From our Annals of Apartheid Tourism Bureau with some assistance from our Bureau of Insane Socialist Responses to Constant Failure
Ha! Despite all of its efforts to grow rich from apartheid tourism, Castro, Inc. continues to fail miserably.
But failure has never made Castro, Inc. think twice about its insane policies, much less change course.
As its apartheid hotels and resorts remain largely empty, it keeps building more and more of them. One must assume that they are desperately trying to increase their current 70% vacancy rate to 90%. Truly insane.
Hotels in Cuba remained open in the first half of 2023 with seven out of ten empty rooms, according to the most recent report Tourism, Selected Indicators 2023, with data from January to June, published by the state National Office of Statistics and Information ( ONEI).
According to the report, the average hotel occupancy in Cuba reached only 27.9% in this period.
“Of every ten rooms, seven are not used, but they continue to divert resources to build hotels. Could someone explain the rationale? I know they are going to put a photo of a washing machine in the comments,” the Cuban economist wrote on his Twitter account. Pedro Monreal.
“Traditionally there have been cases of using hotels in the Caribbean as instruments for ‘tax optimization’ that is more associated with ‘tax avoidance’ (legal) than with ‘tax evasion’ (illegal). It consists of accounting manipulation,” he explained. he.
“Through an internal transfer of prices scheme, transnational companies underdeclare profits in countries with high taxes (for example, Europe) and transfer them to countries with low or zero taxes (Caribbean). For that, hotels would be needed,” Monreal said.
Moreover, official figures of investments in strategic sectors of Cuba during the first half of 2023 leave no doubt that the Government will maintain the trend of recent years: it cares about growing more in hotel rooms and tourist facilities than in crops and hospitals.
According to another ONEI publication, in the first half of the current year the business and real estate services sector accounts for 10,406 million pesos of the total 41,616,003 million invested. In other words, almost a quarter of that figure.
This total investment is almost 10,000 million pesos higher than what was invested in all of 2022, when the Government allocated 32,019,000 million to all sectors on which data is published.
Castronoids are many things, but not insane. There must be significant gain in it for them. Maybe it’s simply money laundering, obviously DIRTY money. The fact this situation IS insane from the standpoint of ordinary Cubans is absolutely routine and “normal.” Still, it looks really bad–to those who care to see.
On a side note, those hotels are probably cheaply made and add nothing to the architectural patrimony of the Havana. Looking at them, they are the cookie cutter hotels you find all over the Caribbean and a far cry from el Hotel Nacional that was built in pre-Castro Cuba. They come to contribute to yet another degradation of a once beautiful city. It’s like putting lipstick on a sow in order to make her presentable.
And what housing they’ve built for “the people” has been not only woefully insufficient but very crappy, so that it has NOT aged well. Of course, “the people” were always beside the point.