In Tuesday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh praises a CBC News (!!!) article on the massive impact of purely Canadian tourist income on Cuba:
A billboard in Havana, showing Camilo Cienfuegos, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Fidel Castro, 4 November 2014.
Photo attributed to Tumpatemcla~commonswiki via Wikimedia Commons.
NP Platformed returns today with that rarest of things in the National Post: an absolutely unironic recommendation to read a CBC News report. The article in question comes from Evan Dyer, and it’s headlined: “How Canadian Tourism Sustains Cuba’s Army And One-Party State“. And it is, we have to confess, a masterpiece of precision. We appreciate the small, uncomfortable barb, for example, concealed in this phrase: “in normal years far more Canadians enter and leave Cuba than citizens of any other country — including Cuba itself.”
Why is Canada a quintessential source of the tourism dollars that flow directly to the Cuban army, or in some cases to partnerships between foreign hospitality providers (like Toronto’s Sunwing Travel Group) and the Cuban army? Last month the world was reminded by Cuban protesters how fragile and miserable the communist island’s economy really is. As people stormed into the streets pleading for food and medicine, sympathizers abroad continued to sing from their moth-eaten hymnal and blame America’s long-standing trade embargo (which allows even American citizens and companies to sell, wait for it, food and medicine to Cuba).
And yet, within Canada, there is no sign of any social stigma attaching to Cuban travel. Perhaps it’s because Latin America is one huge undifferentiated wad in our minds, and if we began to get fussy about the governments of various Caribbean countries (most of which let people leave if they like), we might be forced to … we dunno, winter in Costa Rica or Bermuda or someplace weird like that. Cuba can’t find the cash to keep a fresh coat of paint on a hospital, but the empire of affordable resorts and jineterismo continues to expand. Some of you helped build it.
There is nothing new about this — except the obvious willingness of ordinary Cubans to risk wounds and death to protest against their communist rulers, as Michael Totten reported more than seven years ago:
Cubans in the hotel industry see how foreigners live. The government can’t hide it without shutting the hotels down entirely, and it can’t do that because it needs the money. I changed a few hundred American dollars into convertible pesos at the front desk. The woman at the counter didn’t blink when I handed over my cash — she does this all day — but when she first got the job, it must have been shattering to make such an exchange. That’s why the regime wants to keep foreigners and locals apart.
Tourists tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the additional money, so they’re “rich” compared with everyone else. In fact, they’re an elite class enjoying privileges — enough income to afford a cell phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a while — that ordinary Cubans can’t even dream of. I asked a few people how much chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are. Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they’ll bring in $600 a month — 30 times what everyone else gets. “All animals are equal,” George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, “but some animals are more equal than others.” Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba.
