Cuban dictatorship opens yet another luxury apartheid hotel in Havana

From our Bureau of Socialist Priorities with some assistance from our Annals of Apartheid Bureau

Here we go again. Another luxury hotel, this time a huge 494- room, multi-building monstrosity at the intersection of Third Avenue and 70th Street, in the once-beautiful neighborhood of Miramar, now an enclave for foreigners, oligarchs, kleptocrats, and all sorts of Castro, Inc. apparatchiks and their apartheid boutiques and Air-b-& b’s..

This latest jewel in Castro, Inc.’s tourism monopoly was built with funding from the Indian firm MGM Muthu Hotels. It joins a cluster of equally ugly hotels that are situated across the street from the Russian Embassy (arguably the ugliest building in the entire Western hemisphere). Although this new hotel and all the others around it are on the waterfront, they have no beaches. The coastline there is very rocky, composed of sharp-edged dogtooth limestone (diente de perro).

Long live apartheid tourism! Superior human beings require five-star luxury accommodations that befit their exalted status. Great work, Castro, Inc., keep it up, comrades. As usual, no one is going to notice that all of the materials for this luxury hotel — and all the food and drink that will be available there for foreigners — somehow managed to get to Cuba despite the “blockade.” Yeah. No one will notice. So, keep blaming all your failures and shortages on “the blockade”…. and keep shouting for it to be lifted. That Big Lie is indestructible and immortal.

Now, let’s see if anyone shows up . . .

Loosely translated from Diario de Cuba

The five-star Gran Muthu Habana hotel opened this Thursday and is located on First Street at the corner of 70th, in the Miramar neighborhood, in the Cuban capital. This is the ninth establishment that the Indian chain has opened in Cuba and is managed jointly with the Gaviota group, a company of the GAESA conglomerate, owned by the regime’s military, reports the Cubadebate state site.

With 27 floors, the facility has 494 rooms, including five suites, as well as bars, restaurants, a Casa del Habano, and meeting rooms with capacity for 400 people.

MGM Muthu Hotels is an Indian hotel company with legal residence in the city of Chennai. Its largest hotel investment outside of Europe is in Cuba, with five-star hotels in the island’s main resorts, such as Varadero, Cayo Coco, Cayo Guillermo and Cayo Santa María, always in association with the opaque GAESA.

Between January and November 2022, Cuba received 1.6 million tourists, a figure lower than the initial government forecast of 2.5 million, as published by the National Office of Statistics and Information at the end of December of last year.

The number of visitors in 2022 was far from the 4.2 million tourists that the country received in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year.

This year, the Government’s forecast is that 3.5 million visitors will arrive in Cuba, a figure that, according to experts, is expected to be very difficult to meet given the strong competition from other destinations such as the Dominican Republic and Mexico.

Tourism in the Caribbean rebounded in 2022 after the pandemic, with record numbers on the Mexican beaches of Cancun, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and an almost complete recovery in Colombia. In this context, Cuba lagged behind.