By Pascal Fletcher in Caibarién, Cuba. Published: May 17 2000 01:29GMT. Financial Times. FT.com
Behind a rope slung across a freshly tarmacked road that disappears ahead into a shimmering horizon of azure sky and sea, two bored Cuban policemen in faded blue uniforms lounge at what looks like a crude frontier post.
But this checkpoint marks no national border. It leads instead to one of the new frontiers of Cuba's blossoming tourism industry, which is driving the recovery of the communist-ruled island's recession-hit economy.
Causeways built across the sea into the labyrinth of keys and islets that ring the Caribbean island's northern coast have opened up an unspoilt world of virgin beaches, coral reefs and mangrove forests to be developed by Cuban tourism companies and foreign investment partners.
"Our strategic idea is to create an exclusive product . . . out of the virgin keys of the north coast," Eduardo Rodríguez de la Vega, deputy tourism minister, told a tourism conference in Havana last week.
The cluster of coral-rimmed, mangrove-covered islets off Cuba's central Villa Clara province is still in the early stages of development.
A 44km road causeway links Caibarién port to Cayo Santa María, where the first 300 rooms of a planned 1,600-room hotel complex are being built.
Owned by Gaviota, the tourism company of Cuba's powerful armed forces, the Cayo Santa María resort will be run by the Spanish hotel chain Tryp, which already manages a 972-room complex on the neigbouring, much larger Cayo Coco islet, north of Ciego de Avila province.
Both Cayo Santa María and Cayo Coco form part of the Jardines del Rey (Kings' Gardens) archipelago, which is top of the list of locations being extensively developed and promoted by Cuba's tourism ministry as part of its ambitious plans to attract 2m foreign visitors this year. The
ministry sees this figure climbing to between 5m and 7m by 2010, not including US tourists, who are barred from visiting Cuba by a 38- year-old US economic embargo. If US travel restrictions were lifted, Cuban officials predict total visitors in 2010 could reach 12m.
To accommodate them, officials estimate the island would need 185,500 hotel rooms, nearly six times the end-1999 capacity of 32,260. The ministry calculates this would require overall investment of more than $22bn and is looking for foreign capital to help achieve this.
Since Cuba's tourism sector was opened to foreign investment and management after 1989, international hotel chains such as Spain's Sol Meliá, France's Accor and SuperClubs and Sandals of Jamaica have expanded into the island and now run 50 of the existing 189 hotels, administering 15,390
rooms.
In addition, 24 hotel joint ventures involving capital of about $900m have been established to develop 13,320 rooms, 3,700 already in operation.
"The northern keys are a priority," said Juan José Vega, president of Cuba's largest state tourism corporation, Cubanacan, which owns the three existing hotels on Cayo Coco. Besides Tryp, Sol Meliá and Iberostar of Spain and Italy's Ventaglio are also managing hotels on
Cayo Coco or on neighbouring Cayo Guillermo to the west.
On Cayo Coco, Canadian real estate group TMS is building a $50m resort to be opened next season in a joint venture with Cubanacan. Quebec-based TMS is also carrying out a feasibility study for the development of an entire adjacent key to the east, Paredón Grande.
The tourism boom in the keys includes new transport infrastructure. Spain's airports' authority (AENA) will help to run a new international airport being built on Cayo Coco. Another separate key near Cayo Santa María already has a completed tarmac landing strip and this will be upgraded
to an international airport by 2002.
Tourism brought Cuba gross revenues of $1.9bn in 1999, putting it well ahead of traditional sugar and nickel exports as the single biggest hard currency earner. But foreign experts say the island must present the right mixture of product and prices to maintain high growth and income in the
highly competitive Caribbean region.
"I hope they will develop smarter and smaller hotels of a high standard to attract the premium market," said Toby Brocklehurst, a UK tour operator specialising in Cuba.
The number of foreign visitors to Cuba has grown by an impressive 19 per cent a year over the past decade. But arrivals in 1999 were below expectations at 1.6m, partly because of fears over the Millennium Bug. Results remained sluggish in the first two months of this year but are now reported to
be improving again.
Mr Brocklehurst urged Cuba to improve hotel food and accommodation and to eliminate irritants such as long delays and intimidating searches at airport customs. "The only way to get prices up is to improve the product," he said. |