The lack of maintenance and repairs over decades have left many of Havana’s residential buildings crumbling with collapses happening on a regular basis, injuring and killing Cubans and leaving them homeless. The communist Castro dictatorship claims U.S. sanctions prevents them from obtaining the building materials needed to repair these residences. However, it appears there’s enough building material for the construction of a new hotel for foreign tourists in Havana.
Surrounding by crumbling buildings on the verge of collapse, the Castro dictatorship is diverting resources to build the Corona Hotel, a 147-room five-star hotel for the exclusive use of foreign tourists.
Via ADN Cuba (my translation):
Reporters from ADN Cuba showcased the progress of the new hotel being built in Havana. Amid inhabited buildings at risk of collapse, the regime is allocating substantial resources to construct the Corona Hotel, located at Remedios #60, between Morro and Zulueta streets.
The building, previously occupied by the Corona Tobacco Factory, is situated near the Granma Memorial, the Museum of the Revolution, and just a few blocks from Havana’s Malecón. Scheduled for completion in 2025, the hotel, owned by the military conglomerate GAESA, will be a five-star establishment with 147 rooms and will be managed by the Turkish hotel chain ATG.
Carlos Milanés, a reporter for ADN Cuba, reported being intimidated by authorities while filming the video, highlighting the regime’s repression and its violation of his right to freedom of expression.
In the video, a trailer loaded with sacks of cement for the construction of the Corona Hotel can be seen. According to the reporter, a sack of cement currently costs 7,000 Cuban pesos on the black market and is often expired when available.
The construction occupies an entire block, surrounded by buildings in a deteriorated structural state.
The problem in Cuba is not just the lack of resources caused by six decades of communist incompetence, but also the corruption of the Castro dictatorship that prioritizes its own survival over that of Cubans. This is socialism in action.
It couldn’t be clearer: the Castronoids don’t care how bad they look as long as they can stay in power.
Don´t worry. Give it a couple years and – like most the Robolution´s buildings – will be probably worse than the surrounding, that bad as they are, have withstood almost 100 years of neglect .
What is a constant source of wonderment to me is how the hell can a country sustain itself on only tourism? Everything is turned into a hotel. That was a former cigar factory. Just look at the size of it. Can you imagine how much money that factory contributed to pre-castro Cuba in cigar exports! Not to mention how many people it employed! Look at the Payret Theater. That too is being turned into a hotel as was La Manzana de Gomez [a former shopping mall] and la Aduana! Yes, even la Aduana is being turned into a hotel! What kind of city is Havana? A city of hotels and nothing else. What a seriously boring city! And let me not get into the fact that you have hotels surrounded by squalor.
Well, nobody’s forcing foreign tourists to be so stupid as to choose Cuba over far, FAR better destinations, even apart from any moral or ethical issues (which they obviously don’t care about). It’s a depressing and literally stinking garbage-strewn shithole.
Cuba’s non-ending propaganda mill spends millions on propaganda. That’s why gullible tourists go there despite how crappy it is. I went to Paris years ago and every tourist shop had a huge poster inviting Frenchmen to visit Cuba. It was the usual advertisement: the black woman with the cigar, the 1950’s car and La Buena Vista Social Club. Speaking of propaganda mill, that’s another thing that gets me, they spend millions on buying ads in international magazines, instead of fixing the problems plaquing the country. It’s sort of like having a pile of smelly shit in the middle of your living room and instead of cleaning it up, spending hundreds of dollars on buying bottles of Chanel # 5 and spraying it on the ever smellier and more putrid shit hoping that it covers the smell then wondering why people are starting to avoid you. Clean the shit and then you won’t have to buy Chanel and people will come back. The entire regime is a mess with morons stuck in Fidel Castro’s crazy mode of doing things.
Castro would destroy things and instead of fixing them, would let them fall apart and would then spend money and time trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.
Snotty Russian tourists, who of course feel infinitely superior to Cubans, are saying Cuba is like a tropical version of the Soviet Union. Actually, it’s worse, and the execrable Russians, who were a big part of the problem in the Soviet era, are still part of the problem now. Castro, Inc. was never self-sustaining; it was always parasitic, but it’s always had willing feeders. Alas, that includes the “diaspora.”