NYT
May 24, 2011
Revolutionary Cuba Now Lays Sand Traps for the Bourgeoisie
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
MEXICO CITY — One of Fidel Castro’s first acts upon taking power was to get rid of Cuba’s golf courses, seeking to stamp out a sport he and other socialist revolutionaries saw as the epitome of bourgeois excess.
Now, 50 years later, foreign developers say the Cuban government has swung in nearly the opposite direction, giving preliminary approval in recent weeks for four large luxury golf resorts on the island, the first in an expected wave of more than a dozen that the government anticipates will lure free-spending tourists to a nation hungry for cash.
The four initial projects total more than $1.5 billion, with the government’s cut of the profits about half. Plans for the developments include residences that foreigners will be permitted to buy — a rare opportunity from a government that all but banned private property in its push for social equality.
Mr. Castro and his comrade in arms Che Guevara, who worked as a caddie in his youth in Argentina, were photographed in fatigues hitting the links decades ago, in what some have interpreted as an effort to mock either the sport or the golf-loving president at the time of the revolution, Dwight D. Eisenhower — or both.
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who maintains close ties with Cuba, has taken aim at the pastime in recent years as well, questioning why, in the face of slums and housing shortages, courses should spread over valuable land “just so some little group of the bourgeois and the petit bourgeois can go and play golf.”
But Cuba’s deteriorating economy and the rise in the sport’s popularity, particularly among big-spending travelers who expect to bring their clubs wherever they go, have softened the government’s view, investors said. Cuban officials did not respond to requests for comment, but Manuel Marrero, the tourism minister, told a conference in Europe this month that the government anticipates going forward with joint ventures to build 16 golf resorts in the near future.
For the past three years, Cuba’s only 18-hole course, a government-owned spread at the Varadero Beach resort area, has even hosted a tournament. It has long ceased to be, its promoters argued, a rich man’s game.
“We were told this foray is the top priority in foreign investment,” said Graham Cooke, a Canadian golf course architect designing a $410 million project at Guardalavaca Beach, along the island’s north coast about 500 miles from Havana, for a consortium of Indians from Canada. The company, Standing Feather International, says it signed a memorandum of agreement with the Cuban government in late April and will be the first to break ground, in September.
Andrew Macdonald, the chief executive of London-based Esencia Group, which helps sponsor the golf tournament in Cuba and is planning a $300 million country club in Varadero, said, “This is a fundamental development in having a more eclectic tourist sector.”
...
Read the full story HERE in the NYT.
Showing posts with label tourism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tourism. Show all posts
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Buena Vista: Cuban band or brand?
Of course, it's both: quality nostalgia guaranteed.
BBC
Buena Vista: Cuban band or brand?
By Michael Voss
BBC News, Havana
Sunday night in Old Havana and dozens of tourists pack into a club on a corner of the colonial Plaza Vieja to hear the sounds of the Buena Vista Social Club.
Leading the night's entertainment is 67-year-old "sonero" Felix Baloy and his big band. Looking dapper in his white suit and white fedora hat, he produces a pulsating evening of traditional rhythms and songs.
Felix Baloy sang on several of the early Buena Vista albums and can now use the name on his billboards. The original band has turned into a brand.
"Buena Vista Social Club has transformed into several bands, including mine," he said.
"I play traditional Cuban music and will continue doing so until the day I die."
'Sound of Cuba'
For many around the world, Buena Vista is the sound that defines Cuban music.
“ Members of the band may change because some have passed away, but the spirit lives on ”
Omara Portuondo Original Buena Vista singer
You can hear songs like Chan Chan played on almost every street corner in the tourist centre of Old Havana.
Yet in Cuba, these are considered "golden oldies". At home, Buena Vista must compete with everything from salsa to reggaeton and the folk ballads of revolutionary idols like Silvio Rodriguez.
"This is such a musical country with so many different rhythms; young people have gone their own way," Mr Baloy says.
"You still hear it here, but for the rest of the world, Buena Vista remains the sound of Cuba."
The original Buena Vista Social Club was a loose collective of ageing musicians brought together by the American guitarist Ry Cooder in 1997, in a bid to re-discover the music of Cuba's pre-revolutionary past.
Since then many of those who shot to stardom in the award-winning film have died, including pianist Ruben Gonzalez and the singer Ibrahim Ferrer.
New generation
It is Ibrahim Ferrer's former band which has taken over the official mantle and today tours the world with a mix of old and new faces, under the name Orquestra Buena Vista Social Club.
Apart from an occasional concert in the beachfront hotel resort of Varadero, the band almost never performs at home.
......
'Trade mark'
Buena Vista has turned into a project rather than a band.
"It's been converted into a trade mark. A lot of the well-known figures who were in Buena Vista have developed their own bands; that's where the spirit of Buena Vista lies," said Mr Valdes.
Today, this 63-year-old drummer still lives in the same modest Havana apartment in which he grew up.
On the walls of his tiny living room are framed gold disks, along with a fading black-and-white photograph of his father - a clarinettist in an early Cuban big band.
There is also a glamorous colour photo of his daughter, Idania, who has taken over as the lead female singer touring the world with the Orquestra Buena Vista Social Club. She was just 20 when she joined it.
"It was a little unnerving at first, especially stepping in for such a famous name," she admits.
Cuban diva
Omara Portuondo is one of the only original Buena Vista superstars who remains hugely popular at home.
The 79-year-old diva is regularly invited to perform at major cultural and political events.
At a recent Alba summit of left-wing Latin American leaders, the closing ceremony saw Omara singing her way across the platform; Venezuela's Hugo Chavez blew her kisses, Cuba's President Raul Castro reached out and kissed her hand.
She was also the first Cuban musician to be granted a visa to perform in the United States after President Barack Obama ended restrictions on cultural exchanges.
Her most recent album won a Latin Grammy, which she was able to collect in person at the award ceremony in Las Vegas.
Her repertoire has expanded beyond the classic Buena Vista sounds but the band and the music, she believes, will always live on.
"This type of music will always be with us. It's still the Buena Vista sound; members of the band may change because some have passed away but the spirit lives on."
Read the complete story HERE.
BBC
Buena Vista: Cuban band or brand?
By Michael Voss
BBC News, Havana
Sunday night in Old Havana and dozens of tourists pack into a club on a corner of the colonial Plaza Vieja to hear the sounds of the Buena Vista Social Club.
Leading the night's entertainment is 67-year-old "sonero" Felix Baloy and his big band. Looking dapper in his white suit and white fedora hat, he produces a pulsating evening of traditional rhythms and songs.
Felix Baloy sang on several of the early Buena Vista albums and can now use the name on his billboards. The original band has turned into a brand.
"Buena Vista Social Club has transformed into several bands, including mine," he said.
"I play traditional Cuban music and will continue doing so until the day I die."
'Sound of Cuba'
For many around the world, Buena Vista is the sound that defines Cuban music.
“ Members of the band may change because some have passed away, but the spirit lives on ”
Omara Portuondo Original Buena Vista singer
You can hear songs like Chan Chan played on almost every street corner in the tourist centre of Old Havana.
Yet in Cuba, these are considered "golden oldies". At home, Buena Vista must compete with everything from salsa to reggaeton and the folk ballads of revolutionary idols like Silvio Rodriguez.
"This is such a musical country with so many different rhythms; young people have gone their own way," Mr Baloy says.
"You still hear it here, but for the rest of the world, Buena Vista remains the sound of Cuba."
The original Buena Vista Social Club was a loose collective of ageing musicians brought together by the American guitarist Ry Cooder in 1997, in a bid to re-discover the music of Cuba's pre-revolutionary past.
Since then many of those who shot to stardom in the award-winning film have died, including pianist Ruben Gonzalez and the singer Ibrahim Ferrer.
New generation
It is Ibrahim Ferrer's former band which has taken over the official mantle and today tours the world with a mix of old and new faces, under the name Orquestra Buena Vista Social Club.
Apart from an occasional concert in the beachfront hotel resort of Varadero, the band almost never performs at home.
......
'Trade mark'
Buena Vista has turned into a project rather than a band.
"It's been converted into a trade mark. A lot of the well-known figures who were in Buena Vista have developed their own bands; that's where the spirit of Buena Vista lies," said Mr Valdes.
Today, this 63-year-old drummer still lives in the same modest Havana apartment in which he grew up.
On the walls of his tiny living room are framed gold disks, along with a fading black-and-white photograph of his father - a clarinettist in an early Cuban big band.
There is also a glamorous colour photo of his daughter, Idania, who has taken over as the lead female singer touring the world with the Orquestra Buena Vista Social Club. She was just 20 when she joined it.
"It was a little unnerving at first, especially stepping in for such a famous name," she admits.
Cuban diva
Omara Portuondo is one of the only original Buena Vista superstars who remains hugely popular at home.
The 79-year-old diva is regularly invited to perform at major cultural and political events.
At a recent Alba summit of left-wing Latin American leaders, the closing ceremony saw Omara singing her way across the platform; Venezuela's Hugo Chavez blew her kisses, Cuba's President Raul Castro reached out and kissed her hand.
She was also the first Cuban musician to be granted a visa to perform in the United States after President Barack Obama ended restrictions on cultural exchanges.
Her most recent album won a Latin Grammy, which she was able to collect in person at the award ceremony in Las Vegas.
Her repertoire has expanded beyond the classic Buena Vista sounds but the band and the music, she believes, will always live on.
"This type of music will always be with us. It's still the Buena Vista sound; members of the band may change because some have passed away but the spirit lives on."
Read the complete story HERE.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Selling trips to Cuba once was deadly, but no more
MH
Posted on Sun, May. 03, 2009
Selling trips to Cuba once was deadly
BY LUISA YANEZ, DOUGLAS HANKS AND LAURA FIGUEROA
lyanez@MiamiHerald.com
There was a time when advertising Viajes a Cuba on a storefront was an invitation to a pipe bombing.
In the politically charged Miami of the late 1970s and '80s, the FBI investigated more than a dozen blasts at Cuba travel agencies -- considered nests of Communist agents by staunch anti-Castro exiles.
Selling tickets to Havana could even get you killed. That's what happened to Carlos Muñiz Varela, a 26-year-old exile living in Puerto Rico who opened the first Cuba-approved travel agency. Thirty years ago this week, he was gunned down in San Juan.
But times have changed, and the travel agencies today worry little about political retribution.
''They want to call me a communist -- thank you very much,'' said a strident Francisco Aruca, the owner of Marazul Charters. Aruca, also a Miami radio host, is one of the more outspoken of the seven agency owners who book charters to Cuba. They all have permission from Cuba and the U.S. Treasury Department.
The long-standing and sometimes violent clashes between exiles who oppose anyone doing business with the island have disappeared -- welcome news to the agencies, where business has been booming since last month, when President Barack Obama lifted restrictions on Cuban Americans wanting to travel or send money to relatives on the island.
Armando Garcia, president of Marazul Charters, points no further than the windows of his Westchester storefront as indication that the climate for trips to Cuba has changed.
More than a decade ago, he had to install bullet-proof glass following a 1996 bombing that nearly gutted the store, which is across the street from The Falls on South Dixie Highway.
It was one of several bombing attempts against the company's three South Florida stores. ''People were scared for their lives,'' Garcia said. ``None of the employees wanted to tell relatives where they worked for fear of retribution. ''
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Now customers sit in a row of chairs edged up against the window. Perception of those who travel to Cuba has also changed; it's no longer a dirty little secret.
''A lot of people were scared of telling their neighbors and friends -- they would lie about where they were going on vacation,'' Garcia said.
Miguel Saavedra, head of Vigilia Mambisa, a group that continues to picket those who do business with Cuba, said the travel agencies feed off Miami's poor exile community. ''Cuban exiles are victims of these agencies who prey off people traveling to see relatives by charging them exorbitant amounts of money that goes to the Cuba government,'' Saavedra said. ``These agencies make a pact with the devil.''
