Cuba Opens Up Virgin Keys to Lure Foreign Tourists

CAYO COCO, Cuba (Reuters) - Watch out Cancun and Jamaica. When European charter airlines begin direct flights to this sandy key in the coming weeks, Cuba will be taking another step to recover its position as a premier tourist destination in the Caribbean.

Flamingos, iguanas and alligators on a nature reserve are an added attraction for tourists looking to lie on sun-soaked snowy-white beaches and sip daiquiris.

Last month, Cuba's communist authorities opened an international airport able to receive wide-bodied jets on Cayo Coco, the largest of a string of hundreds of keys along Cuba's north shore known as Jardines del Rey.

Cuba has already built 11 high-end hotels on Cayo Coco and neighboring Cayo Guillermo to draw vacationers from Canada, Britain, Germany and Spain.

Havana is also banking on the lifting of a U.S. travel ban some time soon -- a move that would bring Americans to the Cuban keys, which are 250 miles south of Nassau in the Bahamas.

"Twenty years from now these keys could be the premier resort in the Caribbean," said Philip Agee, director of the Havana-based online travel agency www.cubalinda.com.

"These islands go on and on for hundreds of miles and offer a fabulous combination of beach, scenery and wildlife. There is a huge market out there for almost virgin islands like these," said Agee, a former CIA (news - web sites) agent.

Proximity to the Gulf Stream allows for good sport fishing and Cuba plans a marina for 400 yachts and deep sea fishing boats. A golf course is also in the works on Cayo Coco.

Spanish and Canadian entrepreneurs see potential in the islands and have invested through hotel management deals and joint ventures with Cuba's communist state.

Spain's Sol Melia hotel chain runs six hotels in the Jardines del Rey keys, out of the 23 it manages in Cuba. The new airport is operated by AENA, a Spanish airport-management company.

Regular charter flights are planned to Cayo Coco by Air Canada, Austrian carrier Lauda Air and Condor, Lufthansa's charter company.

Tourism experts said the direct flights will give Jardines del Rey a boost because tourists will no longer have to travel overland from other Cuban airports. But the islands have an overcapacity of hotel rooms that may not get filled until American tourists arrive, they said.

"Cayo Coco is a beautiful destination with a number of nice hotels. But some of them were built too quickly and seem too big. I'm not sure they can fill them all in the short run. Maybe when the American tourists arrive," said Bernd Herrmann, a Havana-based travel industry executive.

Cuba was once the favorite Caribbean playground for Americans, when Mafia bosses ran Havana's nightlife. But the casinos and prostitution rings were shut after the revolution that brought Fidel Castro (news - web sites) to power in 1959.

American-owned hotels were expropriated and tourism moved elsewhere, to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Jamaica, whose resorts partly owe their success to communism in Cuba.

Cuba turned to tourism again, after the collapse of its international sponsor, the Soviet Union, over a decade ago, and the industry rapidly displaced sugar as the island's top earner of hard currency.

The trade is recovering from the dip in world travel after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Last year, 1.7 million tourists visited Cuba, slightly below the number of arrivals in 2001 (1.77 million), generating $1.85 billion in badly needed cash for Cuba's dilapidated economy.

Cuba estimates that more than 1 million Americans would visit as soon as Washington abolished the travel ban, which has been enforced for four decades as part of an economic embargo against Havana. U.S. cruise companies are planning to add Havana to their itineraries when that day comes.

U.S. farmers and food industries are lobbying hard to end the travel restrictions so that Cuba can earn more dollars to pay for purchases of American food products allowed under a recent easing of the trade embargo.

Yankee Doodle Castro***Once we had Fidel the heroic champion of Third World peoples against the capitalist exploiters. Now it's Fidel the capitalist exploiters' King Pimp ... "Psssst, Meester Canadian? Pssst, Herr German? Psssst, Signorino Italiano? … You wan' my seester? ... first time for you, meester ... here's photo ... only 12 years old ... Nice, hunh?"

