Two Floridita and zero tourists. Both the emblematic bar in Havana and its copy in the Varadero resort are without customers to keep company with the bronze statue of Ernest Hemingway leaning on the bar of his favorite place. In front of the first there was only one convertible vehicle and two cocotaxis this Monday, where before there were dozens of buses and a hornet’s nest of Cubans hunting tourists.
On the outskirts of the premises the sun and the absence of the public competed, while the rest of the businesses in the area remained empty or closed. The place, famous for its daiquirís, tries to return to its old glory years, with little success.
In the historic center of the capital this morning it was also possible to walk several blocks without encountering tourists on the way. Some private businesses in the Plaza Vieja remained with their empty tables under the sun, their employees promoted their premises, but only Cubans passed by or some other countryman who, due to their dress and physical appearance, can confuse those who promote on the street.
“I’m Cuban, you’re not going to earn much today with me,” a man told a promoter who showed him a restaurant menu offering “good prices.” “If I sit here eating with the money to bring food home, my wife kills me.”
In the historic center of the capital this morning you could also walk several blocks without encountering tourists on the way
Cuba, which reopened its borders in the middle of last November after the closure forced by the pandemic, has a priority sector in tourism. This is its second largest item of gross domestic product (GDP) and its third largest source of foreign currency, behind the sale of medical services and remittances.
The state tourism sector expects to end this year with 84,906 rooms. And despite coronavirus restrictions, a lack of tourists and a shortage of construction supplies throughout the country, the Grupo de Administración Empresarial SA (Gaesa), the conglomerate of the military, has not stopped its huge projects.
One of them is the one that is being built at 25 and K, in El Vedado, a luxury hotel that is projected as “the tallest of its kind in Havana” and that aims to reach 42 floors and 154 meters in height. .
The Government, which has not modified its plans due to the impact of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia, continues to aspire to the 2.5 million tourists it had planned for 2022, just over half of those who arrived in 2019 Since then tourism has been unable to recover even relatively. The Dominican Republic, which reopened just a month before Cuba, has already returned to even slightly higher data than it had before covid-19.
The agony is such that Varadero experiences a previously inexplicable emptiness. Foreigners do not arrive, Cubans have no money and establishments are not supplied.
This explains why even the Floridita habanero wasteland is little compared to the desert of clients that can be seen in its twin in Varadero, the peninsula that until recently monopolized a good part of the island’s visitors and lately barely survived with the arrival of Russian tourists, already missing because of the war in Ukraine.
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