Bad blood between exiles and the Cuba travel agencies erupted in earnest in 1978 after a group of Miami Cubans, who became known as the Comité de 75, visited the island and negotiated with Fidel Castro for the release of 3,600 Cuban political prisoners.
NEW DEAL
More significantly, they also negotiated for travel to the island on what were called viajes de la comunidad -- for the first time, trips by exiles to visit Cuba.
The deal created a need for agencies to open for business in Miami, New Jersey and Puerto Rico. Cuba jumped in, creating Havanatur, a government agency charged with overseeing the venture with the U.S. travel agencies. But Aruca said Cuba originally had bigger plans. Cuban officials thought large American companies would jump in to book passage to the island -- much like they did before the 1958 Cuban revolution.
''They were ignoring the public relations aspect that many of these bigger companies would not want to get in the middle of U.S. and Cuban affairs,'' Aruca said. ``Once Cuba realized that no big travel outfits were signing on to coordinate trips, they realized they should work with the smaller Cuban-American businesses.''
The down side: The small agencies became a magnet for anti-Castro anger.
George Kiszynski, a special agent for the FBI in Miami during the late 1970s and '80s, was caught in the middle, assigned with stopping the rash of bombings. The bombings soon spread from the travel and packages-to-Cuba agencies to consulates of countries that did business with Cuba, and to persons believed to support the Cuban government and even the FBI and state attorney's offices in Miami.
''The interesting thing is that there were many bombers, not just one. That made it more difficult,'' said Kiszynski, now director of investigations for the Ackerman Group. It became so hectic, he created an ad hoc task force with other local law enforcement agents. ``We were pretty successful in arresting many of the bombers.''
Most of the bombs were set to go off in the early morning. ''If one had gone off during the day, it could have killed someone,'' he said. In Miami, no one was killed.
SHOOTING DEATH
In Puerto Rico, Muñiz was not as fortunate. With the blessing of Cuba, he had wasted no time scheduling the first flight through Viajes Varadero in December 1978.
Although he was only in his 20s, Muñiz was a dedicated political activist who supported Puerto Rican independence. He was a member of the leftist Antonio Maceo Brigade, said his best friend, Raúl Alzaga Manresa, current owner of the company.
Viajes Varadero made its inaugural flight with about 90 people aboard; Muñiz was among the passengers.
Four months later, he was shot in the head as he drove to his mother's house in San Juan. No arrests have ever been made. ''There had been threats, and our office had been bombed, but I guess we were too young to take the danger seriously; it was a mistake,'' Alzaga said.
The anniversary of Muñiz's death is being marked this week by Cuban government news sites.
''I don't like to use the word martyr, but I guess you can call Muñiz our martyr in the Cuba travel industry. He was the first and the only one directly killed over it,'' Aruca said.
For those agencies in business with Cuba, there are rules to follow. Initially, the travel companies had to follow conditions set by Havanatur -- among them, all flights had to be purchased with a seven-day stay in one of the state-run hotels.
Eventually agency owners were able to bargain to only require one night's stay in a hotel, and by the 1990s the hotel requirement was lifted.
Aruca said Marazul charged customers the cost of the flight and hotel stay, but barely broke even.
In the 1990s, travel agencies diversified by seeking out organizations, sports teams and schools that wanted to travel to Cuba for humanitarian and educational reasons, Aruca said.
Despite the domestic political controversy, winning permission from Washington for the flights is considered the easy part of the equation, said John Kavulich II, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. ''From the U.S. side, if you meet the criteria, you cannot be denied. There isn't a quota,'' Kavulich said.
On the Cuba side, it's another story.
''The Cuban government is going to favor those operators who have stated publicly that they oppose certain U.S. policies'' -- like Washington's trade embargo against the island, Kavulich said.
''They'll Google you,'' he added. ``Have you written letters, have you given testimony, have you been in the media opposing what the Cuban government feels are policies doing [Cuba] a disservice?''
Posted on Sun, May. 03, 2009
Selling trips to Cuba once was deadly
BY LUISA YANEZ, DOUGLAS HANKS AND LAURA FIGUEROA
lyanez@MiamiHerald.com
There was a time when advertising Viajes a Cuba on a storefront was an invitation to a pipe bombing.
In the politically charged Miami of the late 1970s and '80s, the FBI investigated more than a dozen blasts at Cuba travel agencies -- considered nests of Communist agents by staunch anti-Castro exiles.
Selling tickets to Havana could even get you killed. That's what happened to Carlos Muñiz Varela, a 26-year-old exile living in Puerto Rico who opened the first Cuba-approved travel agency. Thirty years ago this week, he was gunned down in San Juan.
But times have changed, and the travel agencies today worry little about political retribution.
''They want to call me a communist -- thank you very much,'' said a strident Francisco Aruca, the owner of Marazul Charters. Aruca, also a Miami radio host, is one of the more outspoken of the seven agency owners who book charters to Cuba. They all have permission from Cuba and the U.S. Treasury Department.
The long-standing and sometimes violent clashes between exiles who oppose anyone doing business with the island have disappeared -- welcome news to the agencies, where business has been booming since last month, when President Barack Obama lifted restrictions on Cuban Americans wanting to travel or send money to relatives on the island.
Armando Garcia, president of Marazul Charters, points no further than the windows of his Westchester storefront as indication that the climate for trips to Cuba has changed.
More than a decade ago, he had to install bullet-proof glass following a 1996 bombing that nearly gutted the store, which is across the street from The Falls on South Dixie Highway.
It was one of several bombing attempts against the company's three South Florida stores. ''People were scared for their lives,'' Garcia said. ``None of the employees wanted to tell relatives where they worked for fear of retribution. ''
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Now customers sit in a row of chairs edged up against the window. Perception of those who travel to Cuba has also changed; it's no longer a dirty little secret.
''A lot of people were scared of telling their neighbors and friends -- they would lie about where they were going on vacation,'' Garcia said.
Miguel Saavedra, head of Vigilia Mambisa, a group that continues to picket those who do business with Cuba, said the travel agencies feed off Miami's poor exile community. ''Cuban exiles are victims of these agencies who prey off people traveling to see relatives by charging them exorbitant amounts of money that goes to the Cuba government,'' Saavedra said. ``These agencies make a pact with the devil.''
Bad blood between exiles and the Cuba travel agencies erupted in earnest in 1978 after a group of Miami Cubans, who became known as the Comité de 75, visited the island and negotiated with Fidel Castro for the release of 3,600 Cuban political prisoners.
NEW DEAL
More significantly, they also negotiated for travel to the island on what were called viajes de la comunidad -- for the first time, trips by exiles to visit Cuba.
The deal created a need for agencies to open for business in Miami, New Jersey and Puerto Rico. Cuba jumped in, creating Havanatur, a government agency charged with overseeing the venture with the U.S. travel agencies. But Aruca said Cuba originally had bigger plans. Cuban officials thought large American companies would jump in to book passage to the island -- much like they did before the 1958 Cuban revolution.
''They were ignoring the public relations aspect that many of these bigger companies would not want to get in the middle of U.S. and Cuban affairs,'' Aruca said. ``Once Cuba realized that no big travel outfits were signing on to coordinate trips, they realized they should work with the smaller Cuban-American businesses.''
The down side: The small agencies became a magnet for anti-Castro anger.
George Kiszynski, a special agent for the FBI in Miami during the late 1970s and '80s, was caught in the middle, assigned with stopping the rash of bombings. The bombings soon spread from the travel and packages-to-Cuba agencies to consulates of countries that did business with Cuba, and to persons believed to support the Cuban government and even the FBI and state attorney's offices in Miami.
''The interesting thing is that there were many bombers, not just one. That made it more difficult,'' said Kiszynski, now director of investigations for the Ackerman Group. It became so hectic, he created an ad hoc task force with other local law enforcement agents. ``We were pretty successful in arresting many of the bombers.''
Most of the bombs were set to go off in the early morning. ''If one had gone off during the day, it could have killed someone,'' he said. In Miami, no one was killed.
SHOOTING DEATH
In Puerto Rico, Muñiz was not as fortunate. With the blessing of Cuba, he had wasted no time scheduling the first flight through Viajes Varadero in December 1978.
Although he was only in his 20s, Muñiz was a dedicated political activist who supported Puerto Rican independence. He was a member of the leftist Antonio Maceo Brigade, said his best friend, Raúl Alzaga Manresa, current owner of the company.
Viajes Varadero made its inaugural flight with about 90 people aboard; Muñiz was among the passengers.
Four months later, he was shot in the head as he drove to his mother's house in San Juan. No arrests have ever been made. ''There had been threats, and our office had been bombed, but I guess we were too young to take the danger seriously; it was a mistake,'' Alzaga said.
The anniversary of Muñiz's death is being marked this week by Cuban government news sites.
''I don't like to use the word martyr, but I guess you can call Muñiz our martyr in the Cuba travel industry. He was the first and the only one directly killed over it,'' Aruca said.
For those agencies in business with Cuba, there are rules to follow. Initially, the travel companies had to follow conditions set by Havanatur -- among them, all flights had to be purchased with a seven-day stay in one of the state-run hotels.
Eventually agency owners were able to bargain to only require one night's stay in a hotel, and by the 1990s the hotel requirement was lifted.
Aruca said Marazul charged customers the cost of the flight and hotel stay, but barely broke even.
In the 1990s, travel agencies diversified by seeking out organizations, sports teams and schools that wanted to travel to Cuba for humanitarian and educational reasons, Aruca said.
Despite the domestic political controversy, winning permission from Washington for the flights is considered the easy part of the equation, said John Kavulich II, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. ''From the U.S. side, if you meet the criteria, you cannot be denied. There isn't a quota,'' Kavulich said.
On the Cuba side, it's another story.
''The Cuban government is going to favor those operators who have stated publicly that they oppose certain U.S. policies'' -- like Washington's trade embargo against the island, Kavulich said.
''They'll Google you,'' he added. ``Have you written letters, have you given testimony, have you been in the media opposing what the Cuban government feels are policies doing [Cuba] a disservice?''
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Cuba's tourist economy in trouble
Miami Herald online
Posted on Tue, Apr. 03, 2007
Cuba's tourist economy in trouble
BY WILFREDO CANCIO ISLA
Cuba's tourism industry, the island's main economic engine for the past 15 years, is in a steep fall amid a mix of factors that range from rising air ticket prices to changes in tour ownerships and crumbling tourist facilities.
The first alarm rang late last year, when Ministry of Tourism (MinTur) figures showed 2.2 million people had visited the island in 2006, down from 2.3 million in 2005.
The decline has accelerated so far this year. January and February indicators show a combined drop of 7 percent compared to the same months in 2006, according to the most recent MinTur figures, with February visitation falling 13 percent.
Spanish tourists, historically the island's third-largest group, dropped by 45 percent over both months.
Cuba's tourism industry has been generating more than $2 billion per year in recent years, and provides direct and indirect employment to about 300,000 people.
Cuban authorities explaining the drop have cited a rise in air fares, due to the cost of fuel, currency exchange rate shifts and the scares of the notoriously violent 2005 hurricane season. Also mentioned are the Bush administration tightening of restrictions on Cuban-American trips to the island, which according to Cuban news media reports dropped from 100,000 in 2004 to about 30,000 a year since.
On the plunge in Spanish tourism, MinTur officials focused blame on the suspension of three weekly flights by the Iberojet charter airline and the sale of the cruise line Pullmantur to Miami-based Royal Caribbean Cruises. A Pullmantur ship used to sail every week from Havana after picking up tourists who had flown in from Madrid, but the company was forced to end its Cuba stops under the new owners because of the U.S. trade embargo.
LEFT UNSAID
But internal MinTur documents obtained by El Nuevo Herald, independent experts and tourism-sector workers on the island show there are other serious problems not mentioned by MinTur.
Most of Cuba's tourism facilities were built in the 1990s and have received little maintenance since then, said a MinTur official who asked for anonymity out of fear of government punishment.
