CUBA: Resorts, Hotels and Beaches

Cuba’s budding tourism industry, built during the 1990’s, has replaced sugar as the island’s top foreign exchange earner. In contrast to sugar, tourism is based on sound competitive advantages, and it has the potential to generate additional growth, income, and employment in the decades ahead.It draws foreign investment and know-how. It forces officials and state enterprise executives to cope with international market realities, and it is bringing managers and workers to learn the art of customer service.

Tourism also benefits other parts of the Cuban economy, creating demand for goods and services provided by state enterprises and, in spite of the economy’s clear socialist orientation, by Cuba’s small private sector as well.This paper examines the growth and composition of Cuba’s tourism industry and its impact on the Cuban economy
and workers, and considers the industry’s competitive future in the international tourism market.

The decision not to promote tourism in the early decades of Cuba’s socialist revolution stemmed from authorities’ revulsion at the ills associated with tourism in the 1950’s:gambling, drugs, prostitution, and the presence of American organized crime in hotels and casinos, working in league with the Batista government. To this day, Cuban officials are adamant that gambling will play no part in their tourism industry.

Cuba’s tourism promotion strategy is built around resorts, history and colonial architecture, and nature and ecotourism.initially, Havana and the Varadero beach resort received the lion’s share of investment, and now the emphasis has shifted to other regions.Beach resorts. The pristine beaches of Varadero, a 22-kilometer peninsula two hours’ drive from Havana, have long been a refuge for Cubans and foreigners alike.


The mansion serves today as a restaurant and guest house, and its servant quarters now Sol Melia, Sandals, Superclubs, and other international resort brands are present.750,000 visitors came to Varadero in 2001, most arriving at the nearby international airport.
house the pro shop of Varadero’s golf course.Club Med, Barcelo,

Cuba’s natural environment offers many opportunities for ecotourism development: the mountains, caves,and geological formations of the Vinales valley in western Cuba;the forests and wildlife of the Rosario, Escambray, and Sierra Maestra mountain ranges; the wetlands of the Zapata peninsula.

In addition, Cuba is developing attractions to bring new visitors to Cuba or to give current ones greater reason to spend money, or to return.Cuba is beginning to make appeals to Canada’s long-term tourists, the “snowbirds” who spend up to six months in Florida each year. In Tarara (just east

of Havana) and elsewhere, Cuba is tailoring beach cottage sites to provide the lodging, amenities, health services, and pricing that these travelers require.Golf courses are expensive to build, but Cuban officials are finding that they might profit by building new ones to complement the island’s single professional-grade course at Varadero.

 The Caribbean has an average of one golf course per 2,000 hotel rooms.Twenty Cuban hotels are joint ventures with foreign corporations, where the foreign partner contributes capital at the beginning of the project, owns up to half the business, participates in management and

marketing, and receives distributions of profits.

Northeast of the town of Caibarien in Villa Clara province,across a 46-kilometer causeway that spans open sea, salt marshes, and small islands, lies Cayo Santa Maria, one of hundreds of keys off Cubas north coast.Cayo Santa Maria, formerly uninhabited, is now home to the 300-room Hotel Sol Cayo Santa Maria, opened in March 2002, the first of three hotels to be built on the island.

Visitors seeking lodging in a private home can make advance reservations through word of mouth or the Internet.