Madrid/Mountains of garbage in the corners, blackouts, expensive hotels without enough food, stooping towels, mosquito invasion, beggars, sad streets and people everywhere with a single plan under the arm: to leave Cuba. The island that Marina visited this summer with her family looks very little that she met in 2004.
With that idyllic memory in the mind, he reserved last August a trip that included Havana and Cayo Santa María (Villa Clara), in an agency of his native Andalusian city whose name prefers to keep. The experience, however, was so disastrous, that the group filed a claim to the Turoperator on its return.
To start they were received, at the same José Martí International Airport, for a blackoutsomething she did not expect to have in the same terminal and that was unthinkable twenty years ago. Already in the capital, they were surprised by the waste without picking everywhere. “The stenher that transmits is unbearable,” he tells 14ymedio. “And it’s a focus of diseases, go.”
Palpable hunger also caused him confusion, specifically, the tail of elders, women and children at the doors of El Asturianito
The palpable hunger also caused him to be confusion, specifically, the tail of elders, women and children at the doors of El Asturianito, waiting for the employees of the popular restaurant, located in front of the Capitol, to distribute the leftovers of the clients. “We didn’t see that again, we didn’t see it.”
Marina did not imagine that in two decades, the historic center not only did not improve, but worsened to the limit. Nor that the city was no longer that place where the old Cuban music sprouted in any corner: “Havana was musicians all day playing live everywhere, and now we could only enjoy that in the Floridita and the winery of the medium, and that’s it.” Nor that they barely run into foreign visitors.
“We asked what was happening, why everything was so abandoned and they told us that it is that tourism took the armed forces directly, and since the armed forces manage it, it is deteriorating a lot,” says Marina, without reliably knowing that, in effect, the military The most successful companies from Habaguanexdependent on the historian’s office then directed by Eusebio Leal, and put them under the umbrella of the Business Administration Group (GAESA).
The absence of tourists seemed to Marina even more striking at the National Hotel, where they spent the night, like the first time he visited Cuba, at a time when the natives of the island had these establishments vetoed. The lack of international guests contrasted with the number of inhabitants of Havana “who came to have their cup, listen to music, and also enough that they went to the pool.” What the guides told them is that those specific customers of the hotel “are rather related to the government.”
Not anyone can pay the 6,000 pesos per person (almost 14 dollars to informal change) from the entrance to the pool of the national –4,000 of them for the obligatory consumption – when the average monthly salary does not reach 7,000.
“We felt the weight of the state there, everyone is silent, we tried to talk to people and people were hermetic”
Dollarization is something that also hit Marina, which ensures that the changers approached them inside the same hotel. “People came to us and they told us: if you want to change, I give it to you,” he explains. And that “so much” coincided with the information offered daily The touch. How is it possible that in a state establishment it is offered to buy foreign exchange on the left? Marina explains that she saw the “delicate” panorama: “We felt the weight of the state, everyone is silent, we tried to talk to people and people were airtight.” Of course, he says, it was how 20 years ago.
Very different from how Cubans on the street, which, unlike 2004, do dare to talk about everything. “What was happening in Spain knew in the heart, because everyone wants to come, and they stripped that you can no longer be, that it is fatal.”
“Every two for three you found someone who told you: ‘I am going to Spain and for that date’, or ‘I already have a flight, I go to Huelva, my wife is waiting for me, she has been there for two months and my girl is already in school’, or ‘I have left a crystal job thanks to some friends I have there,” continues Marina, evidencing the exodus that is being given by the Democratic Memory Lawwhich grants Spanish nationality to descendants of emigrants and whose application period expires this month. “They were very overwhelmed because they had to expedite all the documentation, because this ends in October.”
The stories of the people with whom they ran into something that he observed on the round trip to Madrid: “The Cubans were many more than the tourists.”
