Nice. Did you see the tourism promoting quotations of Fidel quoted on my response to Mr. Duray. More info on the subject:
salon.com
Tourism apartheid in Cuba
Many of the island nation's most beautiful areas are off limits to its citizens. Will Fidel's tourist policy be his undoing?
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By Damien Cave
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."
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cubanet.org
Cuba's Prostituted Revolution
Frank Calzon. Posted on Mon, Sep. 16, 2002 in The Miami Herald.
Add one more issue to the debate about lifting U.S. restrictions on travel to Cuba: the exploitation of Cuban woman and children.
Earlier this year, researchers at the Protection Project, a human-rights institute based at Johns Hopkins University, reported: ''Canadian and American tourists have contributed to a sharp increase in child prostitution and in the exploitation of women in Cuba.'' A crackdown on sex tourism in Southeast Asia and the lifting of political restrictions on tourism is contributing to such increase, the researchers wrote in their report "Human Rights Report on Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.''
Prostitution exists in many countries, but Fidel Castro's communist polemics and repressive controls compound the problem in Cuba.
• Immediately after seizing power, Castro blamed prostitution on ''capitalist oppression'' and American tourists. In his new society, he assured the Cuban people, prostitution and the ''exploitation of man by man'' would disappear. Forty years later, the situation is much worse. Not only do Cuban women and children face exploitation by men, but everyone -- men, women and children -- also face the ''exploitation of man by man'' as indentured servants of a government that assigns jobs and housing, sets pay and dictates when and where Cubans may shop and travel.
• Cuba no longer has a civil society nor does it have a way to build one. The government owns the media; only if and after Castro himself discovers a problem can it be reported and commented on, and then it's to blame "the imperialist monster of the North.''
• Independent organizations, which elsewhere can demand protection for women and children, don't exist in Cuba. Years ago, Castro was forced to acknowledge widespread prostitution; he dismissed it offhandedly declaring that Cuban prostitutes were ''the most highly educated in the world.'' He has denied the existence of widespread AIDS in the island. He unlikely will acknowledge the extent of sexual abuse of children; to do so would call into question his revolution's alleged "special concern for children.''
NO MILK AFTER AGE 7
Even in Havana that ''special concern'' and the revolution's ''achievements'' are no longer taken at face value. This is a country that suspends the milk ration for children after they turn 7. Parents have little or no say about state-run schools or the enrollment of their high-school age children in the work-study programs that send teenagers to distant rural communities to work on government-owned farms. Pope John Paul II described this forced separation of families as ''traumatic'' and warned against the ''profound and negative'' effects of increased vulgarity and promiscuity and a lack of ethics. Teens begin having sexual relations in these camps and have easy access to abortions.
The Protection Project's report notes that Cuba has signed numerous international conventions, but "has not ratified the [International Labor Organization] Convention to Eliminate the Worst Forms of Child Labor and not signed the U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.''
Public perceptions of Cuba take a while to catch up with realities there. In 1996, the University of Leicester published a report entitled ''Child Prostitution and Sex Tourism: Cuba,'' based on in-depth interviews conducted by two British sociologists in Cuba. The report found that "most of the child sexual exploitation that does take place in Cuba is perpetrated by tourists.''
But should the U.S. Congress act as blindly and callously as it debates lifting all restrictions on travel to Cuba? Those asserting that unrestricted, no-questions-asked U.S. tourism will help the Cuban people -- not enrich the repressive, exploitive Castro government -- would be somewhat more persuasive if they coupled their courtesy toward Cuba's dictator with demands to end the unspeakable outrages that Castro foists and fosters on Cubans. |
