Abandoned by the communist dictatorship, Cubans struggle to find medicine, food, and basic necessities while the Castro regime invests what little cash it has in hotels for foreign tourists. This is socialism in action.
Yes, the Capital Invested in the Construction of Hotels is Cuban Capital
Cuban men and women, left to fend for themselves in the middle of a tragic health crisis, are becoming ill by the thousands and dying by the dozens, while the regime continues adding more floors to its hotels.
During the last several weeks, thousands of Cuban men and women have protested or voiced their indignation on social media for the sharp contrast between the construction of hotels in Cuba and the dilapidated state of hospitals and the dismal state of public health in general.
The construction of tourism facilities, carried out mostly by the military corporate conglomerate known as GAESA (founded in Panama as an off-shore company of the Cuban Armed Forces in the 1980s), has not been stopped even for a minute during a year-and-a-half of crisis aggravated by COVID-19; they have not altered their construction and delivery schedules. However, the irresponsible and inefficient handling of public health contingencies is obvious, compounded by the deplorable state of medical attention in the context of perpetual shortages of medications and food together, and the deterioration of hospital infrastructure and related services.
While the two hotel towers being built on First and Avenue D, in El Vedado (with more than 600 guest rooms, at a cost of US$ 80 million) are almost ready for inauguration, and while the hotel complexes on 25th and Avenue K (also in El Vedado, with several floors already completed) and on Third and 70th Avenue in Miramar (which will headquarter a real estate firm and a shopping center that will replace the present area market), hospitals in the island are literally collapsing and the handful of ambulances that still run are falling to pieces. Not to speak of “medical attention”, which barely exists thanks to the huge personal effort of health personnel and international aid that is received nowadays as a result of individual campaigns and initiative to get donations to Cuba, since the government –controlled by the military- refuses to divert a single penny from hotel investment funds to other matters unrelated to their construction plans.
Against the constant protests by the independent press and on social media about the scandalous inequality, the most active and aggressive advocates of the Cuban regime –those whose government-funded work is not to produce goods but to monitor cyberspace, to fight freedom of expression and to justify that which is unjustifiable- argue that hotel development is not executed with Cuban capital but with funds from foreign investments. This is far from the truth.
Many people, both inside and outside Cuba, subscribe to this erroneous view, out of spite or naïveness, and they repeat the same erroneous information without researching even a minimum of published news, including those published by the Communist Party official press. If they did their research, they would corroborate easily the level of crime being committed in the island today by a handful of military strongmen who are more concerned about the number of tourists that will arrive in Cuba in 2030, than about the number of Cubans who die -and will die- of starvation or COVID-19 now in 2021.
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It’s simple: the “revolution” is for the ruling class, whose top priority is staying in power, which costs money. Ordinary Cubans don’t generate hard currency (except for the rent-a-doc slaves), and they will always rate lower than those who do, like tourists. Nothing personal, just economic reality. Now move along.