''The structure created for years in the tourism industry is crumbling piecemeal,'' the employee said. ``Tourism in Cuba is headed for chaos and it will take years to revert the present situation.''
The MinTur documents also point to the inability of the Tourism Construction Enterprise (Emprestur) to repair hotels because of the lack of materials.
The employee said there's also widespread dissatisfaction with the way Tourism Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz and leading managers are running things. Marrero, former president of the Gaviota Group, run by the Cuban armed forces, and a trusted aide to Cuban interim leader and Defense Minister Raúl Castro, was appointed to the post in early 2004 after the removal of Ibrahim Ferradaz amid reports of a corruption scandal.
''What's happening in tourism is a reflection of a behavior that has spread nationwide,'' said dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe on the phone from Havana. ``People are disgusted with the economic situation at home, workers don't take pride in their work and inertia corrupts the entire organization.''
PRICEY PESO
Also affecting tourism was the Cuban government's decision in late 2004 to effectively increase the value of its currency by 20 percent, making foreigners' hotel stays and meals in Cuba that more expensive.
``It was logical that a devalued dollar would cause a drop in tourism from Latin America and Canada, because the visitors from those countries buy very cheap packages, said Carmelo Mesa Lago, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh and a long-time Cuban economy watcher.
With 44,000 hotel rooms, Cuba had an occupancy rate of 63.5 percent in 2004 and only 55.7 percent in 2005, according to the United Nation's Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. The average daily expenditure per visitor dropped from $175 in 2003 to $97 in 2005.
MinTur has not released occupancy statistics for 2006, but the MinTur official estimated it at 50 percent.
Trying to reverse the trend, MinTur announced a strategic plan for 2007 that involves support for investments, construction of new facilities and repairs of existing hotels. The plan also envisions improved highways and road signs, and guarantees of electricity and water for the tourism industry.
Marrero has announced a ''total change in the philosophy of promotion and advertising for the island,'' and in January unveiled a campaign named ''Viva Cuba,'' designed to present a new image of the country, at the International Tourism Fair in Madrid.
Posted on Tue, Apr. 03, 2007
Cuba's tourist economy in trouble
BY WILFREDO CANCIO ISLA
Cuba's tourism industry, the island's main economic engine for the past 15 years, is in a steep fall amid a mix of factors that range from rising air ticket prices to changes in tour ownerships and crumbling tourist facilities.
The first alarm rang late last year, when Ministry of Tourism (MinTur) figures showed 2.2 million people had visited the island in 2006, down from 2.3 million in 2005.
The decline has accelerated so far this year. January and February indicators show a combined drop of 7 percent compared to the same months in 2006, according to the most recent MinTur figures, with February visitation falling 13 percent.
Spanish tourists, historically the island's third-largest group, dropped by 45 percent over both months.
Cuba's tourism industry has been generating more than $2 billion per year in recent years, and provides direct and indirect employment to about 300,000 people.
Cuban authorities explaining the drop have cited a rise in air fares, due to the cost of fuel, currency exchange rate shifts and the scares of the notoriously violent 2005 hurricane season. Also mentioned are the Bush administration tightening of restrictions on Cuban-American trips to the island, which according to Cuban news media reports dropped from 100,000 in 2004 to about 30,000 a year since.
On the plunge in Spanish tourism, MinTur officials focused blame on the suspension of three weekly flights by the Iberojet charter airline and the sale of the cruise line Pullmantur to Miami-based Royal Caribbean Cruises. A Pullmantur ship used to sail every week from Havana after picking up tourists who had flown in from Madrid, but the company was forced to end its Cuba stops under the new owners because of the U.S. trade embargo.
LEFT UNSAID
But internal MinTur documents obtained by El Nuevo Herald, independent experts and tourism-sector workers on the island show there are other serious problems not mentioned by MinTur.
Most of Cuba's tourism facilities were built in the 1990s and have received little maintenance since then, said a MinTur official who asked for anonymity out of fear of government punishment.
''The structure created for years in the tourism industry is crumbling piecemeal,'' the employee said. ``Tourism in Cuba is headed for chaos and it will take years to revert the present situation.''
The MinTur documents also point to the inability of the Tourism Construction Enterprise (Emprestur) to repair hotels because of the lack of materials.
The employee said there's also widespread dissatisfaction with the way Tourism Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz and leading managers are running things. Marrero, former president of the Gaviota Group, run by the Cuban armed forces, and a trusted aide to Cuban interim leader and Defense Minister Raúl Castro, was appointed to the post in early 2004 after the removal of Ibrahim Ferradaz amid reports of a corruption scandal.
''What's happening in tourism is a reflection of a behavior that has spread nationwide,'' said dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe on the phone from Havana. ``People are disgusted with the economic situation at home, workers don't take pride in their work and inertia corrupts the entire organization.''
PRICEY PESO
Also affecting tourism was the Cuban government's decision in late 2004 to effectively increase the value of its currency by 20 percent, making foreigners' hotel stays and meals in Cuba that more expensive.
``It was logical that a devalued dollar would cause a drop in tourism from Latin America and Canada, because the visitors from those countries buy very cheap packages, said Carmelo Mesa Lago, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh and a long-time Cuban economy watcher.
With 44,000 hotel rooms, Cuba had an occupancy rate of 63.5 percent in 2004 and only 55.7 percent in 2005, according to the United Nation's Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. The average daily expenditure per visitor dropped from $175 in 2003 to $97 in 2005.
MinTur has not released occupancy statistics for 2006, but the MinTur official estimated it at 50 percent.
Trying to reverse the trend, MinTur announced a strategic plan for 2007 that involves support for investments, construction of new facilities and repairs of existing hotels. The plan also envisions improved highways and road signs, and guarantees of electricity and water for the tourism industry.
Marrero has announced a ''total change in the philosophy of promotion and advertising for the island,'' and in January unveiled a campaign named ''Viva Cuba,'' designed to present a new image of the country, at the International Tourism Fair in Madrid.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Santeria used for travel license
The Miami Herald
Sun, Feb. 27, 2005
IS SANTERIA USED AS PLOY TO SKIRT TRAVEL RULES?
A Santeria group with a religious license to travel unimpeded to Cuba reports a boom in the size of its congregation, drawing criticism and scrutiny.
BY OSCAR CORRAL
Despite the Bush administration's crackdown on exiles' trips back to Cuba, there are still ways to travel to the island without restriction.
One seems to be increasingly popular: Go as a Santero.
Religious groups can get licenses with little trouble. And the head of at least one group that says it practices the Afro-Cuban religion Santeria acknowledged that his congregation has exploded in size since the new travel restrictions kicked in.
Jose Montoya, head of the Sacerdocio Lucumi Shango Eyeife in Miami, said that between 1996 and July 2004, he took about 60 people to Cuba under his religious travel license. Since the restrictions took effect in July, he has taken about 2,500, he said.
''Before, people didn't have a necessity, and Afro Cubans who practice our religions could travel to Cuba without a license, but now they need a license,'' Montoya said. ``This is a ticking time bomb. They will give a religious license to anyone.''
Exiles who support the restrictions -- which cut exile trips to Cuba from once a year to once every three years -- say the Santeria groups are abusing their religious privilege.
The U.S. Treasury Department allows unimpeded travel to Cuba for legitimate religious reasons. The department has issued more than 200 licenses to religious groups for travel to Cuba, according to the office of U.S. Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart, R-Miami.
Díaz-Balart, a supporter of the new limits, has called for an investigation, which he said is being conducted by the Treasury Department.
''There is abuse and it needs to stop,'' he said. ``It is wrong for someone to say that they are seeking a license for religious travel and then to use that license commercially to promote tourism, and I think it's happening.''
Treasury Department spokeswoman Molly Millerwise and other department officials could not be reached for comment.
Tom Cooper, CEO and chairman of Gulf Stream International Airlines, one of the biggest companies still operating flights to Cuba, said he has also noticed a recent increase in the number of people coming to his airline with religious licenses.
RESOURCEFULNESS
''I have my own questions about it,'' Cooper said. ``I think the Cuban people are very industrious and ingenious, and I think that they really will find a way to visit their relatives in Cuba.''
During a recent interview in his office at 4315 NW Seventh St., Montoya told The Herald that he has an established track record in Miami's Santeria community and is not abusing his travel license.
Montoya acknowledges that he has no church or temple, and his office is plainly decorated, with no evidence of Santeria. His church, the Sacerdocio Lucumi Shango Eyeife, is listed in Florida corporate records as a for-profit company. He brands himself ''Maximo Sacerdote General,'' or Maximum High Priest.
Montoya said the Treasury Department's religious license places no restrictions on the number of people allowed to travel to Cuba under that license, or the frequency of visits. He provided The Herald a copy of his license.
He also provided The Herald a copy of an application people must fill out if they want to travel to Cuba under his religious license. Applicants must swear that they are part of his religion and get the letter notarized. The application named Heidy Gonzalez as an applicant and showed a telephone number. When The Herald called the number, a man named Braulio Rodriguez said Heidy Gonzalez was a 1-year-old baby and that he was her grandfather.
Rodriguez said he had no idea how her name came to be on an application for travel to Cuba and that as far as he knew, she would not be traveling to Cuba as the application stated.
When quizzed about potential abuses, Montoya pointed to another supposed Santeria group that has a religious travel license, Santa Yemaya Ministries. Montoya said his own research shows that many of the people traveling to Cuba under religious licenses today travel through Santa Yemaya.
Florida corporate records show that Santa Yemaya Ministries was established in October 2003 by Fabio Galoppi. The principal place of business address, according to corporate records, is 9741 NW 31 St., a house in a gated community in Doral. It is listed as a nonprofit company.
The official explanation given by Fabio Galoppi to incorporate Santa Yemaya, according to corporate records, is ''to spread the word of God across the world.'' Santa Yemaya Ministries' website boasts a 15-day travel itinerary in Cuba filled with Santeria tourist stops at places such as Casa Templo and The Yoruba Center.
A woman who described herself as Fabio Galoppi's wife when phoned by The Herald declined to comment. She referred questions to a Pierre Galoppi.
Pierre Galoppi, who owns Estrella de Cuba Travel in West Miami-Dade and PWG Trading Corp., confirmed that Santa Yemaya has a religious travel license. He declined to describe his relationship to Fabio Galoppi.
''I can assure you that our agency and our ministry are in full compliance with all regulations,'' Pierre Galoppi said.
`SENSITIVE INDUSTRY'
When asked how many people travel to Cuba under Santa Yemaya's license, or whether Fabio Galoppi is a Santero, Galoppi declined to comment.
''It's a very sensitive industry,'' he said. ``I have no idea how many people we're talking about.''
Pedro Gonzalez-Munne, owner of Cuba Promotions, an agency that promotes travel to Cuba, said he has done business with Pierre Galoppi and is familiar with his enterprise.
''Since the new restrictions kicked in in July to now, PWG Trading has 33 to 34 percent of the total market of people that travel to Cuba,'' Gonzalez-Munne said. ``Is this a situation of freedom of religions, or are they using their religion for travel and profit?''
The Santeria travel wars have spilled over into local media. Montoya said community leaders and radio commentators have singled him out for criticism on Miami's Spanish-language radio stations. That has prompted Montoya to buy four full-page ads in El Nuevo Herald since November, defending his travel practices.
''We continue to deny the disinformation campaign that some radio stations have established that intend, for politics, to violate our religious rights,'' said an open letter from Shango Eyeife published in El Nuevo Herald on Jan. 24. ``Our institution has nothing to do with other people who possess licenses for our religious practices issued by Treasury.''
RELIGION AS PLOY
Ernesto Pichardo, Miami-Dade's best known Santero, who once took a case about animal sacrifices to the U.S. Supreme Court, said the groups ``are not authorized, legitimate religious organizations in Cuba or here.''
