Cuba aspires to receive in 2023 nearly three million visitors, after increasing arrivals this year by 250% compared to 2021, and despite “the obstacles that the United States puts up,” which right now restricts entry to its territory to people who have been in Cuba, according to what the Minister of Cuba recalled on Tuesday. Cuban tourism, Juan Carlos García Granda.
García Granda attended the media during a visit to the world fair of sightseeing World Travel Market, which is held until Wednesday in London with the presence of some 2,500 exhibitors from more than a hundred countries, according to the Spanish agency Eph.
The Minister of Tourism Juan Carlos García Granda participates with a Cuban delegation in the World Travel Market, one of the most important tourist travel fairs in the world.
The sight is set on the recovery of British and European tourism.#UniqueCuba #CubaTravel pic.twitter.com/TTJcY4CsuV– Ministry of Tourism (@MinturCuba) November 7, 2022
The minister, quoted by this source, said that his priority is “rescue the largest number of visitors” after the pandemic, for which the country has prepared by controlling COVID with its own vaccines and the entire population immunized, he explains.
So far this year, the Island has received 1.2 million visitors and could reach 1.7 million by the end of the year, compared to 4.5 before the health crisis and below the 2.5 projected.
“It is not everything that we would have wanted, but the restrictions that had to be maintained on the arrival of countries until April did not allow sufficient confidence in the issuing markets,” lamented García, who anticipated, however, that these months of “November and December will be good”.
“We are being attractive, the tour operation sees demand, despite the fact that the blockade exerted by the United States against Cuba and the effort they make to hinder its economic development makes them constantly think about measures to affect the arrival of visitors to the Island,” He said: “For example, now they are conditioning that any citizen who visits Cuba does not have the right to enter the United States with the electronic tourist visa, but must go to the American consulate or embassy to obtain another one.”
about the crisis in the electricity generation what the Cuban population looks like today through prolonged blackouts, García assured that his government “works very hard” to solve it, and warned “they do not harm tourism”, because “the private sector is prepared”.
“The private and state network that is dedicated to tourist activity is preparing for energy contingency situations with emergency generator sets or photovoltaic cells, because we also have environmental objectives,” he assured.
García, according to this report, argued that his mission is to attract more visitors precisely in order to generate income that “contributes to economic reactivation.” “Tourism serves to reactivate thermoelectric plants, to buy more food, to give raw materials to producers, to give more well-being and quality of life to the people in general. They already know that Cuba is a socialist state, that it has a lot of social justice, like free public health and education, and that has a cost,” he said.
Asked by the journalists, García highly valued the commitment to the Island of the Spanish hotel chains, such as Iberostar, Barceló or Meliá. “We have been blocked for 60 years. The hotel chains are really very brave, they demonstrate their independence, their values as human beings and above all, in addition to setting up a business, they do so with the honesty of not accepting the pressures that are probably exerted on them from the United States, pressures that go to the family environment, since they are also prohibited from visiting that country,” he declared.
Cuban government recognizes that it will not reach the number of tourists planned for 2022
García Granda maintained that Cuba’s main attraction continues to be its people.
“That town that you tell me has even blackouts, that does not lose its smile, that does not lose its solidarity, that town that shares what it has, not what is left over. Cuba’s next campaign is called ‘Cuba, unique’, and it is dedicated both to simple, everyday people, and to the great personalities of culture,” he stated, according to the source.
Efe/OnCuba.
