Latin America – the ghost of tourism in Cuba

We take the Havana taxi towards Viñales. Only a few cars are on the multi -lane motorway, but some horse -drawn teams. In the shade under the bridges, many people gather who are waiting for a bus or other means of transportation. If you can pay in euros, you are traveling faster, this is one of the first lessons to learn as a tourist in Cuba.

The driver drums on the steering wheel and screams: »Amigos! Amigos! «, Before he suddenly brakes. On the roadside there is someone with a “Triangulo Rojo”, a warning triangle, and a cardboard sign for the price. Apparently a rare artifact, because our driver plucks some notes from his large bundle with Cuban pesos before proudly stowing his new acquisition in the trunk. Another lesson: private trade blooms on the Caribbean island. Cigarettes and lighters, handkerchiefs and homemade things are sold on the streets.

Some sell luxury goods like cigars. The taxi drives off the street shortly behind Pinar del Río, you can look at picturesque valleys with lush green and red earth. Tobacco has been grown here for centuries, which is considered the best in the world. Hardly out of the car there is pouring around and a cigar is offered. A nice start for the following sales talk, in which we are guided through the plantation. In the dry house, the tobacco leaves hang from the ceiling before they are fermented. Only then are they so elastic that you can turn cigars as we are shown. Che Guevara smiles at us from a poster on the wall. The cigars are found for good, you buy here without a label and invoice, as with taxi-in euros or US dollars. For half a dozen cigars, you put the monthly wage of a Cuban doctor on the table.

Viewed soberly, the tourist with euros or dollar is the spearhead of the global market, from which the island is cut off through sanctions. Wherever he appears, economic worlds collide. So far, so well -known: In other countries, this goes hand in hand with such “natural” phenomena of economic life such as child poverty, homelessness, drug addiction or gang war, so you only have to look at one island. There is nothing to be seen in Cuba and yet it cannot be overlooked that there is not much from many. Except time. It seems to be in abundance.

If you are not rushing over the highway in a taxi, everyday life is at a pace that would not be used in this country, where work-life balance or four-day week are not used for the prosperity of others, as a deceleration experience. As in Viñales, the dreamlike valley in the west of the island, where you sit in the rocking chair in front of the bungalow for half the day, while lively conversations from Veranda fly back and forth.

In rural Viñales, the electricity is repeatedly canceled, then restaurants and shops accumulate the generators. There is a festival on the Plaza on Saturday evening. Where the children play baseball in the afternoon, boxes and Büdchen stand where strong mojito is served. The colorful music mix of the laptop DJs is particularly well received by a few older ones with a surprisingly fresh hip swing, who quickly snap around to dance around, while the small town youth wear western branded clothes and can only be lured out of the reserve through hip-hop.

Suddenly all lights and the music go out and the darkness you look into the clear starry sky. For the tourists, this is also booked as a romantic event, as is the night walk through a city in complete darkness as a journey through time before electrification. With the new solar parks, which are currently being built in Cuba, that should change soon.

The excursion to the beach in the “Taxi Colectivo”, one of the many limousines from the 50s, leads through potholes covered with potholes. The Polish couple on the back seat, which starts with beer in the morning, becomes more and more quieter and Blieber, the longer the trip in the fluctuating road cruiser takes. After over two hours, the Gulf of Mexico has been reached, with dazzling white beaches and turquoise blue sea.

The Caribbean sun burns like a laser beam through several layers of sunscreen, even in the shade under the palm trees. It can hardly be prevented from looking for the next few days like the tree that is shown to us in the botanical garden of Viñales as “The Tourist Tree”: with reddish bark that peeled off. It is not even summer, as the Cubans say: 20 degrees Celsius are displayed on their weather app, on our 30th at 95 percent humidity.

The beach is an image of the paradoxes of Cuban opening policy. An almost overcrowded section is under state administration, in the state restaurant there is good Piña Colada (not this cream massacre, as the drink is known here), otherwise limited map. A few steps further there is an almost deserted section, in the shade three people sit in front of an improvised grill in the sand on which lobsters, freshly captured from the sea, are also sizzling with the machete, headed with a shot “Coco Loco”, crazy coconut). A coexistence of state and start-up economy. The lobster tastes fantastic, when paying it is as often: here you would just get a North Sea crab roll, there it is a small fortune. And nobody can afford what you could never afford here. Such differences keep global mass tourism going, even in Cuba, where you are dependent on foreign exchange.

Back in Havana, which overwhelmed with morbid beauty, you are involved in sales talks on the street. Exclusive tickets for the very last concert by Buena Vista Social Club? Cigar? Coca and chicas? Even the conversations, which initially do not feel economically motivated, end within minutes in a narrow apartment in front of a box of alleged cohibas with a fake label.

Some tourists do not seem to disturb this: in a shabby bar, supposedly already visited by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, a British couple shows photos of a previous vacation on their cell phone, the viewers receive overpriced drinks. It looks like Win-Win. The revolutionary museum is – almost symbolically – closed due to renovation, the yacht »Granma« is behind dusty glass panes. A lot of past is quoted on the few posters in the streets. In the Centro Fidel Castro Ruz, equipped with the latest technology, the battle around the bay of pigs in first-person shooter is encouraged. Just what inspires today?

As an observer of the improvisation -heavy everyday life, one has the impression that people in Cuba determine their economic relationships themselves with a not inconsiderable part. Is this the “death of the state”, as it can be found in the writings of socialism? Or vice versa? Anyone who maintains such relationships with tourists and their currency is ultimately taken to the handcuff by Airbnb & Co., the realistic teaching of socialist classics could be assumed. Or, as can be seen on the streets in Havana, the hand lands on the hand of western tourists (young women with older men, but also young men with older women). Do the tourists not only bring foreign exchange in the form of euros and dollars, which you change on the street much more cheaply than in the state bodies, but also a new class that can not only buy luxury goods (as in the noble department on the outskirts of Havana, not far from the former Soviet embassy), but also workers?

Does the country threaten a tear test? Or does the cunning world spirit in capitalist abroad prevent the mass tourist outdoor leaving cuba? For a few weeks now-the Trump government has not remained idle-platforms such as Airbnb have been prohibited from doing business in Cuba; The country is on the “terrorist list”. The Cuban government forces the fact that attempts are made to bring tourism on the island to take things more into their own hands in order to lure more visitors into the country. Tourism, it is said, should become “sustainable”. Just how sustainable can something be that people can circulate as meaningful and entitled to the globe as the goods?

The answer is not only in the Caribbean. As paradoxical as it sounds: Anyone who visits socialist cuba will come back to capitalism with some questions.