The brisk tourist stream into Viñales is proof that talk in the US of opening up “isolated” Cuba is a myopic view: It has long been “open” to most of the rest of the world. Three million tourists come to Cuba each year. It’s a popular spot for Canadians and Western Europeans.
And there are plenty of visitors from the US, as well. As I passed through Havana’s José Martí International Airport, the flight board showed nine direct flights arriving from Tampa, Miami, and New York that day. They were filled by groups on “educational” or “cultural” tours, or who qualify for one of the other 12 exceptions to the embargo.
If you don’t like tour groups, it is easy to fly through a third country. I paid $20 at the airport in Grand Cayman for a Cuban visa. I came and went with no questions asked, either by Cuban authorities or American customs officials, who barely glanced at the Cuban stamps in my passport.
But the US is a huge neighbor, just 90 miles away, and when the last flimsy restrictions are dropped from traveling here, the Cuban government expects 10 million visitors could come. Carnival and Haimark cruise lines are vying to be the first to serve Havana; the old ferry terminal is being fixed up to accommodate the big cruise ships. At a warehouse near the terminal, Cuban artists have filled their stalls with bold paintings, T-shirts, and cheap trinkets, awaiting the arrivals.
There already is a boomlet of visitors who want to come before the doors are thrown open to the US.
“I wanted to be witness to the last traces of communism. It’s like an open-air museum here,” says Matthieu Ducret, a Swiss telephone engineer, at an isolated beach destination called María la Gorda on the western tip of Cuba. “I wanted to come before there are too many Americans, before they are selling Coke and there are McDonald’s all over the place.”
Indeed, the sense of a society preserved in amber that helps draw tourists may be endangered by that very influx. Some of the peeling old buildings that give Havana its sepia feel are being fixed up. And “once the Americans come, in five years all the old cars will be bought up,” sniffs a German businessman on vacation with his family. Even the island’s natural attractions could be threatened.
“One of the side effects of the last 50 years is we have kept [the marine areas] wild,” says Ivan Rodriguez Mauri, a Havana-based dive master, as he puttered about in a shop lined with scuba tanks and wet suits. “Everybody knows there will be an impact. If you put up a new cottage on the beach, how can the turtles come up to lay their eggs?”
The government has suggested it will move slowly and deliberately. President Raúl Castro has so far played down the consequences of the thaw in US relations. And Cuban officials say they will keep strict rein on the pace of change. (It is illegal, for example, to export one of the iconic old cars from Cuba. They are considered national treasures.)
But change is hard to control. For some years, the Internet has been available only to a select group of professionals, and then only through a slow-speed dial-up service.
Faced with pent-up demand, the government in July offered Internet at 35 Wi-Fi hot spots, available with an access card for about $2 per hour. The price would seem prohibitive here, but the cards quickly sold out at many places.
On 23rd Street in Havana, where the phone company broadcasts a Wi-Fi signal over about four blocks, Cubans young and old gather every day, huddled over their cellphones and computers to access the Web.
Some are making Internet calls to overseas family members for the first time. Others are absorbed in Facebook. Still others are surfing the Web, peeking at the outside world and seeing, perhaps, what awaits the Cuba of the future.
Article Appeared @http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2015/1004/Cubans-brace-for-the-American-invasion