Havana recently topped Bangkok as "child-sex capital of the world." Consider the human tragedy, the desperation of poor people driven to such things in such numbers, and after 43 years of "liberation" and "national dignity."

18,000 riddled by firing squads. Half a million incarcerated. 50,000 drowned or ripped apart by sharks in the Florida Straits. Thousands more slaughtered in Africa for Moscow. Two million exiled. And we wind up with a nation that in 1959 had a higher living standard than Belgium or Italy, had a lower infant mortality rate than France, had net immigration, as child prostitution capital of the world.***

Column turns blind eye to Cuba's injustices [Full Text] Re Max Castro's Jan. 1 column, Let fellow Americans see beauty of Cuba: Castro is out of touch with the suffering of the Cuban people.

As Castro walked through the streets of Havana, Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet had just been attacked and imprisoned for continuing his campaign for human rights in Cuba. Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas' home was attacked. There were death threats left on his door before the government granted him permission to leave Cuba so that he could receive the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament for his opposition to the Castro regime and his support for human rights.

Unlike Canadians, Mexicans and so many others, Cubans who seek a life outside of Cuba without the regime's permission are subject to imprisonment for illegal exit, a fact left out of the column when discussing immigration policies and so-called Cuban privileges. Cuban refugees have an easier time of entering the United States because Cuba's illegal-exit laws are a violation of internationally recognized standards of human rights.

Castro also didn't mention Cuba's system of tourist apartheid. Nationals cannot patronize the hotels, beaches, stores, restaurants and medical facilities set aside for tourists. Nor was there any mention of the explosion in sex tourism from European and Canadian tourists. A March 2002 report released by Johns Hopkins University states that Cuba is ``increasingly reported to be a major destination for sex tourists from North America and Europe. The increase is attributed to a concurrent drop in political restrictions on travel to Cuba and a crackdown on sex tourism in Southeast Asia, causing sex tourists to seek out alternative destinations.''

Changing current law to deregulate travel to Cuba would lock in place Fidel Castro's tourist apartheid. It would provide hard currency for a country on the State Department's list of terrorist states and do nothing to help the internal Cuban democratic opposition. However, it would do a lot to help the Cuban dictatorship. [End]- JOHN SUAREZ, Coordinator, Free Cuba Foundation - Florida International University Miami

The Price of Sex and Milk in Cuba*** Twenty feet in front of me, close to the turquoise sea, a group of Italian men with Cuban girls laughed and bantered. The men were 40-ish but fending off gravity better than most American males, and they didn't look bad in their bathing trunks. The women were spectacular in their tangas, not an ounce of fat on their 20-year-old bodies. They were ebony. There was an adage around that you heard once you'd been in Cuba a few times, that the Italian men always went for the really black Cubanas. What interested me about this was that in Italy, bourgeois Northern Italians will sneer at Sicily or even Naples as "Africa."……………… Why had Castro beggared his nation and put a generation of young women in the position of learning to be whores? Did the daughters of the Cuban leadership have to wiggle their butts in nightclubs? ***

After Jimmy Carter's much publicized trip to Cuba in May of 2002: Lawmakers Preserve Cuba's Socialism *** HAVANA (AP) - Cuban lawmakers voted unanimously to make socialism an ``irrevocable'' part of the constitution in an effort to ensure the nation will remain socialist long after Fidel Castro is gone. More than 500 members of Cuba's unicameral National Assembly voted late Wednesday to declare that ``capitalism will never return again'' to the Caribbean island. Deputies' names were called out in alphabetical order and each one stood up and shouted ``Si!'' into a microphone. Of Cuba's 578 deputies, 559 were present and all voted affirmatively.

