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FROM
CUBA
No hotel for Cubans in provincial capital
PINAR DEL RIO, Cuba - January 16 (Rafael
Ferro Salas, Abdala Press / www.cubanet.org)
- There are no hotel rooms for Cubans in
the provincial capital of Pinar del Río,
a city of 200,000; travelers and those looking
for a place to have an intimate tryst must
find other solutions since the three hotels
open to Cubans were diverted to other uses.
"If you need a hotel... even for one
night, your only option is the bushes in
the outskirts of the city," said one
young man accompanied by his girlfriend.
Young people feel doubly left out, since
the existing hotels had modest discotheques
where they could get together. Now, they
say, they have even fewer entertainment
options.
The three hotels that used to allow Cubans
to enter, El Globo, Italia, and La Marina,
have been reassigned to other uses. Italia
and La Marina now house people who lost
their houses to one of the recent hurricanes,
and El Globo has been taken over by "social
workers," in reality young people from
outside the province who are auditing government
enterprises for fiscal irregularities, as
part of the government's effort to eradicate
administrative corruption.
There are other hotels in the city, but
their rooms must be paid for in dollars,
and Cubans are denied access to them no
matter what currency they may be willing
to pay in.
Versión
original en español
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