Word: tourism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Concepcion Portela could not agree less. Maybe it is generational: she is 61. "I am a Marxist," she says. After years in a government ministry, she runs a private business advising foreign investors on joint ventures in tourism, biotechnology, construction. Her job -- which she considers temporary, until "we work our way out of this situation" -- is not to change the system but to preserve it by bringing capital into the country. Cuba, she insists, will never denationalize, never privatize: "I distribute what I produce to others...
...town plaza, has loosened his tongue. For 30 years his life was good, he says, until dollars were allowed. "I worked, I earned my pay, my family could live just like my neighbors." But he has no family in the U.S. to send money, no relatives working in tourism to collect tips. "Some people can have dollars; I only earn pesos," says Alberto. "The people with dollars can buy a pair of shoes, and I cannot. Why should my neighbor have more than...
...many other Cubans, tourism is a pact with the devil. They remember how they felt exploited by rich foreigners before 1959. At the Tuxpan disco, the only Cubans allowed in are pubescent girls dressed in scanty Lycra minis who have bartered their company to rum-swilling tourists for a meal. It makes Julio Gonzalez angry even as he takes their money...
Varadero Beach, where rich gringos used to cavort in the days of the Batista dictatorship, is once again a clean, green ghetto for foreigners. Tourism is supposed to be the country's short-term salvation, but it also accentuates the difference between those with dollars and those without. Everyone wants to work at Varadero: hotel maids earn more in tips than peso-poor engineers; teachers and Angola veterans drive cabs; and psychologists make plane reservations. The expertise of the Cubans who work for Eamonn Donnelly, the Irish manager of two German-owned hotels, runs from agronomy to piloting MiG fighters...
...Tourism is a sort of chemotherapy," says historian Juan Antonio Blanco, director of a new private think tank. "You have cancer and it's the only possible cure, but it might kill you before the cancer does." The inequality, the privileges derived from separating the foreigner from his dollar, he says, "could prove more socially disruptive than the bad shape of the economy...