''We've started doing homework,'' Pichardo said. ``I've gotten people from New York, D.C., all over. They have bought into this little deal of buying into [Montoya's] membership . . . to fly to Cuba on a religious visa.''
Cooper, the Gulf Stream CEO, said air travel to Cuba plunged after the restrictions kicked in. For example, his company used to fly five planes a week with 600 seats to the island. Now he flies only about 123 seats a week. However, in the past month, he said, business has picked up again, partly because of religious-license travel.
Pichardo said a signal that Shango Eyeife and Santa Yemaya may not be legitimate religious groups is that neither has a church or temple in Miami.
He said that he doubts they have churches in Cuba, because the Cuban government has never authorized Santeria.
Gonzalez-Munne said the trend shows that people will do whatever it takes to get to Cuba, and business people are thinking creatively to make it happen.
''People are not traveling because they are Babalaos, let's speak clearly,'' Gonzalez-Munne said, using a term meaning priest. ``They are traveling because they have no other way to get to Cuba.''
Sun, Feb. 27, 2005
IS SANTERIA USED AS PLOY TO SKIRT TRAVEL RULES?
A Santeria group with a religious license to travel unimpeded to Cuba reports a boom in the size of its congregation, drawing criticism and scrutiny.
BY OSCAR CORRAL
Despite the Bush administration's crackdown on exiles' trips back to Cuba, there are still ways to travel to the island without restriction.
One seems to be increasingly popular: Go as a Santero.
Religious groups can get licenses with little trouble. And the head of at least one group that says it practices the Afro-Cuban religion Santeria acknowledged that his congregation has exploded in size since the new travel restrictions kicked in.
Jose Montoya, head of the Sacerdocio Lucumi Shango Eyeife in Miami, said that between 1996 and July 2004, he took about 60 people to Cuba under his religious travel license. Since the restrictions took effect in July, he has taken about 2,500, he said.
''Before, people didn't have a necessity, and Afro Cubans who practice our religions could travel to Cuba without a license, but now they need a license,'' Montoya said. ``This is a ticking time bomb. They will give a religious license to anyone.''
Exiles who support the restrictions -- which cut exile trips to Cuba from once a year to once every three years -- say the Santeria groups are abusing their religious privilege.
The U.S. Treasury Department allows unimpeded travel to Cuba for legitimate religious reasons. The department has issued more than 200 licenses to religious groups for travel to Cuba, according to the office of U.S. Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart, R-Miami.
Díaz-Balart, a supporter of the new limits, has called for an investigation, which he said is being conducted by the Treasury Department.
''There is abuse and it needs to stop,'' he said. ``It is wrong for someone to say that they are seeking a license for religious travel and then to use that license commercially to promote tourism, and I think it's happening.''
Treasury Department spokeswoman Molly Millerwise and other department officials could not be reached for comment.
Tom Cooper, CEO and chairman of Gulf Stream International Airlines, one of the biggest companies still operating flights to Cuba, said he has also noticed a recent increase in the number of people coming to his airline with religious licenses.
RESOURCEFULNESS
''I have my own questions about it,'' Cooper said. ``I think the Cuban people are very industrious and ingenious, and I think that they really will find a way to visit their relatives in Cuba.''
During a recent interview in his office at 4315 NW Seventh St., Montoya told The Herald that he has an established track record in Miami's Santeria community and is not abusing his travel license.
Montoya acknowledges that he has no church or temple, and his office is plainly decorated, with no evidence of Santeria. His church, the Sacerdocio Lucumi Shango Eyeife, is listed in Florida corporate records as a for-profit company. He brands himself ''Maximo Sacerdote General,'' or Maximum High Priest.
Montoya said the Treasury Department's religious license places no restrictions on the number of people allowed to travel to Cuba under that license, or the frequency of visits. He provided The Herald a copy of his license.
He also provided The Herald a copy of an application people must fill out if they want to travel to Cuba under his religious license. Applicants must swear that they are part of his religion and get the letter notarized. The application named Heidy Gonzalez as an applicant and showed a telephone number. When The Herald called the number, a man named Braulio Rodriguez said Heidy Gonzalez was a 1-year-old baby and that he was her grandfather.
Rodriguez said he had no idea how her name came to be on an application for travel to Cuba and that as far as he knew, she would not be traveling to Cuba as the application stated.
When quizzed about potential abuses, Montoya pointed to another supposed Santeria group that has a religious travel license, Santa Yemaya Ministries. Montoya said his own research shows that many of the people traveling to Cuba under religious licenses today travel through Santa Yemaya.
Florida corporate records show that Santa Yemaya Ministries was established in October 2003 by Fabio Galoppi. The principal place of business address, according to corporate records, is 9741 NW 31 St., a house in a gated community in Doral. It is listed as a nonprofit company.
The official explanation given by Fabio Galoppi to incorporate Santa Yemaya, according to corporate records, is ''to spread the word of God across the world.'' Santa Yemaya Ministries' website boasts a 15-day travel itinerary in Cuba filled with Santeria tourist stops at places such as Casa Templo and The Yoruba Center.
A woman who described herself as Fabio Galoppi's wife when phoned by The Herald declined to comment. She referred questions to a Pierre Galoppi.
Pierre Galoppi, who owns Estrella de Cuba Travel in West Miami-Dade and PWG Trading Corp., confirmed that Santa Yemaya has a religious travel license. He declined to describe his relationship to Fabio Galoppi.
''I can assure you that our agency and our ministry are in full compliance with all regulations,'' Pierre Galoppi said.
`SENSITIVE INDUSTRY'
When asked how many people travel to Cuba under Santa Yemaya's license, or whether Fabio Galoppi is a Santero, Galoppi declined to comment.
''It's a very sensitive industry,'' he said. ``I have no idea how many people we're talking about.''
Pedro Gonzalez-Munne, owner of Cuba Promotions, an agency that promotes travel to Cuba, said he has done business with Pierre Galoppi and is familiar with his enterprise.
''Since the new restrictions kicked in in July to now, PWG Trading has 33 to 34 percent of the total market of people that travel to Cuba,'' Gonzalez-Munne said. ``Is this a situation of freedom of religions, or are they using their religion for travel and profit?''
The Santeria travel wars have spilled over into local media. Montoya said community leaders and radio commentators have singled him out for criticism on Miami's Spanish-language radio stations. That has prompted Montoya to buy four full-page ads in El Nuevo Herald since November, defending his travel practices.
''We continue to deny the disinformation campaign that some radio stations have established that intend, for politics, to violate our religious rights,'' said an open letter from Shango Eyeife published in El Nuevo Herald on Jan. 24. ``Our institution has nothing to do with other people who possess licenses for our religious practices issued by Treasury.''
RELIGION AS PLOY
Ernesto Pichardo, Miami-Dade's best known Santero, who once took a case about animal sacrifices to the U.S. Supreme Court, said the groups ``are not authorized, legitimate religious organizations in Cuba or here.''
''We've started doing homework,'' Pichardo said. ``I've gotten people from New York, D.C., all over. They have bought into this little deal of buying into [Montoya's] membership . . . to fly to Cuba on a religious visa.''
Cooper, the Gulf Stream CEO, said air travel to Cuba plunged after the restrictions kicked in. For example, his company used to fly five planes a week with 600 seats to the island. Now he flies only about 123 seats a week. However, in the past month, he said, business has picked up again, partly because of religious-license travel.
Pichardo said a signal that Shango Eyeife and Santa Yemaya may not be legitimate religious groups is that neither has a church or temple in Miami.
He said that he doubts they have churches in Cuba, because the Cuban government has never authorized Santeria.
Gonzalez-Munne said the trend shows that people will do whatever it takes to get to Cuba, and business people are thinking creatively to make it happen.
''People are not traveling because they are Babalaos, let's speak clearly,'' Gonzalez-Munne said, using a term meaning priest. ``They are traveling because they have no other way to get to Cuba.''
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Tourism apartheid in Cuba
Salon.com
Tourism apartheid in Cuba
Many of the island nation's most beautiful areas are off limits to its citizens. Will Fidel's tourist policy be his undoing?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Damien Cave
Feb. 6, 2002 | Gustavo Iglesias stands on the sandy shores of Caibarien, Cuba, and points out to sea.
"Mira," he says, pointing to a long causeway that seems to lead nowhere. "Hay una isla allá -- con las playas vírgenes. Es muy, muy bonita."
Through a hazy December sun, I can see the outline of the tiny key, Cayo Santa Maria. Thoughts of Ernest Hemingway come to mind. Gregorio Fuentes, a Cuban fisherman who died recently, and who Hemingway fictionalized in "The Old Man and the Sea," used to take Papa out to these keys on the northern coast. They were a respite for them both, a place to fish, to party on the virgin beaches and to get away from the bustle of strangers who -- after Hemingway won the Nobel prize in 1954 -- began to appear regularly at Hemingway's suburban Havana home.
But today, this tiny key would not welcome the likes of Hemingway and Fuentes. The pair, close friends for years, would have to separate. Hemingway could step foot onshore, but Fuentes? He'd have to stay aboard his boat or sail home. The only Cubans allowed on the key are those who are either building hotels or working in them. Everyday Cubans are not allowed. They can't moor their boats nor can they drive the 48-kilometer road that juts out into the Atlantic toward the Florida coast.
It isn't just the $5 toll, the equivalent of a month's salary, that keeps them away. It's also the law. Cubans and tourists are allowed to mix when tourists initiate contact or in public areas, but otherwise, never the twain shall meet. "Tourism apartheid," as its critics call it, is taking hold.
The policy isn't actually new. It's been around for at least a decade, since Cuba started expanding its tourism industry to make up for lost economic aid from the Soviet Union. But every year, another beach, key, resort or historic hotel is cordoned off for foreigners. Because the Cuban government's hunger for tourists and their dollars is insatiable -- more than 22,000 hotel rooms have been added since 1990 -- Cuba is progressively being taken away from its own people. Unless something changes, more and more of the country's most beautiful places will soon be off limits to the people who built or founded them.
Many Cubans, if not most, don't seem to notice the irony of this situation. Iglesias, for example, knew I would never rat out his opinions; he's the second cousin of my Cuban-American girlfriend, Diana, and we shared a comfortable rapport. But he only shrugged when I prodded him about his feelings on Cuba's economic policies. Castro's form of tourism, which flies in the face of both socialist and free-market ideals, didn't seem to bother him. Like many other Cubans Diana and I spoke to over the course of two weeks, he simply accepted the policy as inevitable.
This is apparently quite common. "There's a certain habit of resignation in Cuba," says Manny Hidalgo, the Washington office director of the Cuban Committee for Democracy, a moderate Cuban-American nonprofit. "They've just resigned themselves to the situation that they're in."
And yet, however stoic Cubans may be, in a handful of situations I saw signs of the system breaking down. Diana and I played pool at a hotel in Varadero with two drunk young Cubans while the hotel manager looked on. We discussed Britney Spears and Marc Anthony with a pair of locals on the city's white-sand beach -- a conversation that tourists in previous years had to take elsewhere. And in Trinidad, "the most beautiful city in Cuba" according to most guidebooks, I watched a group of teenagers resist police efforts to make them leave an open-air tourist bar.
All of which made me wonder: Could Castro's "tourism apartheid" inspire the kind of dissent that would threaten his regime? Might the attempt to court tourism become a catalyst for democratic change?
Cuba's beaches and hotels have always been political playthings. Many of the richest 19th century sugar barons lived along the coast, and when tourists flocked to the country in the '40s and '50s, they found that some of the best hotels catered not just to Americans, but also to their Jim Crow brand of racism. Black Cubans could not enter the buildings -- except as servants.
The Cuban revolutionaries, as they agitated and expanded their ranks in the mid-'50s, pledged to end imported racism. They eventually made good on the promise. Soon after Castro, Che Guevara and their comrades seized power from Fulgencio Batista, they seized the private clubs and beaches, then opened them to the public.
