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Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Did you know that your tourist dollars in Cuba help to directly finance the Cuban military?

What travel agencies don't mention about Cuban tourism


 Tourism funds Cuban military 

A large chunk of the Cuban economy is run by the company Gaviota that deals with tourism and is controlled by the MINFAR (the military)  and Castro’s Ministry of the Interior (MININT) that runs a hotel chain, an airline, taxi company, marinas, shops, restaurants and museums and is under the control of another general. The tourist group Cubanacán was founded at the beginning of the 1980s and is also under military control. This means that tourist dollars go directly to strengthening the Castro regime's repressive apparatus.

The first American ship to cruise from the United States to Cuba in over half a century is partnering with Havanatur that is heavily penetrated by Cuban spies from the Ministry of Intelligence (MININT).Christopher P. Baker in his travel guide Havana explains the nature of the staff that tourists will be encountering.

"The Cuban government looks with suspicion  on U.S. travelers entering on religious or humanitarian licenses, and U.S. "people to people" programs are handled exclusively by Celimar, a division of Havanatur that is said to report to MININT and is heavily laden with ex-MININT staffers."
Secondly, since Cuba is a totalitarian communist dictatorship that is the tenth most censored country on Earth according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, information of interest to traveler is often unavailable or misrepresented.

Can purposeful travel outweigh supporting Castro's repressive apparatus?

If you are going to travel to Cuba and put hard currency into dying communist institutions that prolongs the life of the dictatorship then you have to ask yourself what would serve as a counterbalance to that? What does purposeful travel to Cuba look like? One could argue that it looks like this: members of the Miami-based non-governmental organization, the Cuban Democratic Directorate, traveled to Cuba in 2002 and took humanitarian assistance to Cuban dissidents and signed the Varela Project in the living room of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas.

Courageous human rights activists from Europe and Latin America have risked all to assist Cuban human rights defenders. Is this something that you'd be willing to do? Would you be ready to assume the consequences?

2 comments:

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  2. Regarding the 'censorship' issue: I was recently in Cuba for 30 days and thoroughly enjoyed my time there.

    When I attempted to log onto some websites from Cuba to book a flight and accommodation for future travel plans, my access was blocked. The block was not from Cuba but from the United States. A number of American websites would not allow me (an Australian) to use their website because I happened to be in sitting in Cuba.

    So, yes. There are issues with getting accurate information but as far as I could see it's not because of Cuba.

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