Lights and shadows of tourism in Cuba: The lost decade
Over the past 60 years business relations between the United States and Cuba have traveled on a road plagued by obstacles, restrictions, convergence and divergence, where tourism, as the principal symbol of mobility and trade among persons, has been a mirror, marking the trajectories of the policies imposed by alternating Democratic and Republican governments with respect to the Island.
The United States has played and continues to play a key role in Cuba’s economy, despite the restrictions and regulations imposed by the first Trump Administration, which have been continued by the Democratic administration of Joseph Biden.
The climate of détente in the relations between the governments of Washington and Havana during 2015 and 2016, the end of the second term in office of President Barack Obama, encouraged the growth in the flow of foreign visitors to Cuba from the principal emitting countries, particularly from the United States, which triggered an increase in the number of arrivals beginning in 2016.
The number of visits of Cuban-Americans to the Island remained stable until 2015, with prospects of an increase as a result of the policies of the Obama Administration that liberalized travel by Cubans to their country of origin, removed the limits on remittances and allowed certain payments to individuals. This also led to an increase in rentals in private homes for travelers from the United States.
The start of the Republican administration of Donald Trump in January 2017 was accompanied by a new phase of restrictions and a predictable decrease in international tourism to Cuba. Nevertheless, it was in the years 2017 and 2018 that Cuba exhibited the best results in arrivals of international visitors.
Despite a number of exogenous negative factors beginning in September 2017, the year closed with 4,689,000 visitors, an increase of 16.2% with respect to the previous year. International arrivals in 2018 totaled 4,732,000 visitors, the highest figured registered by Cuba since the start of the development of its tourism sector. That year, 620,676 overseas Cubans and 638,360 citizens of the United States[1] visited the Island, accounting for 27.5% of total international visitors.
Starting in the second year of his mandate, President Trump imposed a radical toughening of the sanctions against the Island with over 240 new measures, that included a ban on cruise ships from the U.S. in June 2019, and restrictions on both travel and remittances by Cuban-Americans to their homeland. He also imposed sanctions on a number of foreign companies that traded with Cuba, and included the country in the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT), which practically shut down most of its access to international banks and markets.
Under this scenario air transportation between Cuba and the U.S., in 2018, experienced a reduction of 18.3% compared to 2017, or a total of 11,704 flights–2,620 less than the previous year. The principal causes of this contraction were the new policies of the Trump Administration on travel to Cuba. In October 2019, the Department of Transportation announced the suspension of all flights by U.S. airlines from the U.S. to Cuban airports, except to Havana’s José Martí International Airport.
Between 2019 and 2020, Cuba suffered the greatest impact of Trump’s sanctions and restrictions, including the activation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act starting May 2, 2019; incorporating Cuba in the list of countries that “do not fully cooperate with U.S. antiterrorist efforts”; the addition of 211 entities to the List of Restricted Cuban Entities, and more hotels banned for U.S. travelers, among other measures, that the Biden administration did not roll back.
In March 2020, as a result of the COVID19 pandemic, the Cuban government ordered the total shutdown of entries into the country, a measure that many other countries took in the face of one of the most dangerous pandemics in history. It included closing hotels and other tourist installations, which caused the exodus of almost 10,000 tourism industry workers that sought other forms of employment and income, including emigration. This abrupt loss of qualified personnel affected considerably the quality of service in hotels and other tourist installations.
Another Biden administration measure that came into effect in July 2023 concerns travel authorizations with the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), which allows citizens of 42 countries to travel to the United States for business or tourism for stays of up to 90 days, without the need for a visa. The US ruled that people who had traveled to Cuba did not meet the requirements to travel to the US under the program and their visa-free travel authorizations were canceled. This significantly reduced tourism to Cuba by Europeans and Latin Americans. But it also served to curb temporary visits to the US by Cubans with European passports, mainly Spanish, who were traveling for family reasons, but also to bring back to Cuba products, especially food and medicines exempt from tariffs, for flourishing private businesses, as well as to transport cash remittances to family and friends. All were adverse effects on tourism, retail trade and family remittances.
In this brief synthesis, it is evident that various factors have affected this decline of arrivals to Cuba in the last three years, and all indicates that it is a trend that will not be easy to revert. Cuba has plunged into a deep economic crisis caused by the decrease in domestic production since the pandemic, a multisystemic domestic crisis and the impact of worsening sanctions by Washington. We can add to this the devastating impacts suffered as a result of climate and meteorologic events of hurricanes and earthquakes.
In this complex scenario, from January to October 31, 2024, the number of overseas Cubans that traveled to the Island fell by 17.8% in comparison to the same period in 2023. In the case of Cuban residents in the U.S., the decline was 19.2%. In the period January-October only 244,116 visited the Island far below the 513,657 overseas Cubans that visited in the same period in 2019. The U.S. market contributed 118,038 travelers, much below the figure of 452,835 between January and October 2019. This represents a 74% decline in the period analyzed. Today travelers from the U.S. are less than half of those that visited the Island five years ago.
Cubans who live elsewhere, principally those in the U.S., prefer to travel to Punta Cana or Cancun and invite their families in Cuba, rather than vacation in Cuba staying with their families in Cuban hotels. Data of the Dominican Republic’s General Directorate of Migration informs that in the period January-September of this year, 80,101 Cubans vacationed in that Caribbean destination.
The goal of more than three million tourists for Cuba in 2024 is impossible to meet. The year will probably close with a figure below the 2.4 million visitors that visited in 2023. The scenario could not be more complex: the strengthened U.S. blockade remains intact, but now with a variable of great weight: if the new Republican administration fulfills its campaign promises, the period 2025-2029 will be even more difficult, which presages a Lost Decade for Cuban tourism. Therefore, the future of the country will depend solely on its ability to promote economic development by other means.
