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I know several Canadians that love going to Cuba’s cheap beach resorts.

Based on the videos I have seen on YouTube there seems to be a lot of areas of Havana that are literally falling apart. There was trash everywhere just piled up. Only the tourists areas are kept relatively clean.

It seems like a good place to get a nice bacterial infection like Montezuma’s Revenge. Which I had once in Mexico 27 years ago. I did not go back to Mexico until Cabo put in a desalinization plant. I have been to Cabo twice. No Turista Trots either time.

This is correct. I was in Cuba a couple times a few years ago. Some effort at trash pickup was still made at the guest houses, but you could see the piles of trash down the street where regular folks had no such service. The tourist services are very cheap, and if not great quality at least they are better than what the average Cuban has access to.

There was a story a few years ago that hundreds of buildings in Havana were collapsing every year due to neglect. I've had the opinion ever since then that the trigger for the overthrow of the communist regime might be an apartment collapse that kills dozens of people. Leading to angry grieving protestors filling the streets, a fearful government overreacting and ordering troops to take action against the protestors, and then the troops refusing to follow orders because it's their friends and families that are among the victims of such collapses.

The big problem is that there is no real alternative leadership in Cuba today - it really would be a vacuum for an ambitious leader, and that tends to end poorly. I don't see any institutions capable of offering an alternative vision to the communist propaganda that has filled people's heads there the last 70 years. Maybe if the ex-pat community in Miami really took the bull by the horns they could help lead Cuba to a better government. Let's hope so, because sooner or later the current government is simply going to collapse. There's not much propping it up at this point.