HAVANA, Cuba. – “I’m going to Cuba. What do you recommend?” asked a tourist (or joker) on social media, and immediately someone advised: “Make a U-turn.” Both the question and the funniest of the answers —which went viral in a meme some time ago— manage to make us laugh, despite the drama and dangers that are sensed in the warnings, and even in the discussions in which the few who, blind to our sad reality, try to defend the Island as a tourist destination that still has “something good” to offer, are left without arguments.
They talk about paradisiacal beaches, fabulous landscapes, the climate, even the World Travel Awards where Cuba has been the “Best Cultural Destination in the Caribbean” since 2021, a category in which it was also recently recognized by the TripAdvisor platform, which is based on user ratings and opinions. However, the strong “lobbying” of the regime, through its “unconditional friends” —most of them businessmen with interests in Cuba— around those who organize these competitions, as well as the army of “cyber combatants” used to flood the Internet with favorable comments, are well known. So the Government of the Island continues to bet on deception and, worst of all, on deceiving itself.
Because many of us also know what happens with this “varied” programming of cultural events plagued by setbacks and exclusions, disappointments, “ignorance”, chauvinism and cronyism, political undertones, promotional campaigns that create great expectations but which then, with very rare exceptions, do not correspond either with what the public receives or with our reality where improvisation, mediocrity, envy, clichés, censorship, the absence of freedom of expression, the criminalization of everything that does not agree with power, that criticizes it, questions it or exposes it, prevail.
A reality where, moreover, mercilessly looting the pockets of visitors – whether foreign or countryman – is always in the background of every act because that is the predatory “nature” that, sometimes without realizing it, sometimes very aware of how savage we are, displaced that kindness, that humility, that joy that decades ago characterized the majority of Cubans as among the most hospitable in the world.
And there is a lot of that, the desire to plunder, in the comments of those who, even knowing what is really happening in Cuba, how uncomfortable and unenjoyable it has become (except for that elite in the shadows of power who have never blushed when displaying their standard of living), insist on inviting people to a place where, despite the misery into which they sink for days, some advise arriving “with clothes in their purse and money in their backpack.”
They brandish what are undoubtedly elements of great value for a tourist destination in the Caribbean, but they remain silent, fully aware of the “trap” they are deploying, about this mountain of negative factors capable of completely ruining a product that, in order to gain or retain its main values, needs services and infrastructure that today in Cuba are practically absent or in a precarious situation.
In addition to what we know happens with fuel, food and medicines, the chronic shortages, there are the very serious problems with public transport, the lack of air connections, roads in poor condition and poorly signposted, the (lack of) medical attention and the inefficient medical emergency system, a crazy monetary policy in the midst of the worst inflation, communal hygiene at its most critical point, the exodus of qualified personnel together with mass emigration, the theft and “diversion of resources” in state companies that affects the quality of services and is connected to the lack of maintenance in hotel facilities, a phenomenon that, like others, is derived from that “institutionalized” corruption that runs through the system (that defines it) and whose greatest expression could undoubtedly be that “official” policy that is only apparently irrational, absurd, that encourages the construction of thousands of rooms, while abandoning the existing ones, simultaneously building dozens of empty hotels for empty cities. both tourists and recreational options, varied gastronomy, nightlife and, in a few years, inhabitants.
Because mass emigration, as things are going, will soon reach that dangerous point where a future depopulation would be announced in the style of those rural Spanish villages turned into ghost towns, with the aggravating factor that there will be no budget for “repopulation” plans, nor will there be any need to do so. For what or for whom?
For a city – and by extension a country – to be attractive to a tourist, it must first be attractive to those who live there, to those who are born and make their lives there, whether they are poor or rich.
This is, unfortunately, how an impoverished majority, overwhelmed by material and spiritual deficiencies, perceives the country; this is how “terrible” they feel within it, and this is how they recommend it to anyone who asks them.
OPINION ARTICLE
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2024-07-11 02:59:59
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