Havana Cuba. – I do not say it, I only return and attest to what he said in other words, the Cuban prime minister about the absence of nightlife in Varadero, and I extend it to all corners of the island: we are an extremely boring country where it is difficult, rather impossible, to access some type of healthy entertainment .
If Varadero, the flagship resort of Cuban tourism, is a destination lacking in benefits, it is obvious that all that remains to be seen from Pinar del Río to Guantánamo is the same dense block of boredom where, beyond the sun and the sea, the greatest satisfaction comes from keeping ourselves safe under the air conditioning of the car or the hotel room.
And it is true that Varadero dies as soon as the sun sets, despite the Casa de la Música (the only one in the entire peninsula) and that couple of nightclubs that we Cubans know that people go to for anything else except dance and get drunk, but in recent months, with the absence of tourists, it is not even a place to go for a beer because, simply, there is none. You can’t even drink water, neither from the tap nor bottled.
In Cuba it is no longer a matter of having or not having a certain amount of money or having access to some type of foreign currency, not even enjoying certain privileges reserved for foreigners and military personnel, but that there are not enough recreational options for someone can enjoy something more than sun and beach (or sun and pool), which are the only “products” available and without too many regulations (for the moment), in this peculiar “leisure market” where even lemonade is scarce, that supposedly It is the basis of everything”.
And the essence of such boredom is, without a doubt, in the selfishness (which has a great component of terror for losing total control) of not letting private enterprises take care of an issue where the so-called “socialist state company” has only demonstrated, for years, that it is not capable of offering anything good and lasting, anything genuine, even something that does not end up becoming a core of corruption, theft, diversion of resources to the black market where, without a doubt, it hides its great source of wealth more than one “director” or “cadre” of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). Otherwise too much “persistence in error” is not explained.
No recreation company in the hands of the State offers a service worthy of being called “recreation”. They are all a bottomless hole where the first thing that disappears is not the “offers” and “capital” that should give a sense of profitability to the business, but the quality of customer service, which “normally” lives an “experience of abuse” . So much so that the terms “state” and “national” always connote something lousy or “low cost,” and when not, then “ephemeral” because nothing “state” is good for long.
Thus, the Tropicana and Parisién cabarets, the Coppelia ice cream parlor and even the Lenin Park have known more about the bad times than about the abductions —very brief— of relative splendor. And I say relative because it is a “splendor” that can only be appreciated within the generality of a disaster, of chaos, if not of that fleeting media enthusiasm that accompanies any rehabilitated or reopened work “in salute” to this or that anniversary.
With regard to tourism, the regime has wanted so much to monopolize everything for itself, leaving no room for the indispensable private initiative, that even that “tropical cliché” of drinking a humble coconut water on the shore of the beach in Cuba is a rarity, despite the fact that the coconut trees are there, full of green and ripe fruits, as well as the people willing to harvest them with their own hands, with the idea of selling them to bathers, but thousands of obstacles, bureaucratic and political stubbornness, prevent even that something as simple as knocking down a coconut to trade its water is a feasible and achievable business; something that does not depend at all on the United States embargo but on the evident internal blockade that the communist regime uses as a method of control.
And this is just the simplest example of why everything tends to be so boring and absurd in a country that, if well governed (and the market and productive forces freed), would have all the potential to recover what made it one of the funniest squares on the planet, with the most spectacular nights and the most cosmopolitan neighborhoods and shops, despite the fact that 60 years ago we barely had less than a dozen of the hotels that today are being built by the hundreds, albeit to remain practically uninhabited.
The communists want foreign tourists to come to Cuba by the millions, but in reality, what is “peculiar” to offer them that they don’t find more and better in Cancun, Miami or Punta Cana?
The regime speaks of “citizen tranquility” and “political stability” but we know that in addition to being two elements of pure artifice, which are sustained under a large dose of repression -and therefore exude an annoying level of tension that the visitor ends up to warn and even suffer in their own skin—they are not decisive insofar as the levels of violence in Cancun or the Dominican Republic, for example, have not had a significant impact on the flow of foreign visitors or diverted them towards our supposed “stable” market. and “quiet”.
Actually, as a Caribbean destination, we are exhibiting the worst results in the region, despite the strategies of cheapening the Cuban product to almost zero profit levels.
So that “quiet” and “stable”, in addition to a useless myth, which cracks every second, is rather a “sweetened” translation of “boring tourist destination to kill yourself” in which it only repeats that type of clientele that no tour operator wants because it is made up of retired workers whose pensions are not enough to vacation in other more expensive destinations, elderly couples who take advantage of travel plans, people who are not willing to leave a penny more than what they invested in the package all inclusivein short, the low-cost tourist who, when the musician walks his hat around the tables, pretends to be asleep.
And to attend to that “discard” tourist, in the midst of this migratory wave, which tends to become the greatest of all time, there is still only that precarious service staff left, diminished by the pandemic, by layoffs, by the refusal to return to the job where there are no longer tips or salary incentives.
There is talk of hotels that today would be operating with less than 50 percent of the necessary staff, and the same is experiencing an unprecedented labor exodus, in a sector where the clandestine traffic of vacancies even became commonplace.
The best-trained professionals in the industry could be emigrating right now to wherever they are hired, outside of Cuba, even in lower-level jobs. Personally, I have heard of excellent chefs who have accepted positions as kitchen assistants in the Dominican Republic and Cancun, of tourist entertainers who have definitely left to do their job where they are not forced, as an extra, to offer sexual services. or to depend exclusively on tips to survive.
So soon the problem will not be reduced to the fact that tourists do not arrive in the expected quantity, but rather that the regime will not have quality personnel to attend to the few who risk spending a few days in this great “theme park” of boredom. .
With a perpetual shortage of supplies that complicates existence, a gastronomy that is not very varied, nothing surprising, with hyperinflation, with a schizoid monetary policy, without real shopping centers, without cheap and reliable public transport or roads in good condition, with apartheid between “offers for Cubans” and “promos for foreigners”, in short, without entertainment and services in all the variety necessary to be such, one would have to be extremely bored, oblivious to other travel experiences around the world, to find true pleasure in walk thirsty through broken and dirty streets, under stinking buildings about to collapse, among poorly dressed people, exhausted by hunger and heat, among empty slogans and signs that “there is no”, “it’s over”, ” do not disturb”, “danger”, “collapse”, “national currency is not accepted”, “long live the CDRs”.
OPINION ARTICLE
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