For more than 60 years, commercial relations between the United States and Cuba have been marked by obstacles, restrictions, encounters and disagreements, in which tourism has been the main mirror and sign of people's mobility and trade.
Therefore, the travel industry and the nexus of the aforementioned nations mark the course of the policies imposed by the alternate U.S. administrations, Democrat and Republican, with respect to the Island.
The Cuban academic and researcher José Luís Perelló, in a summary analysis published in December 2024 in the American digital publication Progreso Weekly, analyzed the current situation of tourism on the Island and its relationship with the United States, which takes on greater importance when one recalls that ten years ago, on December 17, 2014, the thawing process between the two countries began, which would give way to a new phase in their relations.
He points out that, as is well known, the United States has played and continues to play a fundamental role in the Cuban economy, despite the restrictions and regulations imposed by Donald Trump administration and continued by the Democratic administration of Joe Biden.
The climate of détente in relations between the governments of Washington and Havana in 2015 and 2016, at the end of President Barack Obama's second term, encouraged the growth of the flow of foreign visitors to Cuba.
With the beginning of Donald Trump's Republican administration in January 2017, a new stage of restrictions and a decline in international tourism was foreseeable. However, 2017 and 2018 showed the best results.
Despite a group of negative exogenous factors, as of September 2017, the year closed with four million 689 thousand visitors, an increase of 16.2 percent over the previous year.
International arrivals in 2018 totaled four million 732 thousand visitors, the best figure recorded in Cuba since the beginning of the development of its tourism sector. In that year, 620,676 Cubans living abroad and 638,360 Americans visited the Island, representing 27.5 percent of the total number of international visitors.
Starting in the second year of his first term, President Trump pushed for a radical tightening of sanctions against the Island, with more than 240 measures, including a ban on cruise ship travel from the United States in June 2019.
In this scenario, air traffic between Cuba and the neighboring country decreased by 18.3 percent in 2018 compared to the previous year, with a total of 11,704 flights, about 2,620 fewer than in 2017.
The main reason for this was the Trump administration's new policy on travel to Cuba. In October 2019, the Department of Transportation announced the suspension of all U.S. airline flights to the Island, with the exception of those to Havana's José Martí International Airport.
Between 2019 and 2020, Cuba suffered the greatest impact from these sanctions and restrictions, including the activation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act as of May 2, 2019, the addition of Cuba to the list of countries that not fully cooperating with counterterrorism efforts, and the addition of 211 entities to the Restricted Cuban Entities List.
In addition, they mentioned, among other things, banned hotel accommodations, which were not reversed under this last Democratic administration, adds the expert.
In March 2020, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Cuban government decided to completely close entries to the country, a measure taken by many nations in the face of one of the most harmful diseases in history.
Washington ruled that people who had traveled to Cuba did not meet the requirements to travel to the United States, among many other restrictions.
Perelló outlines several factors affecting the decline in arrivals to Cuba, which has been going on for three years and will not be easy to reverse.
Cuba is in an economic crisis caused by the slowdown in production during the pandemic, a multi-systemic internal crisis and the effects of Washington's increasing sanctions. To this must be added the devastating effects suffered by the country due to the climatological and meteorological phenomena of hurricanes and earthquakes.
In this complex scenario, until October 31, 2024, the number of Cubans living abroad who traveled to the Island decreased by 17.82 percent compared to the same period in 2023.
In the case of Cubans living in the United States, the decrease was 19.23 percent. At the end of October, only 244,116 visited the Island between January and October, far less than the 513,657 Cubans living abroad who visited during the same period in 2019.
The U.S. market contributed 118,38 travelers, lower than the figure reached in the period January-October 2019, when 452,835 travelers arrived. This decline represents a 74% decrease in the period analyzed (less than half of the number of travelers who visited the Island five years ago are visiting the Island today).
The scenario could not be more complex, the reinforced blockade remains intact and is another variable of great weight, but if the new Republican administration fulfills its electoral promises, Cuba will be in an even more difficult situation between 2025 and 2029.
Therefore, the future of the country can only depend on the ability to promote economic development by other means, concludes Perelló's analysis. (Prensa Latina)
