In 2015, more Americans traveled to Cuba than at any time since the Cuban Revolution took place in 1959. The Wall Street Journal reports that since President Obama began his opening to Cuba in December of 2014 travel was up by 50% and is predicted to triple in 2016. Tour companies are now reporting that many hotels are booked up through next December. According to USA Today “The U.S Tour Operators Association named Cuba its top emerging and off-the-beaten path destination followed by Myanmar, Iceland and Colombia. Ethiopia and Japan tied for fifth.”
It used to be hard to go to Cuba, but not anymore. Travel and Leisure has informed its readers that as of January 1st, “Travel to Cuba just got a little easier, thanks to a new set of regulations that take effect today and expand on President Obama’s recent policy changes.” All you have to do is sign a form saying that you are going there for one of the 12 authorized reasons, which are so broad that virtually anyone can find something to check.
The magazine’s digital editor, Melanie Lieberman, writes that “Havana has become one of the most exciting destinations on our radar. It is now a real possibility that this year, anyone will be able to plan a trip there without signing up for a rigid people-to-people tour.” Verizon will have cell phone coverage there, regular commercial flights to Cuba will begin soon, and the major cruise lines are planning to stop there regularly. As Lieberman puts it, “Visiting the capital is like stepping into a vintage photograph: washed-out colonial façcades and cobblestone streets bustling with antique Fords and Chevys.”
No publication has been an advocate for travel to Cuba more than The New York Times. On Sunday, the paper outdid itself, featuring a long article by Damien Cave in its weekly “36 Hours” series where he lists 13 exciting things you can do in Cuba, which will “Get Your Groove On.” One restaurant he recommends epitomizes “The New Cool,” and you can bar hop at night, see new Cuban art, get nice views of the sea, smoke and buy some famous Cuban cigars, get a great Cuban cappuccino that rivals those of Starbucks, and enjoy a wonderful “black ink seafood risotto.” You can end your stay by going to the famous white sand Varadero Beach, with its “pristine shores.” And please- don’t forget your daiquiri at the bar favored by Ernest Hemingway.
To make the trip even more enticing, at the top of the Times website, you can view a video. As one of the young hip Cubans tells the interviewer, “All eyes are on Cuba. It’s trendy.” The video shows young people singing and dancing in a club, Cuban families enjoying a beautiful beach on the weekend, and middle aged American tourists perusing an art gallery. This is a Cuba that is clearly reserved for well off Western tourists. And you have to be. If you go to travel websites or groups that have tours of Cuba scheduled most will cost between $5000 to $7000 for less than one week to experience a Potemkin village tour, where you will be shepherded around the restored center of old Havana, restored tourist sites like Hemingway’s old villa, and the Partagas tobacco factory in Havana. Finally, if you still need convincing, you will meet with groups of Cubans who will make it appear that life is good and normal in the Castro brothers’ Cuba.
But life is not so wonderful for the majority of the Cuban people. For an honest look at Cuba, one must watch the 2012 movie, Una Noche. As one commentator on the IMBD website writes, “The film reveals parts of the city not only unfilmed, but rarely accessed by outsiders before. As an energetic ride through one day and night in raw and gritty Havana, Una Noche captures the passion of its people, the despair in their lives, but also the love and laughter they share.”
You can also learn something more about the real Cuba by reading James Kirchick’s cover story that appeared in National Review last May. Kirchick minces no words:
Aside from a few carefully well-preserved plazas outside the main tourist hotels, Havana is much dirtier and more run down than I imagined. Walking down its narrow streets, I was reminded of bombed-out sections of Beirut, heaps of rubble and trash strewn about the decaying buildings. Steps from a billboard splayed with Castro’s visage and some revolutionary verbiage, a woman picked through garbage. At a pharmacy, I watched a man purchase Band-Aids -- individually, not by the package.
Clearly no tourist on any existing tour will see what Kirchick witnessed. Nor will he or she learn that in the past year the Cuban regime arrested 8000 dissidents, and regularly sends its security police to harass, beat up and threaten dissenters. Recall that one brave man seeking to approach the Pope in his recent trip was dragged away and beaten in front of the Pope’s eyes. Two years ago Castro's secret police murdered the leading Cuban dissident, Oswaldo Paya. The real crime is that Obama never even asked for concessions from the Cuban regime that would have eased its repression of its own citizens, in exchange for the United States agreeing to an opening long demanded by the Castro brothers.
Rather than applaud Obama’s new Cuban policy, many Cuban are voting with their feet. Even The New York Times reported in the same edition of the Times as the travel story appeared, that that since the new policy took effect thousands of Cubans are fleeing the country, because they fear that the Obama administration will void the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act that gives Cubans who manage to get to the United States a fast track to legal residency and then the ability to obtain a green card. Right now, 11,000 Cuban refugees are languishing in Central America, stuck because Nicaragua, which honors the Cuban regimes’ requests, are forbidding them from crossing into border nations that would allow them to travel to the U.S. Last year alone, 30,000 Cubans made it to our Southwest border, a 77 percent increase from 2014!
Why would so many Cubans flee their country if things are changing and are going so well? What the hype does not tell potential travelers, is that the average Cuban cannot find a job, lives in a hovel that is next to unlivable, and if he or she has a job, gets a pittance for a full week’s work. Cuban doctors sent to countries like Venezuela and Brazil are paid an average of $22 a month, and make far less than Cuban hotel workers and taxicab drivers. It is no wonder, as the Florida Sun-Sentinel reports, that many of the doctors the Cuban regime so proudly sends abroad are choosing to defect to the United States once they arrive at their assigned post.
One of the theories prevailing among supporters of the new policy is that once Americans travel to Cuba, the country will be brought into the modern world, political repression will be reduced and eventually end, and that Cubans will learn from American visitors what genuine democracy is.
Actually, the opposite is more likely to occur. The regime will tighten its control of the population, take measures that firm up its power and use Western travelers’ funds to further enrich the apparatchiks and the regime’s leaders. Moreover, the very nature of the organized Potemkin village tours, approved by the regime’s tourist bureau, are meant to get travelers to see a very small slice of the real Cuba, and to come back with the impression that the country is thriving and is in wonderful hands.
So what can we do? Aside from not traveling to the island- there are plenty of places just as nice that one can vacation in-I have a suggestion. The only thing to do right now is to prevent the possibility that Obama will end the Cuban Adjustment Act by executive action before he leaves office. Obama has already said that he hopes to make an official visit to Cuba before his term is over. Such a visit, before the Cuban government has made any concessions at all that limit its ability to control the populace, will further legitimize the current regime.
It does not appear to concern the Obama administration that by giving the Cuban government what it demands without asking anything in return, the United States is condemning the Cuban people to a continuation of an impoverished life under a repressive Communist regime, while its beaches and hotels are made available to more American tourists to spend time in what they mistakenly see as a “vacation paradise.”