Deputies grew emotional and almost giddy during the tally, eventually applauding loudly after each vote. When the final vote had been declared unanimous, the deputies first stood stoically at attention for the Cuban national anthem, then held hands and swayed back in forth as they sang the socialist anthem, ``Internationale.'' Castro presided over the session and afterward personally greeted many of the lawmakers in the assembly. ***

Fidel Castro - Cuba

CUBA'S CRUEL JOKE

First in a series: Forty-four years after the revolution, Cuba's poor beg for food, the rich drive Mercedes and the U.S. dollar is official currency
By Lawrence Solomon National Post
Canada
Colaboración:
Armando F. Mastrapa III
New York
La Nueva Cuba
Enero 18, 2003

'Can I have your bones?" the old woman asked my eight-year-old daughter, pointing to the gnawed remains of the chicken leg that had been her lunch. Seeing that my daughter was perplexed, the old woman displayed a box of chicken bones that she had collected from other customers at the lunch counter of the department store, a respectable establishment frequented by locals in Old Havana's main shopping street. My daughter provided the bones after the lunch counter staff gave its consent -- the old woman was evidently a regular at the lunch counter, and this was how she earned her supper.

Welcome to Cuba, 44 years into the Revolution that was to industrialize the economy, eradicate hunger and eliminate the gap between rich and poor in this island nation, previously the most prosperous in the Caribbean. Today, the once-muscular Cuban economy is in tatters and its much lauded social safety net a cruel joke. The poor, in reality, are bled to support the lifestyles of the government elite, which lives in luxury -- the driveways of the Havana honchos sport Mercedes -- while its populace goes hungry.

Some Cubans outside government --increasingly those who obtain patronage positions in the tourist industry, where they receive tips and other payments in U.S. dollars -- manage comfortable, if meagre, existences. With dollars, they can shop in the many "dollar" shops, where they can obtain some of the consumer goods, medicines and dairy products that most Cubans, prior to the Revolution, could readily obtain.

The great majority of Cubans, however, are left to fend for themselves in a pitiless system. Most must "do business" to survive, as Cubans put it, because most cannot subsist on the typical wages -- the equivalent of about 50 cents a day -- that the government sets for them. The old woman at the lunch counter begged for food; other Cubans beg for old clothes or for medicine, or sell peanuts on street corners. Young men sell cigars and other goods in the burgeoning black market; young women sell their bodies in the burgeoning sex trade.

Without dollars, life is grim. People line up at dimly lit government distribution centres, ration books in hand -- libretas, the government calls them -- for their monthly allocation. The books, which were established in 1962 to "guarantee the equitable distribution of food without privileges for a few," entitle Cubans to 2.5 kilograms of rice, 1 kilogram of fish, 1/2 kilogram of beans, 14 eggs and sundry other basics at subsidized prices. Through the libreta, each Cuban also gets one bread roll a day. Every two months, a Cuban is entitled to one bar of hand soap and one bar of laundry soap. Fresh fruits and vegetables come infrequently; meat might come once or twice a year. Until the mid-1990s, children under seven were entitled to fresh milk, but fresh milk, like butter, cheese and other dairy products, is now off the shelves. Before the revolution, two litres of fresh milk cost 15 U.S. cents, well within the means of the poor.

Cuba, a country with a coffee culture, produces fine beans in its Oriente province, but not for average Cubans. The good stuff is sold to tourists and exported to earn dollars, or reserved for the Cuban elite, while the government imports cheaper beans, grinds them, mixes them with ground chickpeas, and doles out 28 grams per month -- less than one ounce -- to Cuban citizens. The government also exports high quality Cuban rice for dollars while importing a low-grade rice from Vietnam for its citizens. It exports 90% of its fresh fruits, directing much of the rest to tourists and others who can pay in dollars.

Nowhere in the world does the Almighty Buck more separate the haves from the have-nots. The Cuban government has adopted the U.S. dollar as an official currency that co-exists along with the peso and cleverly keeps the poor in their place. The multinationals operating in the country -- Cuba now courts them to earn dollars -- are forbidden to pay their Cuban workers directly in dollars. Instead, they must turn over the workers' wages to a government agency which pockets most of the money and gives the workers a pittance in pesos. Cuba's communists have perfected the Double Currency Standard, and the double standard: One currency for the rich, another for the poor, and the rich determine the means of exchange.

