Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
His visit can't end Castro's tyranny, Cuba's poverty or the Bush administration's lame policies, but he's the first American politician who has tried to give to Cuba, not just take.
May 16, 2002 | When Jimmy Carter's feet touched the baking asphalt of Havana's José Martí airport on Sunday, an amorous and long-delayed honeymoon with the rebel island finally began. Carter's late-1970s presidency made a huge difference to Cuba, and the former president is still smarter about U.S.-Cuba relations than any other American living today, including the current resident of the White House. When he talks about Cuba, people in both countries listen, and his five-day tour has been almost as historic and monumental as the pope's 1998 visit, from which Cuba is still enjoying a moderate hangover. Tourists can still purchase (at clearance prices!) the last few olive-drab T-shirts emblazoned with colorful prints of the pope and Castro shaking hands.
You'll never catch a Cuban wearing one of the pope T-shirts, of course, even at clearance prices. Nobody has the nine bucks (roughly a month's wages) to waste on such a novelty. Nor will they have the cash to buy the new Carter T-shirts. Those are tourist items. Castro hopes the Carter visit will result not just in T-shirts but also in a new wave of U.S. tourists to buy them, bringing dollars to save the moribund Cuban economy.
For Castro, the world's foremost media strategist now toiling with his tenth U.S. administration, Carter's visit has been yet another successful coup fought on the age-old battlefield of newsprint. On the heels of being added to the Axis of Evil by his enemies in Washington, who accused him supporting bio-terrorism -- a move timed to interfere with Carter's visit -- Castro got the respected former president to go to bat for him. In a courageous speech Carter challenged the United States to produce evidence of Cuban terrorism and insisted there was none. Of course, Castro also let Carter take to the Cuban airways and talk about democracy and human rights, knowing the openness would play well internationally and not change much domestically. Through it all, Castro had his eye on the prize: Carter's trip is the latest salvo in a battle to bring back American tourists, and while the battle hasn't yet been won, the P.R. value of the visit is enormous.
In March 1977, at a time when Cuba was enduring a stretch of poverty very similar to today's, one of Carter's first acts was to lift the controversial travel ban on Americans. With the entire economy hingeing on Soviet subsidies, the Cuban people's faith in Castro's abilities as an economist had begun to wane before then. The only way out of the mess was to take a stab at tourism as a means to earn the island some hard currency. So the Varadero peninsula, two hours east of Havana, was earmarked in 1976 as Cuba's first acre of paradise, quarantined specifically for capitalist tourism.
Only 2,500 tourists visited Varadero in 1977. The next year, after Carter lifted the travel ban, the number rocketed to 18,000 -- mostly American tourists who came to indulge on the sweetest ribbon of Cuban sand. It was so profitable that the government began banking heavily on tourism as the next big thing, hoping to turn the island into the Caribbean's new Hawaii.
But alongside the tourism campaign, Castro continued to pursue his satellite wars in Nicaragua and Angola, which created serious strains in Washington. In April of 1982, the Reagan administration reinstated the ban on American leisure travel to Cuba, pulling the plug on the island's short-lived economic boom. Now 20 years later, the travel ban is still intact, essentially barring all U.S. citizens, with the exception of scientists, journalists, and exchange students, from visiting the island.
Europeans and others still traveled to Cuba, of course, and Castro's pursuit of tourists became even more aggressive after the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1991 and Cuba's economy collapsed with it. In 1991, only 350,000 tourists visited the island. By the end of 1999, the regime boasted 1.6 million visitors, providing about one-fifth of the island's income and surpassing sugar as Cuba's new crop. The new communist slogan became "With tourism we can win," and in 2000, 1.8 million came, buzzing in and out of Cuba's airports at a rate of 5,000 a day.
Yet Cuba appears to be stuck at that number, despite projections that by 2010, 7.5 million visitors would grace its shores. It's now obvious that because of the global recession and a low visitor-return rate -- despite Cuba's massive investment, tourist amenities are still not what high-end visitors expect, and most people come for the one-time novelty -- the numbers are tapering off. The success of Cuba's economic plan is now absolutely hinged on the forbidden, lucrative, nearby U.S. tourist market.
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