Cubans welcomed the change. Nicolas Guillen, the famous mulatto Cuban poet, praised the new level of access. His 1964 poem "Tengo" ("I Have") extols the Revolution for opening up the country to Cubans of African descent. He even specifically uses the beaches as an example, noting that there were no longer prohibitions, only the "giant blue democratic opening: the end, the sea."
Everyday Cubans also enjoyed the sudden property windfall. The Museum of the Revolution -- housed in the former presidential palace and still riddled with bullet holes from the 1959 coup -- holds several pictures of Cubans lounging in front of once-private clubs. The snapshots are simple, yellowed black-and-whites, but they seem to capture the national mood of excitement: Men and women are playing soccer in the sand, families are eating lunch, groups of women are sunbathing or chatting. The beach looks extremely crowded, like New York's Jones Beach in the middle of July.
Throughout the next few decades, open access was the rule. The beaches immediately to Havana's east and elsewhere remained popular with Cubans, and development was limited to health care, agriculture, oil and manufacturing. Tourism was a second thought, if not further down the list of national priorities.
In the '80s, however, Cuba began to build a series of large hotels in Varadero, a town about two hours away from Havana. There were already hotels on the strip of sandy land, some of them famous art deco gems built before the Revolution, but the expansion marked the beginning of Cuba's reemergence as a tourist destination. (A quick Google search for "famous Varadero beaches" yields hundreds of travel agency Web pages.)
The collapse of the Soviet Union severely accelerated the process. The loss of aid and markets for Cuban exports such as sugar forced the economy into a near-depression. Castro called this time "the Special Period" in which Cubans needed to dig deep into their souls to support the Revolution, but with electricity outages, skyrocketing unemployment and other problems, Cuba needed more than socialist resolve.
Tourism came to be seen as an economic savior. Cuba hardly wanted to start courting capitalist visitors who might upset the status quo with their dollars and ideas, but with devastation all around, "What choice did the government have?" says Wayne Smith, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy who was a Cuba expert at the State Department from 1958 to 1982. "Sugar is shot. They don't have oil to export or any other resource in great supply. They almost had to turn to tourism. It is a contradiction of revolutionary values, but there it is."
Castro, then and now, defends the move by stressing that tourist dollars will be used to help all Cubans. "The government argues, and most Cubans grudgingly hope it's true, that as the economy improves, helped in part by the money brought in by tourism, that the injustices can be ironed out and everyone can have an equal shot at things," Smith says.
But the policies of tourism apartheid, now more than a decade old, seem to be undermining Cubans' faith in Castro's promise.
Many of the Cubans I met expressed frustration with the way police broke up conversations with tourists. A handful of these dissenters were simply Jineteros looking for more freedom to sell me cigars, or get a gift out of me. But others seemed genuinely disappointed, if not angry, about their inability to travel where they wanted and speak to whom they pleased.
Some chose to simply break the policy when police were absent, a practice especially common in Havana. Others overtly resisted the segregation. The group of teenagers in Trinidad, for example, refused to move from a table at an outside bar, confident perhaps that the cops wouldn't make a scene in front of the 100 European and American visitors.
And at least a few seem to have found creative ways to undermine not just the tourism policy, but also more general Cuban restrictions. Take the woman I met in the Varadero bus station -- I'll call her Maria. Smartly dressed in a navy blue miniskirt suit set, she told us about how she planned to use her Italian boyfriend to buy a house. Cubans aren't allowed to purchase private property, she explained, but foreigners are. And since Maria's sister was a lawyer, she was confident that the plan would come off without a hitch. She already had money saved. The fact that her boyfriend came to Cuba for only a few months a year seemed to be nothing more than an irrelevant footnote.
Of course, these anecdotes do not an opposition movement make. For every Cuban who expressed opposition, there were at least a dozen more who seemed perfectly happy to remain outside the tourist clubs and beaches. Many were happy just being within earshot of a band, picking up enough of a beat to justify a hearty dance.
Acceptance is the norm in Cuba, some argue. Tourism apartheid is not "an issue that will cause an upheaval," Smith says. The segregation may be visible and important to tourists, he says, but Cubans have other concerns. "Resentments over tourism would recede quickly if the government would but move ahead with other reforms, such as a small-business law and giving more land for private cultivation," he says.
Yet, perhaps Cubans will once again surprise the experts and the world, as they did in 1959. The tourism policy, unlike other Cuban forms of repression, strikes at the heart of both the Revolution and the Cuban psyche, says Max Castro at the University of Miami. "It's self-discrimination," he says. "That creates a different psychological response in the population. It's a point of stronger frustration -- especially for a people that are as nationalistic as Cubans. It's a real hard pill to swallow for a lot of people."
Some sort of showdown may not be inevitable, but it seems to be, at the very least, possible. Cuba's tourism expansion continues, even in the midst of a worldwide recession that's sucked the life out of the industry. The tiny, peaceful key off the coast of Caibarien is only one example of many projects being developed. New hotels seem to be everywhere and some of the most beautiful plazas in Havana are being refinished and essentially set aside for tourists. Even in Varadero -- which is already full of luxurious, if boxy and functional, hotels -- new construction is common.
Perhaps more disturbingly, the ironies and hypocrisies continue to add up. History seems to be disappearing. Not only are the coastal islands once frequented by Hemingway being gobbled up by the government, but so too are the shreds of literature that praise open access.
Remember Guillen's poem "Tengo," for example? Well, says Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, a comparative literature professor at Yale, "Guillen is dead now and so is his poem, which I understand is not allowed to circulate because, indeed, certain hotels, bars, restaurants are not open to Cuban blacks. There is an irony for you."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Damien Cave is a senior writer for Salon
Tourism apartheid in Cuba
Many of the island nation's most beautiful areas are off limits to its citizens. Will Fidel's tourist policy be his undoing?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Damien Cave
Feb. 6, 2002 | Gustavo Iglesias stands on the sandy shores of Caibarien, Cuba, and points out to sea.
"Mira," he says, pointing to a long causeway that seems to lead nowhere. "Hay una isla allá -- con las playas vírgenes. Es muy, muy bonita."
Through a hazy December sun, I can see the outline of the tiny key, Cayo Santa Maria. Thoughts of Ernest Hemingway come to mind. Gregorio Fuentes, a Cuban fisherman who died recently, and who Hemingway fictionalized in "The Old Man and the Sea," used to take Papa out to these keys on the northern coast. They were a respite for them both, a place to fish, to party on the virgin beaches and to get away from the bustle of strangers who -- after Hemingway won the Nobel prize in 1954 -- began to appear regularly at Hemingway's suburban Havana home.
But today, this tiny key would not welcome the likes of Hemingway and Fuentes. The pair, close friends for years, would have to separate. Hemingway could step foot onshore, but Fuentes? He'd have to stay aboard his boat or sail home. The only Cubans allowed on the key are those who are either building hotels or working in them. Everyday Cubans are not allowed. They can't moor their boats nor can they drive the 48-kilometer road that juts out into the Atlantic toward the Florida coast.
It isn't just the $5 toll, the equivalent of a month's salary, that keeps them away. It's also the law. Cubans and tourists are allowed to mix when tourists initiate contact or in public areas, but otherwise, never the twain shall meet. "Tourism apartheid," as its critics call it, is taking hold.
The policy isn't actually new. It's been around for at least a decade, since Cuba started expanding its tourism industry to make up for lost economic aid from the Soviet Union. But every year, another beach, key, resort or historic hotel is cordoned off for foreigners. Because the Cuban government's hunger for tourists and their dollars is insatiable -- more than 22,000 hotel rooms have been added since 1990 -- Cuba is progressively being taken away from its own people. Unless something changes, more and more of the country's most beautiful places will soon be off limits to the people who built or founded them.
Many Cubans, if not most, don't seem to notice the irony of this situation. Iglesias, for example, knew I would never rat out his opinions; he's the second cousin of my Cuban-American girlfriend, Diana, and we shared a comfortable rapport. But he only shrugged when I prodded him about his feelings on Cuba's economic policies. Castro's form of tourism, which flies in the face of both socialist and free-market ideals, didn't seem to bother him. Like many other Cubans Diana and I spoke to over the course of two weeks, he simply accepted the policy as inevitable.
This is apparently quite common. "There's a certain habit of resignation in Cuba," says Manny Hidalgo, the Washington office director of the Cuban Committee for Democracy, a moderate Cuban-American nonprofit. "They've just resigned themselves to the situation that they're in."
And yet, however stoic Cubans may be, in a handful of situations I saw signs of the system breaking down. Diana and I played pool at a hotel in Varadero with two drunk young Cubans while the hotel manager looked on. We discussed Britney Spears and Marc Anthony with a pair of locals on the city's white-sand beach -- a conversation that tourists in previous years had to take elsewhere. And in Trinidad, "the most beautiful city in Cuba" according to most guidebooks, I watched a group of teenagers resist police efforts to make them leave an open-air tourist bar.
All of which made me wonder: Could Castro's "tourism apartheid" inspire the kind of dissent that would threaten his regime? Might the attempt to court tourism become a catalyst for democratic change?
Cuba's beaches and hotels have always been political playthings. Many of the richest 19th century sugar barons lived along the coast, and when tourists flocked to the country in the '40s and '50s, they found that some of the best hotels catered not just to Americans, but also to their Jim Crow brand of racism. Black Cubans could not enter the buildings -- except as servants.
The Cuban revolutionaries, as they agitated and expanded their ranks in the mid-'50s, pledged to end imported racism. They eventually made good on the promise. Soon after Castro, Che Guevara and their comrades seized power from Fulgencio Batista, they seized the private clubs and beaches, then opened them to the public.
Cubans welcomed the change. Nicolas Guillen, the famous mulatto Cuban poet, praised the new level of access. His 1964 poem "Tengo" ("I Have") extols the Revolution for opening up the country to Cubans of African descent. He even specifically uses the beaches as an example, noting that there were no longer prohibitions, only the "giant blue democratic opening: the end, the sea."
Everyday Cubans also enjoyed the sudden property windfall. The Museum of the Revolution -- housed in the former presidential palace and still riddled with bullet holes from the 1959 coup -- holds several pictures of Cubans lounging in front of once-private clubs. The snapshots are simple, yellowed black-and-whites, but they seem to capture the national mood of excitement: Men and women are playing soccer in the sand, families are eating lunch, groups of women are sunbathing or chatting. The beach looks extremely crowded, like New York's Jones Beach in the middle of July.
Throughout the next few decades, open access was the rule. The beaches immediately to Havana's east and elsewhere remained popular with Cubans, and development was limited to health care, agriculture, oil and manufacturing. Tourism was a second thought, if not further down the list of national priorities.
In the '80s, however, Cuba began to build a series of large hotels in Varadero, a town about two hours away from Havana. There were already hotels on the strip of sandy land, some of them famous art deco gems built before the Revolution, but the expansion marked the beginning of Cuba's reemergence as a tourist destination. (A quick Google search for "famous Varadero beaches" yields hundreds of travel agency Web pages.)
The collapse of the Soviet Union severely accelerated the process. The loss of aid and markets for Cuban exports such as sugar forced the economy into a near-depression. Castro called this time "the Special Period" in which Cubans needed to dig deep into their souls to support the Revolution, but with electricity outages, skyrocketing unemployment and other problems, Cuba needed more than socialist resolve.
Tourism came to be seen as an economic savior. Cuba hardly wanted to start courting capitalist visitors who might upset the status quo with their dollars and ideas, but with devastation all around, "What choice did the government have?" says Wayne Smith, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy who was a Cuba expert at the State Department from 1958 to 1982. "Sugar is shot. They don't have oil to export or any other resource in great supply. They almost had to turn to tourism. It is a contradiction of revolutionary values, but there it is."
Castro, then and now, defends the move by stressing that tourist dollars will be used to help all Cubans. "The government argues, and most Cubans grudgingly hope it's true, that as the economy improves, helped in part by the money brought in by tourism, that the injustices can be ironed out and everyone can have an equal shot at things," Smith says.
