MIAMI, United States. – This Thursday, Gaviota Tourism Group S.A. announced that it would reopen dozens of its hotels throughout the country this coming November 15, the date the authorities agreed on for reopening the tourism sector in the island.
It involves 11 hotels in Havana, six in Varadero, 11 in the Santa Clara Keys, six in the Jardines del Rey archipelago, and five in Holguín. Likewise, Gaviota’s facilities in Topes de Collantes, Santiago de Cuba and Baracoa will be opened, according to a release published on the Group’s web page.
In a video released on social media by Gaviota, Carlos M. Latuff Carmenate, the Group’s Executive President, stated that, starting on November 15, all the tourism circuits in the country would be reactivated, as well as the excursions, car and motorcycle rentals, all within the health and sanitary protocols put forth by the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP).
According to Carmenate, projections for the reopening of tourism in the island “have progressed hand in hand with the development of a wide-reaching process of vaccination against COVID-19 with the domestic vaccines Abdala, Soberana 2 and Soberana Plus, which will be completed at every destination, company and dependent entity of Gaviota Tourism Group in the first two weeks of November, by which times it is predicted that more than 90% of the country’s population will have been fully vaccinated.”
Although the regime chose November 15 as the day when the tourism sector would reopen, news of the arrival in the country of several airlines –especially Canadian ones- show that numerous tourist facilities opened earlier than the designated date.
There was news this week that Canadian airline Sunwing had resumed operations between the cities of Montreal and Toronto, and Varadero, the principal tourism pole of sun and beaches in Cuba, more than one month prior to the official date.
Likewise, on Friday, October 1, Holguín province reopened to international tourism with the arrival of a Canadian Air Transat Airline Airbus 321. Transat resumed commercial operations to Cuba, according to the digital newspaper Ahora.
With the resumption of tourism, the Cuban regime seeks to recuperate the economy, which was heavily hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Before March 2020, when the first COVID-19 cases were detected in the island, tourism represented the second official source of hard-currency revenue, second only to the income from export of medical services to foreign countries, which has been described by international entities as a “form of modern slavery.”
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