In Cuba, ‘Fidel Has Always Felt Revulsion Toward Tourism’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.02.06 | 6:40 AM ET
With word coming out of Cuba that Fidel Castro has temporarily handed his presidential powers to his brother Raul, American travelers who’ve long wanted to visit Cuba legally may be wondering whether that day is now on the horizon. It’s obviously too soon to say, but for now, they can find a terrific glimpse inside present-day Cuba in the July 24 issue of the New Yorker. The well-timed story by Jon Lee Anderson, written before the latest news story broke, focuses on how the rest of Fidel’s reign might play out.
Tourism, according to Anderson, once helped save Castro’s regime from collapsing, and it still plays a sizable role in the country’s economy. But most tourists generally don’t leave their all-inclusive beach resorts to meet everyday Cubans.
Anderson writes:
This seems to be the way Castro wants it. “Fidel has always felt revulsion toward tourism, because it encourages prostitution and increases social inequalities,” Aurelio Alonso told me. “Tourism is bad because it creates a contrast between a population that lives very badly and a population that lives very well.”
According to Anderson’s story, though, an influx of travelers could be the least of Cuba’s problems in a post-Fidel world.
As a result of the island’s endemic shortages, almost everyone has some contact with Cuba’s black market. The tension between the public Cuba of rallies and tribunals and this hidden one is growing, and a number of Cubans and American officials I spoke to fear that the pent-up chaos could erupt into open unrest upon Castro’s death: looting, rioting, and revenge killings. Senator Mel Martinez, of Florida, who left Cuba as a fifteen-year-old, in 1962, said, “My hope is that there will be one of those wonderful European revolutions, like the Velvet Revolution, without violence, but because of what’s gone on—the repression and the iron grip of those in power for so long—there could be a vacuum, and that creates a potential for violence.” Cubans worry about how the United States, and the exile community in Miami—which has been poised for Castro’s departure for decades—will respond. For them, and for Castro’s possible successors, this is an exceedingly anxious time.
Email to friend
Twitter
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! Buzz
Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
Tim 08.02.06 | 12:21 PM ET
It always makes me laugh when people justify visiting a place like Burma or North Korea by saying, “Tourism is an agent of change.” Yeah right. How long has Castro been in power now? And how much better are things for the average citizen there? How many more human rights do they have?
We can only hope that after Castro dies, prostitution won’t be the only change that tourism has amplified in Cuba.
Nice excerpt from Lea Ashkenas’ book Es Cuba here: http://www.perceptivetravel.com/issues/0706/aschkenas.html