From our Annals of Apartheid Tourism Bureau with some assistance from our Bureau of Great Socialist Latrine American Delusions
Castro, Inc. has basically put all of the few eggs it has into a single basket. That strategy is not paying off at all. Castrogonia’s apartheid tourist industry is in steep decline, even as new hotels and resorts continue to be built. As ever, Canadians are still the top patrons of Castro, Inc.’s apartheid hotels and resorts. But their numbers keep dwindling. And the same is true of Europeans.
And it’s not only the light-skinned foreign superior beings who are staying away. Even the number of Cuban YoYos booking trips to Castrogonia keeps declining. Panic time at all Ministries, especially the Ministry of Apartheid Tourism.
Loosely translated from Diario de Cuba
Between January and July 2024, Cuba received 1,463,097 international travelers, a 1.8% decrease compared to the same period in 2023. This decline highlights the ongoing struggle of the island’s tourism industry to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, and suggests that the government’s projected number of tourists for the year will likely not be met.
According to the latest report from the state-run National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), 153,261 foreign visitors arrived in Cuba in July 2024. This figure is similar to 2022, but lower than 2023. The drop is attributed to fewer travelers from Canada and Europe.
Notably, there was a 14.4% decrease in trips by Cuban residents abroad during this period. While these trips are included in government reports, the travelers typically stay with family rather than in hotels. Between January and July 2023, 210,026 Cuban emigrants visited the island, but this number fell to 179,746 in the same period of 2024.
Despite these challenges, Canada remains Cuba’s top source of tourists, with 622,128 visitors, followed by Russia (123,358), the United States (95,804), Germany (40,226), Mexico (37,086), and Spain (36,965).
Except for Russia, Mexico, and Argentina, most of the other markets saw year-on-year declines in the first seven months of 2024, a trend that has become more pronounced since the beginning of the year. Some analysts link this to the U.S. decision to eliminate the ESTA visa waiver option for Europeans who have previously traveled to Cuba.
These statistics come after Cuba received only 11,284 more foreign visitors in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023. According to ONEI, by the end of June, the island had received 1,309,836 international visitors, reflecting a modest 0.9% year-on-year growth.
With these numbers, Cuba has only achieved 40% of the government’s target of 3.2 million tourists for 2024. To meet this goal, the island would need to attract an average of 315,000 visitors per month in the second half of the year—a number that was not even reached during the high season months from December to March. The 153,261 visitors in July are less than half of that required figure.
Cuba received 2.4 million international visitors in 2023 and 1.6 million in 2022, according to official data. These figures are far below the 4.2 million in 2019 and 4.6 million in 2018, the two years before the COVID-19 pandemic, when the local tourism industry began to decline.
Despite this, at the end of 2023, the “Business Services, Real Estate, and Rental Activities” category—which includes the construction of hotels and other tourism-related facilities—absorbed the largest share of the state budget. Investments in this sector amounted to 23.744.8 million pesos, 24.5% of the year’s total of 96.622.0 million pesos. This figure is slightly higher than the 23,369.6 million in 2022 and 20,735.1 million in 2021, far surpassing investments in other vital economic sectors, such as agriculture, food production, health, and housing construction.
The collapse of tourism in Cuba contrasts sharply with the booming appeal of neighboring destinations like Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic and Cancún in Mexico, which are experiencing record numbers of visitors.
Even apart from moral/ethical issues, it simply makes no sense to vacation in a crumbling shithole where the best you can have is a Potemkin experience, meaning something disconnected from Cuba’s reality.
I cannot wait until their hotels collapse because no one wants to visit. My theory is that the people who do visit are sadists. They enjoy the suffering of the Cuban People. Why else, when there are so many better destinations, would they keep visiting Cuba?