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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Many of the island nation's most beautiful areas are off limits to its citizens. Will Fidel's tourist policy be his undoing?
Feb 6, 2002 | Gustavo Iglesias stands on the sandy shores of Caibarien, Cuba, and points out to sea.
"Mira," he says, pointing to a long causeway that seems to lead nowhere. "Hay una isla allá -- con las playas vírgenes. Es muy, muy bonita."
Through a hazy December sun, I can see the outline of the tiny key, Cayo Santa Maria. Thoughts of Ernest Hemingway come to mind. Gregorio Fuentes, a Cuban fisherman who died recently, and who Hemingway fictionalized in "The Old Man and the Sea," used to take Papa out to these keys on the northern coast. They were a respite for them both, a place to fish, to party on the virgin beaches and to get away from the bustle of strangers who -- after Hemingway won the Nobel prize in 1954 -- began to appear regularly at Hemingway's suburban Havana home.
But today, this tiny key would not welcome the likes of Hemingway and Fuentes. The pair, close friends for years, would have to separate. Hemingway could step foot onshore, but Fuentes? He'd have to stay aboard his boat or sail home. The only Cubans allowed on the key are those who are either building hotels or working in them. Everyday Cubans are not allowed. They can't moor their boats nor can they drive the 48-kilometer road that juts out into the Atlantic toward the Florida coast.
It isn't just the $5 toll, the equivalent of a month's salary, that keeps them away. It's also the law. Cubans and tourists are allowed to mix when tourists initiate contact or in public areas, but otherwise, never the twain shall meet. "Tourism apartheid," as its critics call it, is taking hold.
The policy isn't actually new. It's been around for at least a decade, since Cuba started expanding its tourism industry to make up for lost economic aid from the Soviet Union. But every year, another beach, key, resort or historic hotel is cordoned off for foreigners. Because the Cuban government's hunger for tourists and their dollars is insatiable -- more than 22,000 hotel rooms have been added since 1990 -- Cuba is progressively being taken away from its own people. Unless something changes, more and more of the country's most beautiful places will soon be off limits to the people who built or founded them.
Many Cubans, if not most, don't seem to notice the irony of this situation. Iglesias, for example, knew I would never rat out his opinions; he's the second cousin of my Cuban-American girlfriend, Diana, and we shared a comfortable rapport. But he only shrugged when I prodded him about his feelings on Cuba's economic policies. Castro's form of tourism, which flies in the face of both socialist and free-market ideals, didn't seem to bother him. Like many other Cubans Diana and I spoke to over the course of two weeks, he simply accepted the policy as inevitable.
This is apparently quite common. "There's a certain habit of resignation in Cuba," says Manny Hidalgo, the Washington office director of the Cuban Committee for Democracy, a moderate Cuban-American nonprofit. "They've just resigned themselves to the situation that they're in."
And yet, however stoic Cubans may be, in a handful of situations I saw signs of the system breaking down. Diana and I played pool at a hotel in Varadero with two drunk young Cubans while the hotel manager looked on. We discussed Britney Spears and Marc Anthony with a pair of locals on the city's white-sand beach -- a conversation that tourists in previous years had to take elsewhere. And in Trinidad, "the most beautiful city in Cuba" according to most guidebooks, I watched a group of teenagers resist police efforts to make them leave an open-air tourist bar.
All of which made me wonder: Could Castro's "tourism apartheid" inspire the kind of dissent that would threaten his regime? Might the attempt to court tourism become a catalyst for democratic change?
