From our Bureau of Blame-Shifting by Morally Bankrupt Superior Beings
British newspaper The Telegraph is blaming the collapse of Castro, Inc.’s tourist industry on U.S. policies, especially Cuba’s “desperately unfair” listing as a state sponsor of terror. The headline above is taken straight from The Telegraph.
Good luck finding any other reason for this collapse in the article below, other than “ugly headlines” (also the fault of the U.S.) Covid had nothing to do with it. Extreme repression of natives had nothing to do with it. Shortages of food, water, fuel, electricity, medicines, and just about everything else had nothing to do with it.
And –especially — the quality of the tourist ‘experience’ had nothing to do with it, such as exploding hotels, crappy resorts, dirty roach-infested hotel rooms, bad food, tropical mosquito-borne illnesses, and utterly depressing cities and towns filled with gigantic piles of stinking garbage.
Abridged from The Telegraph, through USA TOPnews Media (Telegraph requires a subscription)
While many Caribbean countries have seen a spike in tourist numbers against pre-pandemic figures – there have been 11.1 per cent more visitors to the Dominican Republic in the last year than in 2019 – Cuba has emptied.
According to Aruba-based Tourism Analytics, the number of Germans, Brits, Italians and French visiting this, the largest of the Antilles, has dropped between 62 and 69 percent over the same period.
Partly this is due to ugly headlines, of protests against the Communist regime fuelled by shortages of food and gasoline, but tour operators and small business owners say “the ESTA issue” is also having a profound effect.
ESTA is the US electronic visa waiver that allows easy access to the US for citizens of 40 countries, mostly Europeans but also Japanese, South Koreans, Australians and New Zealanders.
“My core business was Europeans, Australians and some New Zealanders,” says Fiona Wilson, who runs Casa Los Mangos, a bucolic guest house on the outskirts of Trinidad in Cuba’s south with her husband, Ossiel Ramirez. “Now it’s mainly US citizens. The ESTA mess is prohibiting people’s ability to support the Cuban people – and is devastating for small businesses.”
The problem began, stutteringly, on January 12, 2021 when then-president Donald Trump returned Cuba to the US State Department’s lists of state sponsors of terror (SSOT). ESTAs cannot be used to visit the US if the traveller has been to one of the countries on the list (say, Iran and North Korea).
“It’s the US exporting its embargo on Cuba to the rest of us,” says Toby Brocklehurst, one of the island’s most long-standing and best-loved tour operators.
Sir George Hollingbery, Britain’s ambassador to Cuba, says the island’s place on the SSOT list is “desperately unfair” but he’s happy visitors are coming from the US. “Our experience is that those who come are profoundly shocked at what the SSOT designation is doing to the people here, quite apart from making it harder for tourists to visit.”
When a place becomes enough of a shithole, even totally amoral tourists into an “edgy” destination will eventually opt for a better option, and there are LOTS of better options. As for the Telegraph, like, please.
And the local savages may not be pigs, but they are no better than animals to the ruling class.