MIAMI, United States. – The Minister of Tourism of Cuba, Juan Carlos García Granda, announced that in the coming months the first hotels built and managed by Russian companies will be inaugurated on the Island. “We are very close to the first hotels built by Russian businessmen appearing in Cuba,” declared the official in an interview with the Russian agency. TASS.
García Granda highlighted that there are projects in the study stage that are close to beginning their implementation, although he avoided offering additional details. “I won’t give them away until they materialize,” he said. In addition, he mentioned the possibility of several existing hotels being transferred under the management of Russian travel companies.
The official stressed that this initiative represents “an important step forward” for the Cuban tourism sector and will allow expanding the possibilities of air communication, a factor that currently limits the arrival of Russian tourists to the largest of the Antilles.
However, the regime’s minister acknowledged that the goal proposed by the Cuban Government of reaching 200,000 Russian tourists in 2024 “will not be achieved.” Although in the first 10 months of the year Russia showed a growth of 24.52% in the number of visitors, the official forecast for tourist arrivals suffered a year-on-year drop of almost 5% at the end of the summer.
In previous statements collected by the Interfax agency in March, García Granda had stated: “The task we have set ourselves is to attract capital from Russian investors to Cuban tourism. “We have been working with the Russian government for two years to identify all the necessary foundations and actions necessary to make such investments a reality.” He also indicated that these are “hotel complexes, network facilities of various categories, with yacht parking and other additions.”
Russian hotels for what?
Last week it emerged that Cuba had received 1,719,145 international travelers between January and September 2024, which represents a decrease of 5.2% compared to the same period of the previous year, according to data published by the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI).
This decline takes the country away from its official goal of reaching 2.7 million visitors in 2024.
The main sending market continues to be Canada, with 695,567 visitors, followed by Russia (141,615), the United States (110,538), Spain (50,498), Mexico (48,112) and Germany (47,324).
Of these six countries, only Russia and Mexico show an increase in the number of tourists, with increases of 12% and 5%, respectively. In contrast, Canada, the United States, Spain and Germany experienced declines ranging between 2% and 17%.
The weakness of the tourism sector, the traditional economic engine of the Island, is fundamentally attributed to the serious economic crisis that the country is going through. “Tourism is fundamental to the Government’s plans, due to its contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) and the inflow of foreign currency it represents,” according to the news agency. EFE.
To reach the proposed goal, Cuba would need to receive a monthly average of almost 273,000 tourists, a figure that was only exceeded in March during the high season. In 2023, the country received 2.4 million international visitors and 1.6 million in 2022. These figures are far from the 4.2 million and 4.6 million tourists who arrived in 2019 and 2018, respectively, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