Cuba's poor are also squeezed in the other necessities of life. Even in central Havana, people commonly carry water by bucket from standpipes in the street to their homes, and then lift the buckets by rope to the higher floors, because their buildings' broken water pipes go unrepaired. Those lucky enough to have working water pipes can get water at the tap -- but only at certain times. In one dense urban neighbourhood that I visited, the water flowed from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., during which time families scrambled to fill pots and pans inside their homes for drinking water, and former oil drums outside their homes for washing. About the time that the water came on, the electricity went off -- it, too, is rationed by daily blackouts.

In buildings where one or two families might have once lived, today live many. The inner courtyards of Cuba's residences have become miniature shanty towns, cinder block housing units or other improvisations piled on top of one another. The units -- often two small rooms totalling 200 square feet -- can house an extended family of seven, 10 or even 12. The rooms are often windowless or near-windowless, the ceilings low and oppressive. Among these buildings packed with people lie many identical buildings, but appropriated for government use. In the space that might house 50 or 100 people will sit one government functionary, bored and idle at a desk, the premises otherwise near-empty.

"For the first time in the history of our country, both the state and the government left aside the rich side and joined the poor side," Fidel Castro proclaimed after assuming power in 1959. Forty-four years after the Revolution, the poor side are talking of another revolution, in which the government will do much, much more for its people by doing much, much less.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation. E-mail: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

© Copyright 2003 National Post

LA PRENSA LIBERAL Y CASTRO
01-22-2003 11:43 AM

LA Times shills for Castro while so-called liberals whine about the media -
January 01, 2003 By David Horowitz

While Liberals Whine About Conservative Media
So-called liberals lost an election. Now they're whining about conservative successes in the media. On New Year's Day The New York Times ran a front page story which described liberal plans to recruit talk show hosts to compete with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Reagan, to buy a cable network and to fund a liberal think tank comparable to the Heritage Foundation.

Liberals still don't get it. There's no big liberal audience for liberal talk show hosts because they control taxpayer funded NPR and all the metropolitan newspapers; or for liberal cable, because they control the networks and PBS with ten times the audience; or for liberal think tanks, because universities are the liberal think tanks.

(And of course there's Brookings, the Progressive Policy Institute and dozens of other liberal 501(c)3s on top of the trillion dollar university system).

In last Sunday's LA Times, Neil Gabler, professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC pretended to be unable to detect liberal bias in the media, including leftwing papers like the one he was writing in. Perhaps that's because he also failed to notice that the Annenberg School is run by a former Clinton Administration official and -- like journalism schools across the country -- its faculty is one hundred percent leftwing.

People who call themselves liberals and democrats yet participate and run a system that ruthlessly excludes any view that is not on the left are probably incapable of making sensible comments about the political world we live in anyway.

LA Times Shills For Cuban Sadist
The Los Angeles Times has a front page story today (Thursday) attacking the US economic sanctions against Cuba because ordinary Cubans are suffering. Don't even ask whether the Times ever ran a story anywhere let alone on the front page attacking the economic sanctions against South Africa because ordinary South Africans were suffering (and they were). The headline for this “news story” itself makes the editorial point: “Many Question Embargo as Cubans Suffer.”

The author of the piece, Carol J. Williams demonstrates early that she is an ignoramus of Pulitzer proportions it comes to this pathetic island prison. “Life in Cuba, once one of Latin America’s most prosperous countries has deteriorated over the past decade, putting the tropical island on a level with the region’s most hopeless and destitute nations.”

In fact, one can pinpoint the deterioration of the economy of Cuba with precision accuracy as having begun 40 years ago, January 1, 1959, the day a victorious Communist named Fidel Castro entered Havana. Cuba’s descent from the second most prosperous nation in Latin America to the third or fourth poorest was an accomplished fact 30 years ago not ten.

Williams follows up this noxious lie with an equally mendacious pro

: “Abandoned by Soviet mentors and isolated by more than 40 years of U.S. embargo, Cubans wanting to put food on the table now must navigate shortages, ....” In reality, Cuba is not at all isolated, since every country in the world trades with Cuba but the United States, including all of Latin America.