But the policies of tourism apartheid, now more than a decade old, seem to be undermining Cubans' faith in Castro's promise.
Many of the Cubans I met expressed frustration with the way police broke up conversations with tourists. A handful of these dissenters were simply Jineteros looking for more freedom to sell me cigars, or get a gift out of me. But others seemed genuinely disappointed, if not angry, about their inability to travel where they wanted and speak to whom they pleased.
Some chose to simply break the policy when police were absent, a practice especially common in Havana. Others overtly resisted the segregation. The group of teenagers in Trinidad, for example, refused to move from a table at an outside bar, confident perhaps that the cops wouldn't make a scene in front of the 100 European and American visitors.
And at least a few seem to have found creative ways to undermine not just the tourism policy, but also more general Cuban restrictions. Take the woman I met in the Varadero bus station -- I'll call her Maria. Smartly dressed in a navy blue miniskirt suit set, she told us about how she planned to use her Italian boyfriend to buy a house. Cubans aren't allowed to purchase private property, she explained, but foreigners are. And since Maria's sister was a lawyer, she was confident that the plan would come off without a hitch. She already had money saved. The fact that her boyfriend came to Cuba for only a few months a year seemed to be nothing more than an irrelevant footnote.
Of course, these anecdotes do not an opposition movement make. For every Cuban who expressed opposition, there were at least a dozen more who seemed perfectly happy to remain outside the tourist clubs and beaches. Many were happy just being within earshot of a band, picking up enough of a beat to justify a hearty dance.
Acceptance is the norm in Cuba, some argue. Tourism apartheid is not "an issue that will cause an upheaval," Smith says. The segregation may be visible and important to tourists, he says, but Cubans have other concerns. "Resentments over tourism would recede quickly if the government would but move ahead with other reforms, such as a small-business law and giving more land for private cultivation," he says.
Yet, perhaps Cubans will once again surprise the experts and the world, as they did in 1959. The tourism policy, unlike other Cuban forms of repression, strikes at the heart of both the Revolution and the Cuban psyche, says Max Castro at the University of Miami. "It's self-discrimination," he says. "That creates a different psychological response in the population. It's a point of stronger frustration -- especially for a people that are as nationalistic as Cubans. It's a real hard pill to swallow for a lot of people."
Some sort of showdown may not be inevitable, but it seems to be, at the very least, possible. Cuba's tourism expansion continues, even in the midst of a worldwide recession that's sucked the life out of the industry. The tiny, peaceful key off the coast of Caibarien is only one example of many projects being developed. New hotels seem to be everywhere and some of the most beautiful plazas in Havana are being refinished and essentially set aside for tourists. Even in Varadero -- which is already full of luxurious, if boxy and functional, hotels -- new construction is common.
Perhaps more disturbingly, the ironies and hypocrisies continue to add up. History seems to be disappearing. Not only are the coastal islands once frequented by Hemingway being gobbled up by the government, but so too are the shreds of literature that praise open access.
Remember Guillen's poem "Tengo," for example? Well, says Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, a comparative literature professor at Yale, "Guillen is dead now and so is his poem, which I understand is not allowed to circulate because, indeed, certain hotels, bars, restaurants are not open to Cuban blacks. There is an irony for you."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Damien Cave is a senior writer for Salon
A sexual education in Cuba
salon.com > Travel June 12, 1999
URL: http://www.salon.com/travel/feature/1999/06/12/cuba
A sexual education in Cuba
The dance of need and desire differs from one country to another.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Daniel Weinshenker
It's hard to see anything. It's dark, and the strobe lights intermittently illuminating the inside of the Copacabana aren't much help. The arms flailing with shoulders and torsos following them in the air above the dance floor make it hard to focus on anything at all. In the intermittent swatches of light, I can see the face of the girl I am dancing with. Her lips look inflated, swollen like frozen red waves, as if I could take a pin and pop them. Her dark hair is sashaying behind her back in bouquets of ringlets. She puts her arms around my neck now and I can smell her. And then she moves in closer.
"I don't think you understand," I say in nervous and drunken Spanish, leading her away.
We sit down at one of the small drink tables next to the dance floor. The ice is melting in my Cuba Libre.
"I'm thirsty," she says, pouting. "Buy me a drink."
A waiter comes over and I buy her a cola. It's $4, American. She places her hand on the bottom of my thigh and I can feel the blood shifting beneath the skin.
"What don't I understand?" she says, leaning into me. The waiter comes back with the can and sets it on the table, but she doesn't open it.
"Well -- actually, it's me who doesn't understand."
"Where are you staying?" she asks. "Let's go there."
"Um -- I have a girlfriend."
"I don't mind."
"Yeah, well -- I do," I say. "Look, I just wanted to dance. I didn't know you were a -- I just wanted to dance. Can't we just dance?"
There's a remixed version of the "Titanic" theme song hammering out of the speakers. I wonder where they came from, who bought them. On the dance floor are maybe 10 foreign, older men, barely dancing, each of them surrounded by six or seven women. Or maybe they're girls. It's dark and it's hard to see. They're dressed in spandex the color of popsicles, spinning around on a liquid axis. There's a viscosity in their movement, as if the ratio of blood to bone, fluid to structure, is askew. Celine Dion's voice is weaving through the creases in the miniskirts, floating on the humidity in the room, and I think Susana knows her chances with me are sinking.
"Don't you think I'm beautiful?
"Yes, of course."
"Then why don't you want me?"
I don't answer. I can feel the bass lurching in my lungs.
"Look," she says. "Don't think of it like that. Think of it like -- I'm doing a favor for you and you're doing a favor for me."
I think about it. I think about taking her back to the room I am renting near Vedado, across from the Santeria herbero and the painted alleyway. I think about Lorna and Hortensia, the mother and grandmother who own the apartment, unlocking the door for me and us walking up the stairs together. I think about what favors she could do for me and I decide that I don't want them. Then I ask myself what the best thing I could do for her is and I stroke her face.
"I'd be doing you the biggest favor by not taking you home with me," I say.
That's when she starts to cry. I can't hear her because of the music, but I can see her face turn, like the sky above Havana churning in the onset of a small tropical storm.
"Please," she says. "Buy me a sandwich. I'm starving. My daughter's starving. Would you please give me money for a sandwich?"
I give her $10 and she disappears in the crowd gathered around the bar.
That's when Miguel comes back.
"You gave her $10 to go away?! She would've done anything for that much!"
"I didn't want anything," I say. Then I tell him why.
He laughs. He laughs so loud that I can hear it over the techno music.
"You said that?! Don't you know that your idealism isn't worth anything here!"
Strobe lights flicker mechanically and smoke rises from the scuffed floor to the ceiling. Red lights swivel and deal out patterns to the walls.
"I didn't know they were all -- "
"Prostitutes?" he says. "Por favor, Daniel!"
I had met Miguel on the plane from Merida to Havana. Miguel was Mexican, but lived in Miami. He had started a "business" taking packages down to Cuba from family members who had either escaped to the U.S. or had hit the bombo, the lottery. He would take down clothes, money and toiletries and charge the families for doing it. It was a business of sorts, a business that offered free vacations and sex, and it was on one of these trips that he met Pilar, his Cuban girlfriend.
During the flight, he leaned over and told me about a woman who rented rooms in her apartment, and that it was right around the corner from his girlfriend's place. While the engines were throttling, he whispered in my ear for me to wait outside the terminal after customs. I had just gotten on the plane in Mexico, after booking the ticket with a travel agency in the Yucatan. I didn't have anywhere else to go, so that sounded swell to me.
His friend Egon picked us up at the airport in his '72 Lada and drove us back to the city. It was night but even from the plane Havana couldn't be seen. There were no lights on; the electricity, Miguel said, had been shut off.
The moon was strong and smeared itself across the oxidized hood of the Russian jalopy. Crude shadows of fallen buildings cut across the road to Havana Vieja and a few couples, doubling on their bicycles, pedaled slowly on the shoulder.
They dropped me off on a quiet street. A rusted Bel Air was up on blocks and a few boys were kicking around a piece of cardboard.
"This is Lorna's," said Miguel. "No. 153. Right there. Go up and take a look. She lives with her mother, Hortensia. They're great people. They live very well here. Ring the bell."
I got out of the car and knocked on the door. Dogs barked and a woman came to the balcony and looked down. Miguel said something to her in his quick and hyper Mexican accent and the door opened. I pushed it a little and saw a string attached to the lock that rose up the banister to the top floor.
Lorna and Hortensia showed me the apartment: my room, the bathroom, the TV, the toilet that flushed, the couch, the refrigerator that I could keep food in, the fan to blow away the heat. They said they would wash my clothes; $15 a night. I took it.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Egon picks us up outside the Copacabana along the western end of the Malecon, the seaside drive that winds along the Havana coastline. His Lada rumbles and ticks beneath the brown fronds of a hacked-up palm. Along the Malecon, and then along Fifth Avenue (the street that supposedly passes by one of Fidel Castro's many houses), women stand on the medians in skirts and tops that stick to their skin in the humidity. They wave at us, trying to get us to slow down. Egon keeps driving; they're road signs advertising a product he doesn't care to buy.
"What do they want?" I ask.
"A ride," he says without turning his head. "Anything."
None of the dials in the car works; the needles lie down at zero, like exhausted workers on a permanent siesta. A waist-high cement wall is crumbling next to the road, but the painted propaganda on it is still legible: "Patria o Muerte Venceremos" -- "The fatherland or death, we will win."
"What do you think of that, Egon?" I say, pointing to the wall.
"That," he says. "Patria o muerte moriremos" -- "The fatherland or death, we will die."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
When I wake up in the morning, Lorna and Hortensia have made coffee. I've grown accustomed to not having milk; in Cuba there's only milk for children under 7 and even that is powdered.
I stir the coarse sugar into my glass of coffee until it starts to dissolve while Lorna slices open a mammee on a plate. They're nice women, and I'm feeling like a native already, although I know I'm not. It's easy to enjoy a place when you know you can go back to wherever you're from whenever you want. Comfort rides shotgun with the temporary.
Lorna asks me how my night went and Hortensia settles into a chair. I tell them about the dance club and the music and the movement, and then I tell them about the girl.
"Ay, Daniel, what did you expect?" Lorna says.
"I'm not sure," I say, gnawing at a slice of mammee, and it's the truth.
"It's all set up, fixed. You know, like that drink you bought her. She didn't open it, did she?"
"No, she didn't," I say.
"You buy it for $3. She doesn't open it. After you leave, she sells it back to the bartender for $2."
"Jesus, what a setup," I say.
"Ay, Daniel," she says. Lorna then lays it out for me, that most of the prostitutes come from El Oriente, an eastern province on the island, that they come to Havana for a couple of reasons. One, they want to make money. They're starving out in the country. And two, because everyone wants to go to the big city. The city is where you can spend money, if you have it. So these girls come on the train, or hitch rides on state trucks, come to the clubs or the beaches. They do business only with foreigners because only foreigners have money.
In Cuba, it's not a one-time thing. So far as I know, in the United States, it's pretty much a 20-minute deal. You're in, you're out, thank you very much, help yourself to a mint as you leave. But in Cuba, it's a different story. Women don't want just one "session," they want to milk the experience for all it's worth. They're smart capitalists, these socialists. They want you for the entire week. They want to dine with you, go to the pool with you, eat with you and shop with you. You don't even have to pay them cash, just buy them things. It's a barter system: sex for chicken, sex for three-speed electric fans, sex for canned soup, sex for place mats.
Hortensia, Lorna's mother and a great-grandmother, has been quiet all this time, just nodding her head at everything Lorna says and shaking it at my naiveté. It's quiet for a minute while I'm digesting the mammee and the explanation. Then she speaks. "Did you try one?" she asks.
"A cola?"
"No, a Cubana!" she says.
