Cuba courts tourists, even Americans

Brian Hicks/Staff
The Post and Courier

On Plaza Vieja, one of the squares in Old Habana, several buildings are undergoing renovations and several already have been rehabilitated. Some see this work as sprucing up the city in preparation for a coming tourism boom.

Brian Hicks/Staff
The Post and Courier

Old Habana at twilight, as seen from the top of the Morro Castle Lighthouse. The city is a top tourism spot for Canadians and Europeans, as well as a number of U.S. citizens who sneak in every year.

HAVANA — Hemingway leans against the bar at El Floridita, a grin on his face, perpetually awaiting another daiquiri.

Every day and every night, the tourists line up to pose with the life-size sculpture, some pretending they are deep in conversation with the old man of the sea, others mimicking his stance in front of a stool that no one can sit on.

After a while, the bartender points out the painfully obvious: Sitting next to the barstool forever reserved for Papa is "the worst seat in the place."

Amid the Europeans and Canadians parading through, a woman who speaks English saunters up to Hemingway and smiles as a flash goes off. You ask if she is

American, and she says "California."

You ask if she is visiting Cuba legally, she gives a sly grin and hurries out of the bar.

"No mas," she says in a very laid back, if incorrect, Spanish.

That is the lure of Cuba. America's romantic notions of the Caribbean and our own post-war glory days are so tied to this island that thousands of U.S. citizens break federal law each year just to see it, touch it or, for a minute, feel like they have stepped back into simpler times.

Back in the days when a Cuban named Desi Arnaz and his red-headed wife ruled the airwaves, this island was the most popular vacation destination for Americans. What began as a cruise-ship stopover during Prohibition became a land of cabarets and casinos, an American Mafia-run precursor to Las Vegas. Hemingway added the literary cachet.

When the United States established an embargo in 1961, barring travel to Cuba for all but journalists and a select few others, the island's top industry tanked. By 1970, fewer than 1,000 tourists were visiting here annually.

But today the run-down buildings of Old Habana are slowly being refurbished, as if in expectation of a new tourism boom. Right now 1.7 million Europeans and Canadians visit the island annually, but if the embargo ends that number will at least double.

On Plaza Vieja, the buildings are covered in scaffolding as workers paint the coral blocks of century-old buildings. On the square, a super-pricey Paul & Shark clothing store has opened in an immaculate storefront. If $185 polo shirts aren't for tourists, locals ask, who are they for?

"The only people here who can afford those clothes," jokes Nelson Ramos, a tour guide, "is Paul and Shark."

The stores may be for the Canadians, the Europeans, but as far as the Cuban government is concerned, they are for everyone, Americans included. Miguel Alejandro Figueras, adviser to the minister of tourism, makes it clear that U.S. citizens are as welcome here as anyone.

Right now about 50,000 Americans visit the island each year, many of them college students and academic types — a group from the College of Charleston was in Havana at the same time South Carolina journalists visited. But how many U.S. citizens, Figueras is asked, come here illegally?

"We don't ask," he says. "They are all legal as far as we are concerned."

Cuban officials have relied increasingly on tourism dollars since the collapse of their main ally, the Soviet Union, and they are hungry for visitors. They have adopted a don't-ask, don't-tell policy toward Americans, and go out of their way not to stamp anyone's passports. They give the excuse that a Cuba stamp is a scarlet letter on a person's record.

Besides, they say, it's not their law that prohibits Americans from traveling here. They would love to reopen for American tourism, and they estimate that the U.S. embargo has cost Cuba and American companies $20 billion.

If the embargo is lifted, Figueras says, between 2.6 million and 5 million Americans would visit the island in the first year.

That may be a low estimate.

The lure of Cuba catches an infinite variety of tourists. The diving is reportedly among the best in the hemisphere, the bill fishing is phenomenal, the beaches pristine with clear aqua water.

Demand may be the most taxing issue in a new world order. A rush of new tourists would likely strain the Cuban infrastructure, although government officials contend that it would not be a problem. Right now there are a handful of resort hotels in Havana, and many mansions in Old Habana have been transformed into upscale hostels, most holding fewer than 20 rooms each.

At Varadero Beach, Cuba's premier oceanfront resort town 75 miles east of Havana, there are 50 hotels catering to upscale tourists. The Cuban government has invested in 10 new golf courses here and at other locations across the island, filling in a long-suffering gap in their tourism economy. According to legend, the island had written off golf years ago, after Fidel Castro lost a round to Che Guevara.

The Cuban government, which owns nearly everything on the island, has relaxed its business regulations slightly to build up its tourism market. European hoteliers have been allowed to build resorts on Cuban soil, staff them and pay expenses. In exchange they own 49 percent interest. It may not be democratic, but it is obvious that many companies think that just shy of half a business in Cuba is worth more than complete ownership on another island.

Despite the beaches, the resorts and the history, Hemingway is perhaps the island's best tourism mascot. For Papa fans, the island is Valhalla. The home he lived in for 20 years, Finca Vigia, is a short drive outside of Havana. The fishing village immortalized in "The Old Man and the Sea," Cojimar, is even closer. The Terrace, where the Old Man washed ashore with the remains of the great fish, trades heavily on the Hemingway connection.

A window in The Terrace that looks out on water bangs in the wind, and you can't help but wonder if it is the one from the book, the window through which a confused tourist saw the great fish's skeleton and mistook a marlin for a shark.

Unlike his home in Key West, Finca Vigia has held more provenance, primarily because it has not been lived in since Hemingway left. Until the government started a renovation of Hemingway's home, it was a time capsule, like much of the island, where the mail still lay on the bed where the author tossed it.

It is this island's Graceland, except that half a century later, Papa's taste is still in vogue.

In Old Habana, Hemingway aficionados divide their time between the Floridita, where he drank early and often; and the Ambos Mundos, the hotel where he wrote "For Whom the Bell Tolls" when he was still commuting between here and Key West.

The Ambos Mundos has since refurbished every room in the hotel except Hemingway's, which is still decorated as he left it. They charge $2 to see it, and get hundreds of people through there every day, all hoping for the same glimpse of the Morro Castle Lighthouse that Papa wrote about in his Esquire magazine columns.

It is Hemingway's Cuba that many Americans want to see. Michael Stavrinakis, a Charleston travel agent who owns M.E.S. Travel, says that when Cuba reopens for American travel, there is no limit to the potential.

"A lot of people go now," Stavrinakis says. "It's going to be a huge market. It's beautiful, and people have heard of it and heard of it, but have never seen it. If Castro hadn't overthrown the government, it would have become similar to Las Vegas."

And it may be yet. In some ways Cuban officials know they are trading on the island's past. Figueras even mentions "The Godfather, Part II," which featured the end of the Batista regime, in his talk with South Carolina journalists. He promises that those days of hedonism — gambling and prostitution — will never return to Cuba.

But some change is coming. Although the embargo has clearly hurt the island economy, it has enhanced something with much more value.

"Not being able to travel to Cuba has created a mystique," Figueras says.

And that mystique will keep Americans coming here illegally until U.S. law changes.

And when that law is repealed, Cuba changes.

Reach Brian Hicks at 937-5561 or bhicks@postandcourier.com.