Cuba's beaches and hotels have always been political playthings. Many of the richest 19th century sugar barons lived along the coast, and when tourists flocked to the country in the '40s and '50s, they found that some of the best hotels catered not just to Americans, but also to their Jim Crow brand of racism. Black Cubans could not enter the buildings -- except as servants.

The Cuban revolutionaries, as they agitated and expanded their ranks in the mid-'50s, pledged to end imported racism. They eventually made good on the promise. Soon after Castro, Che Guevara and their comrades seized power from Fulgencio Batista, they seized the private clubs and beaches, then opened them to the public.

Cubans welcomed the change. Nicolas Guillen, the famous mulatto Cuban poet, praised the new level of access. His 1964 poem "Tengo" ("I Have") extols the Revolution for opening up the country to Cubans of African descent. He even specifically uses the beaches as an example, noting that there were no longer prohibitions, only the "giant blue democratic opening: the end, the sea."

Everyday Cubans also enjoyed the sudden property windfall. The Museum of the Revolution -- housed in the former presidential palace and still riddled with bullet holes from the 1959 coup -- holds several pictures of Cubans lounging in front of once-private clubs. The snapshots are simple, yellowed black-and-whites, but they seem to capture the national mood of excitement: Men and women are playing soccer in the sand, families are eating lunch, groups of women are sunbathing or chatting. The beach looks extremely crowded, like New York's Jones Beach in the middle of July.

Throughout the next few decades, open access was the rule. The beaches immediately to Havana's east and elsewhere remained popular with Cubans, and development was limited to health care, agriculture, oil and manufacturing. Tourism was a second thought, if not further down the list of national priorities.

In the '80s, however, Cuba began to build a series of large hotels in Varadero, a town about two hours away from Havana. There were already hotels on the strip of sandy land, some of them famous art deco gems built before the Revolution, but the expansion marked the beginning of Cuba's reemergence as a tourist destination. (A quick Google search for "famous Varadero beaches" yields hundreds of travel agency Web pages.)

The collapse of the Soviet Union severely accelerated the process. The loss of aid and markets for Cuban exports such as sugar forced the economy into a near-depression. Castro called this time "the Special Period" in which Cubans needed to dig deep into their souls to support the Revolution, but with electricity outages, skyrocketing unemployment and other problems, Cuba needed more than socialist resolve.

Tourism came to be seen as an economic savior. Cuba hardly wanted to start courting capitalist visitors who might upset the status quo with their dollars and ideas, but with devastation all around, "What choice did the government have?" says Wayne Smith, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy who was a Cuba expert at the State Department from 1958 to 1982. "Sugar is shot. They don't have oil to export or any other resource in great supply. They almost had to turn to tourism. It is a contradiction of revolutionary values, but there it is."

Castro, then and now, defends the move by stressing that tourist dollars will be used to help all Cubans. "The government argues, and most Cubans grudgingly hope it's true, that as the economy improves, helped in part by the money brought in by tourism, that the injustices can be ironed out and everyone can have an equal shot at things," Smith says.

But the policies of tourism apartheid, now more than a decade old, seem to be undermining Cubans' faith in Castro's promise.

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