Why Cuba supports people-to-people exchanges

By Manuel E. Yepe

HAVANA – How can you explain Cuba’s support for the people-to-people contacts promoted by the U.S. government against Cuba? I was asked this by a U.S. student, one of the many who have travelled to the island within the policy framework thus named by the William Clinton administration, later revoked by George W. Bush in 2003, and recently resumed by President Obama.

Another student, also American, did not wait for my answer and added to the first question, “How come here in Havana we are received with so much friendship and respect despite the many outrages of our different governments against Cubans?

I explained that Cuba accepts the challenge of Washington’s people-to-people interaction policy because in spite of the fact that its declared purpose is that visitors promote “democracy” among Cubans (democracy being the term Washington uses to name the capitalist system), in fact it offers Cubans the opportunity to show visitors the falsehoods of the more than half-century old U.S. media campaign against Cuba.

The distance between the manipulations of the campaign and the truth is such that from the first minute of their contact with Cuban reality, well-meaning visitors become open to understanding the reasons that have given rise to the historical popular deed that is the Cuban Revolution and the absurd nature of their government’s policy of hostility against this country.

In January 1961, the U.S. State Department declared that tourism to Cuba was contrary to U.S. foreign policy and national interests. Travelling to Cuba was thus forbidden to all U.S. citizens.

Cuban hospitality toward foreigners is an ancestral quality explained by many experts by the islander nature of the country among many other geographical and historical factors.

But in the case of present-day Americans, every Cuban citizen is aware that any visitor from the U.S. to the island somehow represents a rejection of the unfair policy of isolation and hostility against Cuba. And this deserves reciprocity.

Nowadays nobody doubts that the enmity against Cuba promoted by the oligarchy that rules the destinies of the U.S. will turn – as a boomerang – against its purpose. Lies are being confronted by evidence and are generating a strong trend of attraction towards the Cuban process of independence and social justice.

The prohibition to travel to Cuba is part of the general U.S. strategy to isolate the island and defeat its government by means of an economic, financial and commercial blockade aimed at causing hunger and misery for which Cubans would blame the revolutionary leadership.

This, of course, has not happened. In fact the heroic resistance of Cubans toward this abuse has aroused the solidarity of other peoples and even the almost unanimous world governmental condemnation of the blockade.

In the last 20 years, Cuba has received 29 million tourists; half of them from Europe, 8 million from Canada, 4 million from Latin America and the Caribbean, and 800,000 from the US.

According to some estimates, between 1990 and 2005, an average 20,000 to 30,000 Americans travelled to Cuba each year with special licenses or illegally. With legal permits, students, professors and scholars travelled to Cuba; groups of lawyers, architects, historians and doctors attended professional conferences and events; juvenile sports teams, religious groups and environmental organizations also visited Cuba.

American tourist experts believe that eliminating the prohibition of travel to Cuba would mean that, considering only those motivated by curiosity or attracted by a fruit forbidden for so many years, would increase by millions the number of tourists arriving in Cuba every year.

The Cuban tourist industry is preparing to increase its lodging capacity and other facilities to face the demands of a sudden wave of more than a million tourists from the US when Congress lifts the prohibition on travel to the island. Plans have been made to add 200,000 rooms in the mid- and long- terms.

Tourism is Cuba’s second most important source of hard currency and an important source of employment. Cubans who wait impatiently for this to happen soon are aware that it will contribute greatly to security and peace in the region and the world.

Translated by CubaNews. Edited by Walter Lippmann.