The problem is that a sadistic dictator has ruined Cuba’s economy and Cuba has nothing to trade but its women (which it does with socialist enthusiasm). Cuba's poverty is caused by the crackpot Marxist doctrines imposed by its sociopathic ruler and promoted by half the liberal arts professors on American faculties.

As if this were not enough, the Los Angeles Times account blames capitalism for Castro’s present exploitation of his subject people: "In what amounts to a case of cutthroat capitalism to cover communism’s economic failures, the regime of President Fidel Castro -- who came to power on New Year's Day 44 years ago -- is cashing in on the US sanctions imposed after the 1959 revolution, in the hope that deprivation would prompt Cubans to revolt.” This is an illiterate sentence (don’t try to understand it) but what it is attempting to insinuate is that the Cuban gangster’s policy of encouraging tourism and prostitution at the expense of ordinary Cubans is somehow America’s fault.

Oh, and don’t be fooled by the reference to Communism’s economic failures—for the progressives at the Times that wasn’t “real” socialism anyway. Real socialism is what they’re trying to salvage by promoting an aid program for Castro. (After all even Soviet dictators criticized Stalin after the fact.) Consider this self-indicting sentence: “Most damaging, however, is the ban on extending credit to allow Cuba to buy more food from the bountiful US farm belt."

Oh-ho, so what is really going on here is that the pro-Communist left is promoting a bailout for Castro’s monster regime in the form of US loans. Nice. And these shills for a bankrupt socialist police state call themselves “progressives.”

FIDEL BATISTA!

Third in a series: Though he was corrupt, Batista made Cuba into an economic powerhouse with a thriving free press. In the hands of Fidel Castro, the island's economy, and the voice of the people, have both been throttled

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
Canada
Colaboración:
Juan F. Cuéllar
E.U.
La Nueva Cuba
Enero 27, 2003

Over at the Museo de la Revolucion, Fidel Castro's case against the dictator he overthrew 44 years ago is vividly on display.

Fulgencio Batista was evil incarnate, the museum earnestly instructs visitors in room after room of the once-magnificent building, formerly a presidential palace built in 1920 and decorated by Tiffany's of New York. Under Batista and his predecessors, we learn through photos and text, Cuba became a playground for crass tourists who came for sex, drink and gambling, and who crowded the country's pristine beaches to the detriment of ordinary folk. To drive home the immorality of pre-socialist times, the museum displays an original National Lottery of Cuba ticket from early in the century, a symbol of the country's fall from grace.

We learn that Batista was an illegitimate leader, the election he won stolen by manipulating the press. Worse, Batista intimidated, even jailed or killed, political opponents.

But Batista also failed Cuba by failing to invest government funds wisely. One damning display berates Batista's priorities with a list of budget line items that show government expenditures on frills such as roads, promenades and buildings. Batista's sky-high spending on telecommunications -- which the display dubs as military -- comes in for criticism. Another display lambastes Batista for failing to diversify the economy. Another still, which provides a year-by-year report of sugar output, accuses Batista of neglecting this all-important industry. The numbers show a downward trend, interrupted with some up-ticks, in the 1950s, and then a giant leap forward, as Castro mobilized the country to produce more sugar in one of his regime's grand economic plans.

The moral and economic rot under Batista led to humiliation and human tragedy, the museum tells us. "Many women who were denied jobs saw themselves forced to become prostitutes in order to survive," said one display. Said another: "According to a census in 1953, there were 200,000 shacks and misery huts." Said a third, also referring to the 1953 census: "40,939 people died due to lack of medical attendance and unsanitary living conditions."

The history the museum imparts is part truth, part fiction and all hypocrisy. Batista was indeed an unsavory character. He did oversee a corrupt administration in Cuba. He did undermine the halting democracy that the United States helped create after liberating Cuba from oppressive Spanish occupation at the turn of the century.

