MIAMI, United States. – The Cuban government revised and lowered by 16% its estimate of tourist arrivals to the Island in 2024, which marks a decrease of half a million (the statistic dropped from 3.2 million tourists to 2.7 million), according to data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) (state).
Cuba received a total of 1,680,485 visitors during the first half of 2024, according to official figures from ONEI. Although this number represents an increase of 101.1% compared to the previous year, it barely reflects an increase of 0.9% compared to the same period in 2023.
Despite expectations of recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic, the Island is still far from reaching the figures of 2019, when more than 4 million tourists arrived on the Island. In contrast, tourist destinations such as Punta Cana (Dominican Republic) and Cancun (Mexico) have managed to exceed their pre-pandemic levels.
Canada It remains the main source market, although its visitors decreased slightly from 583,027 in 2023 to 577,549 in 2024. The arrival of Cubans living abroad also fell from 176,349 to 155,320. In contrast, Russia showed a significant increase of 166.7%, going from 67,612 tourists in 2023 to 112,721 in 2024. Other markets, such as the United States, Mexico and Argentina, also showed growth, while traditional European issuers such as Germany, France, Spain and Italy registered declines.
With the figures of travelers who have arrived in Cuba in the first six months of the year becoming known, economist Pedro Monreal considered that “halfway through the year, the official data on visitors received do not seem to be promising, with a dynamic very similar to that of the same period in 2023 and very far from the data of the last normal years (2017-2019)”.
Last JuneCuban authorities had announced the arrival of 1.8 million tourists in the first six months of 2024. However, Monreal refuted this figure, arguing that, to reach that number, 625,112 visitors would have had to have arrived in June, something that was highly unlikely given that the maximum number of visitors in a month of June in recent years was 342,195 in 2018.
Monreal had already concluded in May that the figures provided by the Cuban government were “incongruent” and did not reflect a true recovery of the tourism sector in the country.
