a situation we haven’t seen in the past two years,” Delgado explained to IPS.

The number of private rooms to lease throughout Cuba rose from 37,000 to 40,000 last year.

In December, a new international airport began to operate on Cayo Coco, with two landing strips and the capacity to receive 1.2 million arrivals a year.

The air terminal, which is run by a private Spanish company as part of a joint venture with the Cuban state, will receive flights mainly from Canada, Europe and several Latin American cities.

Cayo Coco is the biggest key making up the Jardines del Rey archipelago, located off the northern coast of the province of Ciego de Avila, 460 kms east of Havana.

That tourist destination, Cuba’s third most-important after Varadero and Havana, has around 10 hotels run by Spanish and Canadian chains in association with the Cuban government, as well as a nature reserve, El Bagá, which opened in December to eco- tourists.

Cuba is working on expanding its range of attractions for foreigners beyond the traditional ”sun and sand” tourism, by putting a greater emphasis on ecotourism, as well as promoting the island as an ideal spot for family vacations, and as a centre for international conventions.

Specialised tourism publications have ranked Cuba alongside countries like the United States, Canada, Brazil and Mexico in terms of it success in developing so-called ”events tourism.”

And despite the travel restrictions making it difficult for U.S. citizens to visit Cuba, 800 people from the United States attended the Havana International Jazz Festival last December.

According to U.S. legislation in place since the 1960s, only U.S. nationals with relatives living in Cuba, and the members of certain groups like students, educators, journalists, doctors or athletes are free to visit this socialist island nation.

Nevertheless, official statistics indicate that some 150,000 U.S. citizens – only 35 percent of whom were of Cuban origin – visited the island in 2001 despite Washington’s four-decade-old trade embargo and travel restrictions.

After Cuba opened its doors to international tourists in 1990, the local tourist industry grew at an average annual rate of 18 percent until 2000.

That made it the driving force behind the recovery of the economy in the second half of the 1990s, after Cuba was plunged into a severe crisis by the loss of its trading partners caused by the demise of the Soviet bloc at the beginning of that decade.

Some 15 foreign firms currently run around 50 hotels in Cuba. Between 1990 and 2000, 200,000 new jobs, indirectly or directly linked to the tourism industry, were created.