It’s cruise-ship time in Cuba again — but now the country is much poorer

(Photo: Ramon Espinosa – AP)

The powerful images of a Carnival cruise ship arriving in Cuba this week — the first arrival of a U.S. cruise liner on the island in more than 50 years — may go down in history as the symbol of the failure of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Many young people may be unaware of this, but Fidel Castro and his idealistic guerrilla comrades took up arms against the Fulgencio Batista regime in Cuba in the late 1950s among other things because they resented the hordes of American tourists coming in cruise ships to their island, and the U.S. mob-run casinos and nightclubs that catered to them. They saw all of that as part of the Batista government’s massive corruption.

For decades, Cuba’s government-run media had depicted U.S. tourists descending from cruise liners as a symbol of the decadence of pre-revolutionary Cuba. Miami mob bosses had indeed built much of Havana’s night life industry since the 1920s, when Prohibition had turned Cuba into a favorite tourism destination for fun-seeking Americans.

“Floating hotels come, floating restaurants, floating theaters, floating diversions visit countries to leave their trash, their empty cans and papers for a few miserable cents, ” Castro said as late as 2005, deriding the cruise lines’ tourism industry.

To continue reading this article click The Miami Herald