Cuba relies on tourism to lift economy
Trump administration seeks to curb U.S. influx
VARADERO, Cuba — The battle for Cuba’s economic future is being waged on its beaches. And at its all-inclusive resorts, dive sites and cobblestoned colonial plazas.
As most of Cuba’s economy stagnates or declines, the country has launched a full-scale effort to turn virtually the only bright spot — tourism — into an engine that can drag the rest of the communist island nation through its worst economic crisis in two decades. In government meetings and propaganda, it has now set a goal of drawing 5 million tourists in 2019 — perhaps the modern-day equivalent of its Soviet-era dependence on the annual sugar-harvest production.
The Trump administration is intently focused on scaling back tourism to the island as part of a campaign to smother the Cuban economy and force its government to sever ties with President Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela.
President Donald Trump recently activated a section of the 1996 U.S. law known as Helms-burton, allowing lawsuits against foreign companies doing business on properties confiscated after the island’s socialist revolution. His administration has also pledged to limit the legal reasons under which Americans can visit Cuba. The U.S. has also prohibited Americans from patronizing a series of hotels and other facilities run by the military conglomerate that controls many of the most important sectors of the Cuban economy.
But despite the restrictive measures, the Cuban government is doubling down on its bet that tourism to one of the world’s last communist nations will continue to surge.
Cuba began to open the island to tourists after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent loss of billions a year in aid.
In total, Cuba drew 4.7 million tourists in 2018, a 1.3 percent rise over the previous year that puts its latest goal of 5 million within reach. Visits to the island are already running 7 percent higher than the same period last year, when some 639,000 U.S. travelers took a trip.
Official figures show that 257,000 Americans visited Cuba in the first four months of 2019, a 93 percent rise over the same period last year.