"Absolutely not," I answer and blush the same color as the flesh of the fruit in my palm. "I have a girlfriend. I'm loyal."
"Ay, Daniel -- loyalty?!" says Lorna, and she says it like loyalty is so old-fashioned, like they'd proved it didn't exist years ago and I was the only one in the world who hadn't gotten the newspaper delivered to his conscience that day.
"You really should try one," says Hortensia, spitting out some seeds into her fist. "You know, they're -- we're incredible, the best in the world."
Lorna is laughing and trying to hide behind her glass and a cigarette.
And I can't believe it, because here I am, being told by a great-grandmother that I should sample a prostitute, as if it were akin to trying a regional dish, pig's knuckles or baby eels.
"Say you're a chemist," she begins, "and you read a great chemistry book. You can say it's the best chemistry book in the world, but if you haven't read all the chemistry books in the world, then how do you know?"
"But what about loyalty?" I say.
"Loyalty?" says Hortensia, spitting a chunk of rind into her hand. "But you're a man."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Is it just me? I'm not just talking about what Hortensia says. I'm talking about everything: the way the men and women interact, not only the different roles they hold but also what is expected of them, both by themselves and by others. I have to find out if it's just Hortensia who has these views, or if it's something deeper, ingrained in the culture.
Hortensia's sister, Paloma, lives in Santa Cruz del Norte. I have an open invitation to get out of the city, where morals typically erode, and into the rural, where more often than not there is some preservation. Plus I have been told there is cheap lobster to be had -- all in all, an irresistible travel menu. So I grab a bus to Santa Cruz.
The first thing I notice is that Paloma and her husband, Domingo, have a house. In Havana there are only apartments, and these apartments are about as stable as the set from a high school play produced 50 years ago. It's said that more than 300 buildings crumble every year in Havana. While in most cities the fallen would be quickly rebuilt or replaced, in Cuba this has not been an option. The evidence of a crumbling country cannot be hidden. So it's not only a saying, it's a visual reality.
Santa Cruz is very different from the city. Many of the people, including Paloma and Domingo, are more content with the country and the system than the city people. Or maybe I should say less discontent. They have more space and a small garden filled with various fruit trees: mango, coconut and guava.
Domingo is hacking open the yellowed husk of a coco with a machete while Paloma and I eat eggs on the porch.
"This is a big house," I say. "Is it just for you and Domingo or do you have any kids?"
Paloma breaks the egg yolk with a tine of her fork.
"We don't have any kids," she says, pausing. "But he has one."
"Oh, from a previous marriage?"
"No," she says and mops up some yolk with an edge of toast.
She explains to me how Domingo had gotten another woman pregnant years back, about how the mother couldn't take care of the baby and how she, Paloma, had taken the baby in.
"But what about Domingo? How could you still stay married to him after that?"
"He's a man," she answers. "That's what men do."
The way she says it, the usage of the word "do" instead of "choose," speaks to a nature that is acknowledged here. Domingo comes in with two glasses of agua de coco, sets them down on the end table and lumbers back outside to boil some milk on a makeshift stove.
"You're talking about men like they don't have a choice, like Domingo couldn't help being with that woman."
Paloma just shrugs and brings the glass up to her lips.
"He's here, isn't he?" she says, and takes a sip, straining the liquid through her teeth. "Look, Daniel, here it's different. Maybe we put a different importance on things because we're just struggle to survive. We don't have the energy to focus on everything. Hortensia told me that you have trouble understanding the prostitutes here. Listen, take my niece. She has a degree in electrical engineering and it's worthless, you know, there are no jobs. So she left for Havana to earn some money and she did, she does. Fidel gave us all education and now he wonders why no one will go back to the fields. Do you understand? We have to work with what we have, and that is so very little. Domingo's daughter, I treat her like my own. We even help take care of her mother now. What are we going to do? There is no choice."
I lean back in the rocking chair and watch Domingo stirring the milk in the backyard, stirring it so it wouldn't burn. My mind stirs, too.
Three days later, I walk back up the stairs of Lorna and Hortensia's apartment. It was a long bus ride and the bag of papayas I have brought has been reduced to mush from the heat and the cramming in the back of the bus, where everyone stood for three hours.
I need to use the bathroom. And while I have reevaluated and relinquished many of the things I think I need in my life since the trip began, I in fact do need to use the bathroom. Lorna and Hortensia are on the couch watching Fidel on TV. Fidel's on TV every night, on both of the channels. Without thinking, I push open the bathroom door; after all, nobody else lives here.
There's a girl on the toilet.
In that moment, that one speck of a second in which I see her on the toilet, I know what's going on. She's beautiful, even sitting on the toilet.
I close my eyes, then the door and walk back out to the living room.
The two women are smirking.
"Welcome back, Daniel," says Lorna.
"Who's that?" I say, pointing to the bathroom.
"Jenny," says Hortensia. "She's a nice girl, you be nice to her."
Then I notice a light on in the room I had been renting before my trip.
"Who's in there?"
"Klaus," says Lorna.
"Klaus?"
"Yes, Klaus."
Klaus and Jenny and I are going to be housemates.
Lorna can tell that I'm not in the best of moods, and that this isn't because I badly need to urinate, although that doesn't make the party any livelier.
But according to Lorna, this is how it works, how people get by in Cuba: Men come, like me, for a vacation. Only it's not a lie-on-the-beach, drink-daquiris, send-postcards vacation. It's a sex vacation. Klaus comes a couple of times every year, she says. Lorna puts him up, cleans up his girls and feeds them.
"How can you do that?" I ask. "Don't you object to it at all? Don't you think it's bad?" The word "bad" -- malo -- echoes off the linoleum.
"Bad, what's bad?" she says. "Daniel, you have a girlfriend, no?"
"Yes."
"And there are things you like about her, no?"
"Of course. She laughs at my dumb jokes, she's fearless, she makes me want to learn."
"And if she didn't have these things, if she didn't make you feel these ways?"
"Then I guess we wouldn't be a couple," I say.
"You want things from her and she wants things from you. We all want things, certain things. This is all. They are just honest, maybe more honest than you about exactly what they want. You think in terms of good and bad. Things here aren't good or bad, they are what they are. La lucha, the struggle, is everywhere. People do what they need to do to survive. You could have sympathy for that, you know. You are capable of sympathy."
Hortensia nods.
We sit there on the couch. Fidel shouts out from the TV's paper speaker. Outside, I can hear children playing, the sound of hot wind slipping through the streets, a hammer pounding on the hood of a car. I think about sympathy. What if everything I've learned -- the things my parents taught me, my teachers taught me -- what if all these weren't right? Then I think about Paloma and Domingo, about them taking in the girl and then taking in the girl's mother, how an act like that just shines.
The bathroom door opens and the girl sticks her head out.
"Does anyone have any soap? I'm so dirty, I'm embarrassed."
I knew neither Lorna nor Hortensia can afford soap. They have empty soap cases and empty shampoo bottles on the shelves as decorations. I have soap, though, tons of it. Lorna is looking at me and I can feel it.
"I have some in my backpack," I say. "Just give me a minute."
I come back with a travel bottle and push my hand through the gap between the open door and the frame.
"Here," I say. "You can use this."
I feel her hand take the bottle from my fingers. I can't say it's a romantic moment, exactly; it's not. But I do feel something: two people making a connection, making the best in a world where many buildings and many more relationships have fallen.
It's a small gesture, I know. It's just soap, but to me it's something more, a small bottle of understanding maybe.
I can hear the water dropping on the floor of the tub. Lorna and Hortensia are smiling on the couch.
"It smells so good, like peppermint," says the girl in the shower.
"I know," I say. "You can keep it."
salon.com | June 12, 1999
URL: http://www.salon.com/travel/feature/1999/06/12/cuba
A sexual education in Cuba
The dance of need and desire differs from one country to another.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Daniel Weinshenker
It's hard to see anything. It's dark, and the strobe lights intermittently illuminating the inside of the Copacabana aren't much help. The arms flailing with shoulders and torsos following them in the air above the dance floor make it hard to focus on anything at all. In the intermittent swatches of light, I can see the face of the girl I am dancing with. Her lips look inflated, swollen like frozen red waves, as if I could take a pin and pop them. Her dark hair is sashaying behind her back in bouquets of ringlets. She puts her arms around my neck now and I can smell her. And then she moves in closer.
"I don't think you understand," I say in nervous and drunken Spanish, leading her away.
We sit down at one of the small drink tables next to the dance floor. The ice is melting in my Cuba Libre.
"I'm thirsty," she says, pouting. "Buy me a drink."
A waiter comes over and I buy her a cola. It's $4, American. She places her hand on the bottom of my thigh and I can feel the blood shifting beneath the skin.
"What don't I understand?" she says, leaning into me. The waiter comes back with the can and sets it on the table, but she doesn't open it.
"Well -- actually, it's me who doesn't understand."
"Where are you staying?" she asks. "Let's go there."
"Um -- I have a girlfriend."
"I don't mind."
"Yeah, well -- I do," I say. "Look, I just wanted to dance. I didn't know you were a -- I just wanted to dance. Can't we just dance?"
There's a remixed version of the "Titanic" theme song hammering out of the speakers. I wonder where they came from, who bought them. On the dance floor are maybe 10 foreign, older men, barely dancing, each of them surrounded by six or seven women. Or maybe they're girls. It's dark and it's hard to see. They're dressed in spandex the color of popsicles, spinning around on a liquid axis. There's a viscosity in their movement, as if the ratio of blood to bone, fluid to structure, is askew. Celine Dion's voice is weaving through the creases in the miniskirts, floating on the humidity in the room, and I think Susana knows her chances with me are sinking.
"Don't you think I'm beautiful?
"Yes, of course."
"Then why don't you want me?"
I don't answer. I can feel the bass lurching in my lungs.
"Look," she says. "Don't think of it like that. Think of it like -- I'm doing a favor for you and you're doing a favor for me."
I think about it. I think about taking her back to the room I am renting near Vedado, across from the Santeria herbero and the painted alleyway. I think about Lorna and Hortensia, the mother and grandmother who own the apartment, unlocking the door for me and us walking up the stairs together. I think about what favors she could do for me and I decide that I don't want them. Then I ask myself what the best thing I could do for her is and I stroke her face.
"I'd be doing you the biggest favor by not taking you home with me," I say.
That's when she starts to cry. I can't hear her because of the music, but I can see her face turn, like the sky above Havana churning in the onset of a small tropical storm.
"Please," she says. "Buy me a sandwich. I'm starving. My daughter's starving. Would you please give me money for a sandwich?"
I give her $10 and she disappears in the crowd gathered around the bar.
That's when Miguel comes back.
"You gave her $10 to go away?! She would've done anything for that much!"
"I didn't want anything," I say. Then I tell him why.
He laughs. He laughs so loud that I can hear it over the techno music.
"You said that?! Don't you know that your idealism isn't worth anything here!"
Strobe lights flicker mechanically and smoke rises from the scuffed floor to the ceiling. Red lights swivel and deal out patterns to the walls.
"I didn't know they were all -- "
"Prostitutes?" he says. "Por favor, Daniel!"
I had met Miguel on the plane from Merida to Havana. Miguel was Mexican, but lived in Miami. He had started a "business" taking packages down to Cuba from family members who had either escaped to the U.S. or had hit the bombo, the lottery. He would take down clothes, money and toiletries and charge the families for doing it. It was a business of sorts, a business that offered free vacations and sex, and it was on one of these trips that he met Pilar, his Cuban girlfriend.
During the flight, he leaned over and told me about a woman who rented rooms in her apartment, and that it was right around the corner from his girlfriend's place. While the engines were throttling, he whispered in my ear for me to wait outside the terminal after customs. I had just gotten on the plane in Mexico, after booking the ticket with a travel agency in the Yucatan. I didn't have anywhere else to go, so that sounded swell to me.