“We were eating yogurts that were very hot and frozen completely melted”
On the blackouts in Havana, they did not suffer, he indicates, something that the hotel had already assured him: “They told us that their cuts of light were minimal because they had their own generators, which others did not have. In fact, on the second day we saw the NH [el Capri] In the dark totally, it would be nine o’clock at night. I imagine that the people who were there would be affected by that situation. ”
As for the hotel conditions, he says that among the friends of the group they said: “We must see, what we have paid, and this is as if it were a three or four stars, because of course, maintenance is fine, but not how it should be.” They could not think that the worst was yet to come, in Cayo Santa María, where they stayed not in any hotel, but in one that is sold as five stars: Iberostar Selection Ensenachos. “The national is a comparative ultra luxury!”
“We were very surprised by the total abandonment of maintenance,” says Marina. Like a rosary, he lists: “The gardens with green puddles with millions of mosquitoes swarming and peaking the beast, the blue crabs of the mangroves invading everything, taking the complex, some black little birds that seem like small crows [totíes] At the tables taking food … ”
Being a Spanish hotel, the woman denounces, “European standards are not taking place there.” The contrast with the first time that he stayed in that same establishment was flagrant. “So I saw everything quite clean, very, very correct. Now not: now they cover a dish with a piece of film plastic. It does not have regulatory cooling. We were eating yogurts that were hot and freely melted.
“They have no staff. They keep four people who are already bitter and who don’t feel like”
There was not even enough food in the free buffet. “When we arrived and went to the restaurant, they told us: everything is over, what remains are two sausages and two hamburgers.” There were six people in the group. Every day, they saw that there was always the same: hamburger, sausage and chicken; Everything else, some fish. “What happened? The sauces changed, the colors changed, but that was always the same. It was junk food,” he says. “One day I asked for a salad and I think they took the garbage cube salad and put it on the plate, because that was horrible.” The greatest fear of the group was to get sick of gastroenteritis or, worse, dengue.
Marina continues with the dire anecdotes: “Everywhere, a lot of dirt. Towels with holes. In the bathroom, a small jaboncillo, which was not even wrapped. In a five stars!” In a sense, he saw logical what was happening, “because they have no staff. They keep four people who are already bitter and who do not feel like.”
On the second day, they began to consider that they should leave, and to the third, they spoke with their agency in Spain to advance their departure one day. The night they had to pass in teaching according to the contracted package paid her from her pocket in El Nacional, back in Havana. More than 200 euros.
“We have claimed our travel agency that at least they return us the money of the night that we were not in the keys,” he laments. “And we have also told them that what happened to us, what they are doing with tourists, is to scam.” A small agency, continues, cannot be allowed to send people to sites without information. “Why do the tour operators continue to sell travel packages knowing that the light goes, that there is not enough food, that hotel complexes are abandoned?”
Abandoned “like ghost ships”, says, putting as an example the Iberostar Selection Havanawhich occupies the tallest building in the city, the controversial Tower K. “They told us that this was paid with the government of the government, which cost I do not know how many millions of dollars, and that they have given it to Iberostar to manage it. But that seemed from the outside that was closed, we did not see much movement,” says Marina, who expresses: “But I would never enter there in my life, because it is afraid, because it is afraid, it is a horrible place.”
The woman confesses that she had read in the press that things in Cuba were wrong, “but not so, so bad.” The testimony that gives 14ymedioin any case, illustrates in flesh and bone the official figures that, month by month, account for the Mengant Tourism. Between January and August of this year, Cuba received a total of 1,259,972 international visitors, 21.64% less than in the same period of 2024, while in the years of Bonanza, between 2015 and 2019, more than double arrived.
What also illustrates the difficult situation facing Spanish hoteliers on the island, notoriously Meliá and Iberostar, on which he published a hard article last month Five days. For this economic newspaper, these tourist giants, who, despite all forecasts against, “continue to redouble their commitment to follow and grow in Cuba,” a “perfect storm” had exploded in their hands. There is no way to fit the numbers on the island.
Thus, the Barceló Group, also Spanish, awarded this September a trip to Cuba to a total of 400 of its travel agents in Spain and Portugal as a reward for have encouraged sales to the island Since the beginning of the year. A news that Marina’s questions can answer about the practices of the tour operators.
She, despite everything, says she will return. “Because I love it, because nature is a luxury, because that is the future of Cuba,” he explains. “But of course, I will come back when they don’t scam me.”
