HAVANA, Cuba. – It is not me saying it, I am only paraphrasing, and verifying it as true, what Cuba’s prime minister said recently -not in those exact words- about the lack of nightlife in Varadero. I say that’s true for every corner in Cuba, an extremely boring country where it is difficult, if not impossible, to access any kind of healthy amusement.
If Varadero, Cuba’s flagship tourism resort, is a destination short on niceties, it is obvious that everything else there is to visit, from Pinar del Río to Guantánamo is one dense block of boredom where, beyond the sun and the sea, the greatest satisfaction is to stay inside an air-conditioned environment either in the car or in the hotel room.
It’s true that Varadero is a ghost town when the sun goes down, in spite of Casa de la Música (the only one in the entire peninsula) and of those two discos where, as Cubans know well, people don’t go to dance or get drunk, although in recent months, with the absence of tourists, you can’t even go for a beer because, simply stated, there isn’t any beer. In fact, you can’t even drink water, neither from the tap nor bottled.
In Cuba, it’s no longer about how much money one has or not, or whether one has access to foreign currency. It’s not even about enjoying privileges reserved for foreigners and military personnel. It’s about there not being enough recreation options to enjoy beyond the sun and the beach (or the sun and the pool), which are the only “products” available and unregulated (for now) in this peculiar “leisure market” where there isn’ t even lemonade, purported to be “the basis for everything.”
The essence of such boredom is, undoubtedly, the selfishness (which has a great element of terror at losing total control) behind not letting private entrepreneurs be in charge of providing entertainment, something that the “socialist state companies” have demonstrated for years they are not able to offer, at least not anything good and long-lasting, not genuine, not turning into a focus of corruption, theft, derailing resources to the black market. It’s not just a few officials or cadres of Cuba’s Communist Party that hide their sources of wealth in the trappings of the black market. How else to explain the excessive “persistence of error”?
No leisure company run by the state offers a service that can be called “leisure”. They are all a bottomless pit where the first thing to disappear is not the offers and capital that should make sense for a Profitable business, but the quality of service to the client who “normally” are the “object of mistreatment”. So much so that the terms “state-owned” and “national” always connotes something awful, low cost, and if not that, then “ephemeral” because nothing that is “state owned” is good to last.
That said, nightclubs like Tropicana and Parisién, Coppelia Ice Cream Parlor, and even Lenin Park have known more bad times than the few –and brief- moments of relative splendor. I say “relative” because this splendor can only be appreciated within a general disaster, within chaos, when not within the fleeting media enthusiasm that accompanies every work that is rehabilitated or re-inaugurated in observance of this or that anniversary.
Regarding tourism, so much has the regime wanted to hoard everything for itself, leaving no room to the indispensable private initiatives, that something as cliché as drinking coconut water by the shore is a rarity, although the coconut palm trees are right there, ripe with fruit, as well as people willing to harvest them with their own hands with the idea of selling them to the swimmers. But hundreds of bureaucratic obstacles, as well as political hardheadedness, prevent something as simple as knocking down a coconut to sell its water from becoming a viable and doable business. And this has nothing to do with the US. however, and everything to do with the internal blockade that the Communist regime uses as a control mechanism.
This is just the simplest example of why everything is doomed to boredom and absurdity, in a country where, if well governed (and its market and work force free to operate), there would be the potential of recovering everything that made Cuba one of the most fun-places on the planet, with the most spectacular nights, and the most cosmopolitan neighborhoods and businesses, even when 60 years ago we had less than a dozen hotels, compared to hundreds that are being built today and which are practically empty.
The Communists want foreign tourists to come to Cuba by the millions, but truly, what is there in our offer that is so unique that they wouldn’t find more and better in Cancun, Miami or Punta Cana?
The regime speaks of “citizen peace” and “political stability”. But we know that in addition to being pure invention, sustained under great repression which generates an annoying level of tension that the visitor perceives and sometimes experiences in his own skin, they mean nothing with regard to violence, for example, in Cancun or the Dominican Republic, neither have they reverberated significantly in the flow of foreign visitors, nor derailed them to our alleged “stable” and “peaceful” market.
Truly, as a Caribbean tourist destination, we are showing the worst results in the region, even with strategies to cheapen the product to a nearly unprofitable level.
Which means that, in addition to a useless myth that collapses by the second, “peaceful” and “stable” an embellished translation for “boring tourist destination to kill”,
Spoken only by clients that no tour operator wants: retired workers whose retirement pension cannot afford vacationing in other more expensive destinations, or senior couples that buy travel packages, or people who are not willing to spend a dime beyond the cost of the “all included” ” plan, in other words, tourists with no resources who will not tips the musician when the time comes.
And to service those useless tourists, amidst the present migration wave that’s becoming the largest one we’ve had, there is still a precarious service staff, reduced by the pandemic, the terminations, the refusal to return to work where there are no tips or salary incentives.
There is talk of hotels that are operating with 50% less than the necessary personnel, and there is also an unprecedented labor drain, in a sector where it had become a habit to traffic clandestinely with vacant positions.
The best trained tourism professionals could be emigrating now to wherever they can be hired, outside Cuba, even if in jobs of lower category. Personally, I know excellent chefs who have accepted jobs as kitchen assistants in the Dominican Republic and in Cancun; I know tourism entertainers who have left Cuba definitively to places where they can do their jobs without being forced to engage in sex as an extra service, or depend solely on tips to survive.
This means that soon, the problem will not be solely that tourists are not arriving in numbers projected by the government, but that the government will not have quality personnel to service the few tourists that risk spending a few days in this “theme park” of boredom.
With perpetual shortages that complicate life; a gastronomical choice that is neither varied nor amazing; with hyperinflation; with a schizophrenic monetary policy; without true shopping centers; without reasonable or reliable public transportation or roads in good condition; with the apartheid of “offers for Cubans” and “promos for foreigners”; in other words, without leisurely activities and services that variety demands, one would have to be extremely bored and ignorant of other travel experiences worldwide to find real pleasure in walking thirsty through filthy and broken streets; under stinking buildings that are about to collapse; next to people who are poorly dressed; exhausted from hunger and heat; through empty slogans and signs that read “all gone”, “sold out”, “don’t bother us”, “danger”, “building on the verge of collapse”, “no Cuban pesos accepted”, and “long live the revolution”.
OPINION ARTICLE
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