His friend Egon picked us up at the airport in his '72 Lada and drove us back to the city. It was night but even from the plane Havana couldn't be seen. There were no lights on; the electricity, Miguel said, had been shut off.
The moon was strong and smeared itself across the oxidized hood of the Russian jalopy. Crude shadows of fallen buildings cut across the road to Havana Vieja and a few couples, doubling on their bicycles, pedaled slowly on the shoulder.
They dropped me off on a quiet street. A rusted Bel Air was up on blocks and a few boys were kicking around a piece of cardboard.
"This is Lorna's," said Miguel. "No. 153. Right there. Go up and take a look. She lives with her mother, Hortensia. They're great people. They live very well here. Ring the bell."
I got out of the car and knocked on the door. Dogs barked and a woman came to the balcony and looked down. Miguel said something to her in his quick and hyper Mexican accent and the door opened. I pushed it a little and saw a string attached to the lock that rose up the banister to the top floor.
Lorna and Hortensia showed me the apartment: my room, the bathroom, the TV, the toilet that flushed, the couch, the refrigerator that I could keep food in, the fan to blow away the heat. They said they would wash my clothes; $15 a night. I took it.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Egon picks us up outside the Copacabana along the western end of the Malecon, the seaside drive that winds along the Havana coastline. His Lada rumbles and ticks beneath the brown fronds of a hacked-up palm. Along the Malecon, and then along Fifth Avenue (the street that supposedly passes by one of Fidel Castro's many houses), women stand on the medians in skirts and tops that stick to their skin in the humidity. They wave at us, trying to get us to slow down. Egon keeps driving; they're road signs advertising a product he doesn't care to buy.
"What do they want?" I ask.
"A ride," he says without turning his head. "Anything."
None of the dials in the car works; the needles lie down at zero, like exhausted workers on a permanent siesta. A waist-high cement wall is crumbling next to the road, but the painted propaganda on it is still legible: "Patria o Muerte Venceremos" -- "The fatherland or death, we will win."
"What do you think of that, Egon?" I say, pointing to the wall.
"That," he says. "Patria o muerte moriremos" -- "The fatherland or death, we will die."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
When I wake up in the morning, Lorna and Hortensia have made coffee. I've grown accustomed to not having milk; in Cuba there's only milk for children under 7 and even that is powdered.
I stir the coarse sugar into my glass of coffee until it starts to dissolve while Lorna slices open a mammee on a plate. They're nice women, and I'm feeling like a native already, although I know I'm not. It's easy to enjoy a place when you know you can go back to wherever you're from whenever you want. Comfort rides shotgun with the temporary.
Lorna asks me how my night went and Hortensia settles into a chair. I tell them about the dance club and the music and the movement, and then I tell them about the girl.
"Ay, Daniel, what did you expect?" Lorna says.
"I'm not sure," I say, gnawing at a slice of mammee, and it's the truth.
"It's all set up, fixed. You know, like that drink you bought her. She didn't open it, did she?"
"No, she didn't," I say.
"You buy it for $3. She doesn't open it. After you leave, she sells it back to the bartender for $2."
"Jesus, what a setup," I say.
"Ay, Daniel," she says. Lorna then lays it out for me, that most of the prostitutes come from El Oriente, an eastern province on the island, that they come to Havana for a couple of reasons. One, they want to make money. They're starving out in the country. And two, because everyone wants to go to the big city. The city is where you can spend money, if you have it. So these girls come on the train, or hitch rides on state trucks, come to the clubs or the beaches. They do business only with foreigners because only foreigners have money.
In Cuba, it's not a one-time thing. So far as I know, in the United States, it's pretty much a 20-minute deal. You're in, you're out, thank you very much, help yourself to a mint as you leave. But in Cuba, it's a different story. Women don't want just one "session," they want to milk the experience for all it's worth. They're smart capitalists, these socialists. They want you for the entire week. They want to dine with you, go to the pool with you, eat with you and shop with you. You don't even have to pay them cash, just buy them things. It's a barter system: sex for chicken, sex for three-speed electric fans, sex for canned soup, sex for place mats.
Hortensia, Lorna's mother and a great-grandmother, has been quiet all this time, just nodding her head at everything Lorna says and shaking it at my naiveté. It's quiet for a minute while I'm digesting the mammee and the explanation. Then she speaks. "Did you try one?" she asks.
"A cola?"
"No, a Cubana!" she says.
"Absolutely not," I answer and blush the same color as the flesh of the fruit in my palm. "I have a girlfriend. I'm loyal."
"Ay, Daniel -- loyalty?!" says Lorna, and she says it like loyalty is so old-fashioned, like they'd proved it didn't exist years ago and I was the only one in the world who hadn't gotten the newspaper delivered to his conscience that day.
"You really should try one," says Hortensia, spitting out some seeds into her fist. "You know, they're -- we're incredible, the best in the world."
Lorna is laughing and trying to hide behind her glass and a cigarette.
And I can't believe it, because here I am, being told by a great-grandmother that I should sample a prostitute, as if it were akin to trying a regional dish, pig's knuckles or baby eels.
"Say you're a chemist," she begins, "and you read a great chemistry book. You can say it's the best chemistry book in the world, but if you haven't read all the chemistry books in the world, then how do you know?"
"But what about loyalty?" I say.
"Loyalty?" says Hortensia, spitting a chunk of rind into her hand. "But you're a man."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Is it just me? I'm not just talking about what Hortensia says. I'm talking about everything: the way the men and women interact, not only the different roles they hold but also what is expected of them, both by themselves and by others. I have to find out if it's just Hortensia who has these views, or if it's something deeper, ingrained in the culture.
Hortensia's sister, Paloma, lives in Santa Cruz del Norte. I have an open invitation to get out of the city, where morals typically erode, and into the rural, where more often than not there is some preservation. Plus I have been told there is cheap lobster to be had -- all in all, an irresistible travel menu. So I grab a bus to Santa Cruz.
The first thing I notice is that Paloma and her husband, Domingo, have a house. In Havana there are only apartments, and these apartments are about as stable as the set from a high school play produced 50 years ago. It's said that more than 300 buildings crumble every year in Havana. While in most cities the fallen would be quickly rebuilt or replaced, in Cuba this has not been an option. The evidence of a crumbling country cannot be hidden. So it's not only a saying, it's a visual reality.
Santa Cruz is very different from the city. Many of the people, including Paloma and Domingo, are more content with the country and the system than the city people. Or maybe I should say less discontent. They have more space and a small garden filled with various fruit trees: mango, coconut and guava.
Domingo is hacking open the yellowed husk of a coco with a machete while Paloma and I eat eggs on the porch.
"This is a big house," I say. "Is it just for you and Domingo or do you have any kids?"
Paloma breaks the egg yolk with a tine of her fork.
"We don't have any kids," she says, pausing. "But he has one."
"Oh, from a previous marriage?"
"No," she says and mops up some yolk with an edge of toast.
She explains to me how Domingo had gotten another woman pregnant years back, about how the mother couldn't take care of the baby and how she, Paloma, had taken the baby in.
"But what about Domingo? How could you still stay married to him after that?"
"He's a man," she answers. "That's what men do."
The way she says it, the usage of the word "do" instead of "choose," speaks to a nature that is acknowledged here. Domingo comes in with two glasses of agua de coco, sets them down on the end table and lumbers back outside to boil some milk on a makeshift stove.
"You're talking about men like they don't have a choice, like Domingo couldn't help being with that woman."
Paloma just shrugs and brings the glass up to her lips.
"He's here, isn't he?" she says, and takes a sip, straining the liquid through her teeth. "Look, Daniel, here it's different. Maybe we put a different importance on things because we're just struggle to survive. We don't have the energy to focus on everything. Hortensia told me that you have trouble understanding the prostitutes here. Listen, take my niece. She has a degree in electrical engineering and it's worthless, you know, there are no jobs. So she left for Havana to earn some money and she did, she does. Fidel gave us all education and now he wonders why no one will go back to the fields. Do you understand? We have to work with what we have, and that is so very little. Domingo's daughter, I treat her like my own. We even help take care of her mother now. What are we going to do? There is no choice."
I lean back in the rocking chair and watch Domingo stirring the milk in the backyard, stirring it so it wouldn't burn. My mind stirs, too.
Three days later, I walk back up the stairs of Lorna and Hortensia's apartment. It was a long bus ride and the bag of papayas I have brought has been reduced to mush from the heat and the cramming in the back of the bus, where everyone stood for three hours.
I need to use the bathroom. And while I have reevaluated and relinquished many of the things I think I need in my life since the trip began, I in fact do need to use the bathroom. Lorna and Hortensia are on the couch watching Fidel on TV. Fidel's on TV every night, on both of the channels. Without thinking, I push open the bathroom door; after all, nobody else lives here.
There's a girl on the toilet.
In that moment, that one speck of a second in which I see her on the toilet, I know what's going on. She's beautiful, even sitting on the toilet.
I close my eyes, then the door and walk back out to the living room.
The two women are smirking.
"Welcome back, Daniel," says Lorna.
"Who's that?" I say, pointing to the bathroom.
"Jenny," says Hortensia. "She's a nice girl, you be nice to her."
Then I notice a light on in the room I had been renting before my trip.
"Who's in there?"
"Klaus," says Lorna.
"Klaus?"
"Yes, Klaus."
Klaus and Jenny and I are going to be housemates.
Lorna can tell that I'm not in the best of moods, and that this isn't because I badly need to urinate, although that doesn't make the party any livelier.
But according to Lorna, this is how it works, how people get by in Cuba: Men come, like me, for a vacation. Only it's not a lie-on-the-beach, drink-daquiris, send-postcards vacation. It's a sex vacation. Klaus comes a couple of times every year, she says. Lorna puts him up, cleans up his girls and feeds them.
"How can you do that?" I ask. "Don't you object to it at all? Don't you think it's bad?" The word "bad" -- malo -- echoes off the linoleum.
"Bad, what's bad?" she says. "Daniel, you have a girlfriend, no?"
"Yes."
"And there are things you like about her, no?"
"Of course. She laughs at my dumb jokes, she's fearless, she makes me want to learn."
"And if she didn't have these things, if she didn't make you feel these ways?"
"Then I guess we wouldn't be a couple," I say.
"You want things from her and she wants things from you. We all want things, certain things. This is all. They are just honest, maybe more honest than you about exactly what they want. You think in terms of good and bad. Things here aren't good or bad, they are what they are. La lucha, the struggle, is everywhere. People do what they need to do to survive. You could have sympathy for that, you know. You are capable of sympathy."
Hortensia nods.
We sit there on the couch. Fidel shouts out from the TV's paper speaker. Outside, I can hear children playing, the sound of hot wind slipping through the streets, a hammer pounding on the hood of a car. I think about sympathy. What if everything I've learned -- the things my parents taught me, my teachers taught me -- what if all these weren't right? Then I think about Paloma and Domingo, about them taking in the girl and then taking in the girl's mother, how an act like that just shines.
The bathroom door opens and the girl sticks her head out.
"Does anyone have any soap? I'm so dirty, I'm embarrassed."
I knew neither Lorna nor Hortensia can afford soap. They have empty soap cases and empty shampoo bottles on the shelves as decorations. I have soap, though, tons of it. Lorna is looking at me and I can feel it.
"I have some in my backpack," I say. "Just give me a minute."
I come back with a travel bottle and push my hand through the gap between the open door and the frame.
"Here," I say. "You can use this."
I feel her hand take the bottle from my fingers. I can't say it's a romantic moment, exactly; it's not. But I do feel something: two people making a connection, making the best in a world where many buildings and many more relationships have fallen.
It's a small gesture, I know. It's just soap, but to me it's something more, a small bottle of understanding maybe.
I can hear the water dropping on the floor of the tub. Lorna and Hortensia are smiling on the couch.
"It smells so good, like peppermint," says the girl in the shower.
"I know," I say. "You can keep it."
salon.com | June 12, 1999
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