But Cuba and its U.S.-style constitution was also an economic powerhouse with potent social institutions and impressive accomplishments. A 1958 United Nations report ranked Cuba's vibrant free press eighth in the world, and first in Latin America. Despite its much smaller population, Cuba had 160 radio stations compared to the U.K.'s 62 and France's 50. It had 23 television stations compared to Mexico's 12 and Venezuela's 10. The tiny country supported 58 newspapers, fourth in Latin America behind populous Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

Cuba once installed telephones at a rapid rate. No more. It once ranked first in Latin America, fifth in the world, in television sets per capita, and also ranked high in radios, automobiles, and many other consumer goods. No more. With the population increased and the housing stock degraded, more people suffer inadequate housing today than ever before, and sanitary conditions have become a scandal through much of the country.

The information-hungry populace in the Batista era was well-educated, as it remains. Student registration at primary schools in 1955 was 1,032 students per 10,000 inhabitants, higher than the figures for 1990 of 842. The registration rate for higher education was an impressive 38 per 10,000, about the same as it was 10 years later (34 per 10,000) and 15 years later (41 per 10,000). The country, in fact, had a long history of high literacy levels: At the turn of the 20th century, only 28% of those 10 and over couldn't read or write, not that different from the current figure, 100 years later, of 16%.

But unlike today, Cuba's economy under Batista was powerful, both domestically and in exports, and it was becoming increasingly diversified. Under Castro, its economy is in tatters, nowhere more so than in the sugar industry that Castro once promoted so heavily. Last summer, Castro announced a shut down of half of the country's sugar mills. "We had to act or face ruin," he explained. As he told NBC News just this week. "It cost us more to produce sugar than what we could sell it for."

But if Batista bested Castro in virtually every broad socio-economic indicator, he paled in comparison when it came to controlling either the electoral process or the populace. Castro executed thousands of political opponents after he came to power, imprisoned tens of thousands and caused hundreds of thousands to flee to exile. Where Batista won a disputed election, a Castro election leaves no room for dispute: Castro allows no opponents, no opposing viewpoints to appear in the press, and, because that might not be enough, his political machine ensures a good turnout by keeping tabs on who votes and who doesn't: In last Sunday's national election, Castro managed a 90%-plus "yes" vote, not quite as impressive as Saddam Hussein's 100% but, among dictators, respectable enough.

Those who revile Batista often point to a decadent economy that relied on mafia-run casinos, prostitution and other demeaning jobs servicing tourists. Tourism was important under Batista -- Havana was an east-coast alternative to Las Vegas, complete with the sex and gaming, and the same mafia owners -- but never as important as tourism has become today. Cuba's once diversified economy is gone and Castro is now putting all of his hopes in attracting tourists.

To do this, Castro's Cuba now permits prostitution, it winks at sex tourism -- tourist guide books even include sections on the country's once-taboo gay and bisexual scenes -- and, as under Batista, the country unabashedly invests heavily in tourism. Earlier this week, Castro inaugurated a US$100-million resort on the island's northeastern coast, broadcast nationwide, to underscore the importance the government places on the new five-hotel complex of 944 rooms able to house 1,500 tourists.

Tourism is now Cuba's No. 1 source of foreign income, with 1.6 million visitors generating about US$2-billion last year. More tourists come from Canada than from other important sources of foreign exchange, chiefly Germany, Britain, Italy, France, and Switzerland. Castro, like Batista, is eyeing one other important tourist market.

"Our friends from the north are not in this list," Castro said with a grin, referring to Americans that can't travel to Cuba due to U.S. government regulations.

Some day soon, perhaps, Castro's dream may be realized, and Cuba's economy may once again benefit from U.S. tourism. If it does, Cuba under Castro will have recovered one of the benefits that the country once enjoyed. Forty-four years into the Revolution, Castro will have achieved all the failings, real and perceived, that Cuba had under Batista, and it will have retained few of the virtues.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation. Email: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.

© Copyright 2003 National Post

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.