Destination of the Week: Cuba
Long known for its isolation from the Western world and its precarious relationship with the United States in particular, the last decade has seen Cuba emerge as one of the top tourist destinations in the Caribbean.
Communist credentials notwithstanding, this is a nation that well understands the commercial power of rebranding and has reinvented itself as the home of sun, salsa and rum with a unique blend of chutzpah and casual manner that's intrinsic to the Cuban character.
Shaped by one of the twentieth century's longest-surviving revolutions, Cuba's image was inextricably bound up with its politics until relatively recently. Even five decades after Fidel Castro and the rebels seized power, Cuba's long satiny beaches, offshore cays and jungle-covered peaks – the defining attractions of neighbouring islands – played almost no part in the popular international perception of this communist state in the Caribbean. Now, having opened the floodgates to global tourism, the country is characterized as much as anything by a frenetic sense of transition as it shifts from socialist stronghold to one of the Caribbean's major tourist destinations, running on capitalist money.
At the same time, visitors may think that nothing has changed for decades, even centuries. Cut off from the capitalist world until the end of the Cold War, and hit hard by the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union (which provided hefty subsidies to this communist outpost that thumbed its nose at nearby America), the face of modern-day Cuba is in many respects frozen in the past – the classic American cars, mustachioed cigar-smoking farmers, horse-drawn carriages and colonial Spanish architecture, all apparently unaffected by the breakneck pace of modernization. At the same time, you will see many newly opened department stores and shopping malls, state-of-the-art hotels and entire resorts created from scratch, an improbable combination of transformation and stasis that's symbolic of this contradiction-riddled country. Besides being sharply split between modern and traditional, Cuba is a country which, in a sense, has become divided by tourism.
Foreign visitors are the surest way of bringing in hard currency, which has led to the development of a two-tier economic system whereby anybody with the means to make money out of tourists is automatically better off than just about everyone else. In a place where taxi drivers earn more than doctors, and where capitalist reforms are seen as the answer to preserving socialist ideals, understanding Cuba is a compelling but never-ending task.