Posted on 11/15/2018 12:43:00 PM PST by Simon Green
The Trump Administration added 26 new names to a blacklist of Cuban tourist attractions that Americans no longer are allowed to visit.
The sanctions are designed to direct “economic activity away from the Cuban military,” according to a statement by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last November. All 26 of the newly banned tourist attractions are owned by Cuba’s military business conglomerate, GAESA, ranging from the new five-star Iberostar Grand Packard and Paseo del Prado hotels in Old Havana, to small beachfront shopping centers far away from the island nation’s capital.
American travelers are still allowed to visit Cuba, and the Associated Press reports that “hundreds of US commercial flights and cruise ships deliver hundreds of thousands of Americans to the island each year.” However, the AP also notes that the increasing number of sanctions over the past year, among other factors, seems to have tanked American interest in touring Cuba. Despite the US easing up on its Cuba travel advisory, tourist numbers dropped dramatically this year, and a number of airlines have scrapped or diminished the number of routes between the US and Cuba to match the downward trend.
What does Cuba have that the Dominican Republican doesn’t?
I know Canadians who have gone there.
They say don’t bother. It’s the crappiest place in the Caribbean by quite a wide margin.
I had heard a couple of things about Cuban tourism, which I just could never understand:
1. Some said, it’s good to visit Cubs ASAP, before it “changes”, while it’s still “authentic” or “unspoiled”, or words to that effect. Meaning, they were eager to see Cuba as it has been a socialist worker’s paradise? Really??
2. I heard a couple of old car enthusiasts say how fun it would be to go to Cuba, to see all the old cars. The old cars in Cuba are in terrible shape, with jury rigged replacement parts and bad paint jobs. They are not the pristine restored cars you see at ‘50s and ‘60s old car shows here in America.
Since Bill and Hillary’s latest tour has been cancelled... Perhaps they can go down to Cuba and run a couple of one-nighters and invite socialist down there to attend.
bammy and the pope are mad. They conspired to bring about the bammy “deal” with Cuba that gave Cuba advantages, and brought the USA nothing, as you would expect the two America-haters to do.
I was going to go on an academic trip to Cuba (focusing on art and archaeology) and then they told us that we could never leave our group ... AND we had to keep a record of every Cuban with whom we had spoken and turn it in to the officials when we left.
Sorry, no.
Europeans go on child prostitute tours of Cuba (there were companies in Germany and Spain rewarding their top salesmen or producers with sex tours of Cuba) but they are limited to specific areas. I assume these are the places where the bordellos are and probably a few car shows for people not interested in “mulatas” (young Cuban black women and girls).
Not going there at all. My group was very respectable, organized by a local leftist Unitarian who is very well meaning, but told us that we had to abide by the laws...one of which was reporting everybody we spoke with.
A liberal relative visited there, shortly after 0bama made it easier to do so. They did it partly to support 0bama. IIRC, the reports of the trip were mainly along the line of being optimistic that the conditions were on the verge of improving.
It is a shit hole but it does have a unique decrepit charm. And the brief time I was there in Havana and suburbs, I never felt I was in any danger. There were no street hustlers or beggars. The young people who took us on a tour out to Hemingway’s rancher and the beach town where he wrote were extremely nice and eager to please. They also exuded an innocence I found rather charming. The female tour guide must have been in her early 20’s and you could tell she had studied her English hard and was always trying to get the syntax right and pick up some idioms. Their ambition was to get an apartment and move out of the parents’ homes. The young man drove a ‘56 Pontiac Chieftan convertible. Red with new white naugahyde interior that was done pretty well. About a $200 Tijuana job in the ‘60’s. Of course it had been repowered with a four cylinder diesel of Chinese manufacture but the original Powerglide had been mated ingeniously with an adapter plate and the big boat ran well and floated over the back roads like they did when I was a kid. I have faith in the young Cubans that as time passes, they will demand economic reform and get it and, though I doubt I will live to see it, western investment will come and there will be a detente and the island will become a pleasant bargain vacation destination.
And Las Vegas.
“It’s the crappiest place in the Caribbean by quite a wide margin.”
and that’s SAYING a lot given how crappy so much of the popular Carib tourist destinations like Jamaica are ...
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