Florida opens up Cuba

By SIMON CALDER Herald correspondent

One man swears he does not care who finally wins the United States presidency. The official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party reports that Fidel Castro votes "Bush no, Gore no."

The new US president will take no notice of heckling from Havana, nor of Dr Castro's interesting assertion that Cuba's one-party state is "the most democratic country in the world." But the fact that the American election will be decided in Florida will have a significant effect on travellers' future holidays in the Caribbean.

Here's why. At present, Americans who feel like a Caribbean vacation are obliged, by their own Government, to fly or cruise past the biggest and most obvious destination to reach less interesting and more distant islands. The main purpose of Washington's prohibition on travel to Cuba is to appease, and secure the votes of, anti-Castro exiles in Miami.

The more extreme among them still fondly believe that the US economic blockade will overturn the Communist regime, despite 40 years in which it has conspicuously failed to do so.

What, you may wonder, does a right-wing group of Cuban-Americans have to do with my holiday?

The present US travel ban benefits holidaymakers from elsewhere. Low-cost packages are available because the Americans are not there to outbid us. But now both Republicans and Democrats realise Florida, with its wafer-thin majority, is the ultimate "swing state" - and that most Floridians are in favour of embracing, not isolating, Cuba, only 144 km away across the water.

So expect the trade embargo to be rapidly dismantled, and the country to open up to Americans. Plans have already been drafted by US airlines and tour operators to meet the pent-up demand for Cuban vacations.

The British and others, whose holiday spending has helped to shore up Fidel in the past decade, will find themselves marginalised. The bigger buying power of the Americans will force them into creakier, older hotels. The character of the place will change, too: already the first "real" shopping mall has opened in the main resort of Varadero, full of the same sterile stores as other Caribbean islands.

Those other islands are deeply worried at the prospect of losing potentially millions of American holidaymakers. The tourism authorities on Cuba's neighbouring islands will have to make themselves more attractive to holidaymakers from other lands by cutting prices. These could feed through as early as the Northern Hemisphere summer the year after next.

Meanwhile, make the most of Cuba's glorious isolation. You will then be in the equivalent happy position of those who visited East Berlin before the Wall came down, and now bore anyone who asks - and many who don't - about how the old place was much more alluring before the West arrived.

Meanwhile, despite the US embargo barring normal tourism to the island, Americans are nonetheless streaming into their Caribbean neighbour in unprecedented numbers via a variety of legal and not-so-legal means.

A record number of about 140,000 US residents are expected to visit Cuba this year, either to see relatives or on US Government-licensed travel for business, cultural, academic, sport and other "people-to-people" exchanges.

Many more - estimates on both sides range from 20,000 to 50,000 a year - are sneaking in via third countries such as Mexico, Canada, Jamaica or the Bahamas.

That means Americans are accounting for maybe 10 per cent of the more than 1.6 million foreign visitors now coming annually to Cuba in a tourism boom that is throwing a lifeline to its troubled economy.

With the embargo lifted, Cuba estimates it would receive five million Americans each year.

Although the sense of "forbidden fruit" may decrease as Americans become more familiar with Cuba, the proximity of the island and its natural beauty will guarantee huge US tourism interest for the future. And the recent boom in Cuban culture, sparked in part by the Buena Vista Social Club compact disc and film, has only further fuelled that.