Havana Cuba. – Spanish blogger Paco Nadal counted In the diary The country that he was visiting Cuba, where his experience would have been so good that he recommends that Spaniards travel to the Island; In the first place, because although Cubans suffer deprivations of all kinds, the tourist does not find out about the scarcity; secondly, because, according to him, if no tourists come the situation will get worse.
Among other niceties, the Spaniard assures that the Cuban government is making a great effort so that foreign visitors are not aware of the crisis, and he says it as if it were a tremendous merit. To Paco Nadal and others, who play criticism while doing favors to the regime, we must remind them that the only effort is being made by the Cuban people, although not voluntarily.
The Miguel Díaz-Canel regime has not asked Cubans if they prefer that the few agricultural products and the little meat produced in the country go to the tables of the hotels in exchange for giving dollars, or euros, to a military dictatorship that does not invest a penny in improving the quality of life of the population. No one has asked Cubans if they prefer to invest money in rental cars for tourism, instead of buying ambulances so that there are at least two well-equipped vehicles in each hospital in the country.
Paco Nadal, who is, apparently, an expert on the subject of Cuba, should know that the only way for tourists to help ordinary Cubans is by staying in rented houses, something that the Government tries to avoid, using precisely scarcity and the economic suffocation of the private sector, to monopolize the largest possible number of foreign visitors and that all the hard currency go to their coffers.
The restaurants, paladares and hostels that have managed to survive the pandemic, the shortage, the exodus and the state scourge against entrepreneurs, in many cases belong to Cubans plugged in with the regime; therefore, they represent one more way for currencies to end up in the same place.
Not a few islanders are considering closing their businesses right now because between inflation, blackouts and the fuel crisis, these are generating more losses than benefits. People have no money and private transport is becoming more expensive every day, even for tourists.
Paco Nadal omits, or ignores, that not in all hotels the regime has managed to have what is necessary to mask the crisis. The only thing missing is not the chorizo, and the opinions of visitors who have stayed in four and five star facilities during the month of April attest to this.
The quality of goods and services offered to travelers has declined greatly. Tourists who come to Havana have to wait in long lines to get money from the only ATM that works within a two-kilometer radius or put gas in the rented car.
Paco Nadal only needed to ask his compatriots to be patient and offer their vacation savings well in exchange for what they can get in the Cuba of “there is no”, as if the sacrifice of the Spaniards could modify the misery in which Cubans survive .
The peninsulars know that we gain nothing if they come, so don’t do us a favor, because the dictatorship will not invest a single euro in our fields, hospitals, homes, hydraulic resources, highways or thermoelectric plants. Cubans don’t know – Paco Nadal doesn’t know either – what the money collected by the tourism industry has been spent on. Before 2019, the income generated by this sector was multimillion-dollar, but all of Cuba was in crisis, with severe infrastructure problems.
Communists always blame someone else, or external factors, for the misfortunes they themselves create; but all Cubans know that the Trump administration, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine -that Cuba supports, by the way— they only brought to the fore the ruin accumulated over six decades of poor governance. There is no room for deception; the only thing that works in Cuba is repression and propaganda in the face of international opinion.
If the Spaniards want to come because they feel like it, they are within their rights, but not because a blogger has made them believe that Cuba’s recovery depends on their money. Cuba needs many things, it is true, but above all, freedom and respect for civil rights are urgently needed.
No Spaniard would allow his government to starve him while keeping tourists well fed and ministers fattening like fattening animals; nor that the health system, weakened by years of neglect, collapsed in the middle of the pandemic while a very high percentage of the budget was allocated to the construction of hotels and other infrastructures for the enjoyment of foreigners.
Cuba is in deplorable conditions thanks to a system incapable of renewing itself, and also because of opinion agents like Paco Nadal, who does not recognize the barbarism caused by the Cuban regime, but lends his blog to manage foreign exchange. With friends like him, Cuba’s fate is cast.
OPINION ARTICLE
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