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Continental Flight 4880, the 8 a.m. departure from Miami for Havana, has an unorthodox check-in. The flight isn't listed on any of the departure screens. Passengers must report to a makeshift desk run by the charter travel company that sells the tickets. There, downstairs by the baggage carousels starting three hours before takeoff, boarding passes are distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. It all seems a metaphor for under-the-radar relations between America and Cuba.
Despite travel restrictions on U.S. citizens and other hassles, tourism is growing -- albeit more slowly than Cuban officials had hoped. Every year, more than 200,000 Americans -- politicians, businessmen, artists, journalists, academics, and legions of Cuban Americans visiting relatives -- manage the trip, 90% with the approval of U.S. authorities. The rest enter illegally via places like Canada and Mexico.
I became part of that 90% when I toured Cuba for 10 days in December with 28 classmates from Stanford Business School. Every year, MBA students propose visits to foreign countries, and when Cuba was approved as 2002's destination, I found the prospect of visiting the Western hemisphere's last communist bastion in the company of my B-school's card-carrying capitalists to be irresistible.
SALSA, CIGARS, RUM. We ended up seeing the island and meeting with officials from various government ministries involved with tourism, as well as foreign hotel owners, beach-resort developers, and former CIA agent Philip Agee, now operating a Havana travel agency for Americans. Unfortunately, Fidel Castro was ill and couldn't meet with us.
Americans represent only a small part of the nearly 1.2 million visitors who come to Cuba every year, mainly from Canada, Spain, France, Germany, and Britain. They pour nearly $2 billion into the economy, outstripping revenues from sugar and other core crops such as tobacco. Despite U.S. travel restrictions, Cuba's tourism receipts are comparable to other popular Caribbean destinations like Jamaica and Costa Rica. "Until September 11, tourism grew at a compound annual rate of an astounding 25%," explains leading Cuban economist Omar Everleny. All this would seem to put tourism on a path to dominate the island's economy.
Cuba's appeal is evident as the plane descends on Havana and a vista of stunning countryside and sweeping beaches that cover the longest coastline in the Caribbean fills the window. On the ground, the weather is almost always balmy, and you can't help being entranced by the infectious musical rhythms on every street corner, constant salsa dancing, and seductive aromas of the island's legendary cigars and superb rum.
Given Cuba's physical and cultural attractions, it's not surprising that in the late 1950s more than 30 flights a day made the 90-mile hop from Miami. Americans by the thousands tanned themselves on the beaches and gambled in the notorious casinos of its capital city.
FAREWELL, COMRADE. The Castro regime quashed all that on January 1, 1959, when mobs stormed the gambling palaces, smashing roulette wheels and craps tables. But many years later, the desperate need for dollars after the fall of the Soviet Union made attracting tourists an imperative. When Soviet support ended, what Cubans know as the island's "special period" from 1990 to 1993 saw a 35% decline in gross domestic product -- a decline that Mark Frank, editor of the Economic Eye on Cuba newsletter, says "could only be comparable to a country after war."
To rescue the economy, Castro decided to accept the U.S. dollar as legal tender, privatize small businesses, court foreign investment from countries like Spain and Canada, and boost tourism, which was generating a mere $250 million in 1990.
Perhaps the most prominent sign of tourism's revival is Habana Vieja (Old Havana), the proud project of Eusebio Leal, an architect-historian who 10 years ago reinvigorated efforts to preserve the district, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the early 1980s. Once a grand and stately neighborhood, the quarter-mile-square district fell into disrepair after Castro took power.
Leon talked Castro into allowing him to run a company, Habanaguanex, which raises funds -- mostly foreign ones -- to renovate buildings, generate cash from tourists, and pour profits into more rebuilding. More than $200 million has been raised since 1994, with the current goal being to renovate 25 hotels by 2005. The new Old Havana already has scores of recently refurbished stores, cobblestone streets, piazzas, and restaurants, all attracting the musicians and entertainers who bring the neighborhood alive.
Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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