FLORENCE E. BABB
University of Florida, USA
In Cuba over the past two decades, diverse and apparently contradictory
aspects of tourism have emerged along with state-led development and
market-driven initiatives. This ethnographic account examines the com-
plex ways in which Cubans and international visitors experience tourism
as an economic and cultural force. Despite the unintended consequences
of tourism, which has produced growing social inequality and illicit trade,
tourism has met surprising success in appealing to desires for both pre-
revolutionary pleasures and enduring revolutionary culture and politics.
Keywords: Cuba, globalisation, nationhood, nostalgia, revolution, tourism.
In Havana’s Museum of the Revolution, housed in a former presidential palace, a
section is devoted to the ‘Special Period in Peacetime’, a time of economic crisis in Cuba
after the fall of the Soviet Union. A display case in this space quotes Fidel Castro in the
early 1990s as he set forth three areas of development intended to resolve the state’s
economic problems:
[Our] development efforts during the Special Period are based on three
pillars: the food programme, which has to be among the first priorities [ . . . ]
the tourism programme, which is developing well [ . . . ] the biotechnology
programme [ . . . ]
Following this quotation are several images – cruise ship, hotel and dancing girls – that
appear to underscore the primary importance of the tourism component of Cuba’s devel-
opment plan. Indeed, since the tourism programme was introduced in 1991, tourism
has become a leading industry in Cuba and the state has become a key competitor in
Caribbean tourism (Espino, 2000: 360). Despite a slight decline in 2006 and 2007, the
number of foreign visitors to the island rose to 2.35 million in 2008 ( USA Today, 13
January 2009).
The return of tourism to this Caribbean island where it famously thrived as a tropical
destination before the revolution has brought about a series of cataclysmic changes in
Cuban society (Schwartz, 1997; Pérez, 1999). It has become de rigueur to describe the
clash of socialist and market economies and desires on the island fostered by the growth
of tourism, and to ask whether tourism will bolster the enduring socialist economy
or destabilise it and bring a full-fledged capitalist economy in its wake. Likewise, it is
© 2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2010 Society for Latin American Studies.
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Che, Chevys, and Hemingway’s Daiquiris
commonplace to ask if tourism can help build a democratic and open society or whether
social conflict resulting from a two-tiered society divided into those with access to
tourist dollars and those without will carry the day (Ch ávez, 2005; Sanchez and Adams,
2008). I want to suggest that we may view tourism as both ‘saving the revolution’
from collapse and as a catalyst for further social and political change – as well as for
engagement with the global market economy, in what has been called Cuba’s ‘hybrid
transition’ (Colantonio and Potter, 2006: 4–8).
Like others who have observed tourism’s growth during the past two decades, I have
noted the ambivalence of many Cubans in response to the surge in the island’s tourism,
which has brought both economic recovery and social divisions (Martin de Holan and
Phillips, 1997; Espino, 2000). At the same time, I have observed the fairly congenial way
that diverse tourism niches have developed and offered relief to the suffering political
economy. Thus, while my work agrees to some extent with analyses that emphasise
the tensions and contradictions in Cuban tourism, I depart from others by arguing
that just as Cuba has moved toward a more mixed economy that allows for increased
collaboration with capitalist states along with continued centralised state control, the
tourism sector has benefited from a similar development strategy. There is a decided
economic and cultural advantage to state and society in allowing pre-revolutionary
capitalist attractions to coexist with socialist revolutionary ones, even as social and
economic disparities become more apparent.
My interest lies in examining how Cuba presents this diverse tourism package and
makes ambivalent desires for pre-revolutionary and revolutionary times into a mar-
ketable commodity. Drawing on work coming out of anthropology and tourism studies,
I call for attention to what I have termed ‘the tourism encounter’ between travellers seek-
ing ‘exotic’ new destinations and countries seeking to market their cultural and national
heritage effectively to this clientele (see Rojek and Urry, 1997; MacCannell, 1999 [1976];
Hanna and Del Casino, 2003; Bruner, 2005). I should be clear that the desires I refer to
are expressed in different ways by Cubans on and off the island and by travellers making
their way to Cuba – they manifest as desires for the familiar or unfamiliar landscape, peo-
ple, music, food, and so on. Nostalgia for the way things were before as well as after the
revolution (and even, perhaps, after an awaited ‘transition’ in the future) has been a stock
in trade in Cuba, and this represents the biggest calling card for tourism development.
While nostalgia for the distant past would seem to be anathema to the revolutionary
project, the government nonetheless participates in re-imagining Cuba’s history in such a
way that the ‘bourgeois’ pre-revolutionary period may be viewed as the logical precursor
to the triumph of the revolution (on related Russian nostalgia in the post-Communist
era, see Boym, 2001). Thus, there is less contradiction than first meets the eye in offer-
ing up Hemingway bars, Tropicana nightclub showgirls, and Buena Vista Social Club
music along with revolutionary monuments for tourist consumption in present-day
Cuba.
During five research trips to Cuba between 1993 and 2009, I focused on the cultural
politics of tourism as part of a broader comparative project in the Latin American region.
In Nicaragua, I had observed the apparent erasure of the Sandinista revolution and, later,
the traces that still made an appearance on the developing tourism market (Babb, 2004).
I judged that it would be instructive to examine similar questions in Cuba, where the
revolution has held sway for half a century, albeit with some opening up of the market
to local entrepreneurs and foreign investors. Staying in Old Havana or nearby Vedado,
popular areas for tourists, I also travelled outside the capital to such tourist destinations
as Varadero Beach, the model eco-community of Las Terrazas west of Havana, the
© 2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2010 Society for Latin American Studies
Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 1
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Florence E. Babb
Vi ˜nales valley in Pinar del Río, and the cities of Santa Clara and Trinidad. I took city
tours and day tours outside Havana for a first-hand view of what guides emphasise and
what tourists take away with them. When possible, I gave questionnaires to tourists to
fill out on the spot with information on their expectations, experiences, and reasons for
travel to Cuba, collecting a total of more than 75 from international visitors. In addition,
I interviewed tour operators in their off-hours and occasionally recorded them during
tours.
After a consideration of diverse forms of tourism and their success in today’s
Cuba, I show that there are nonetheless social costs that are experienced differentially
among the population. I go on to argue that the paradoxes and pleasures of pre-
revolutionary capitalist-identified tourism in one of the last bastions of socialism are
precisely what make Cuba a desired travel destination. With Havana as my principal
site for ethnographic research, I describe the packaged ‘City Tour’ as a microcosm of
how the capital presents itself to visitors, as an amalgam of colonial architecture and
traditional life; pre-revolutionary extravagance and nightlife; and socialist modernity
and revolutionary culture. In the concluding section, I show how these elements come
together to offer up a city and a state that is ready for foreign consumption. As José
Quiroga (2005: 103) so aptly describes, ‘what needed to be saved from the period
before the revolution’ is memorialised and then put up for sale on the global capitalist
market.