Cuba Courts Tourists With Bargain Offers in Bid for Hard Currency

Cuba has found a new, low-key way to earn hard currency by offering bargain tours to West Europeans, Canadians and Mexicans.

Before the rise of Fidel Castro in 1959, Cuba was a magnet for high rollers and good-timers drawn by Havana’s casinos. The new Cuban tourism makes do mostly with sun and socialism.

For about $800, a West German can escape the European winter and spend two weeks on a sparkling Cuban beach, air fare and hotel included. The price from Canada is as little as $700.

The formula’s success in the past three years has turned tourism into one of Cuba’s main sources of much-needed Western currency and encouraged the Communist government to plan ambitious new investments.

Jorge Debasa, general manager of the government’s tourism agency, told a recent interviewer that 120,000 Westerners bought Cuban tour packages in 1984, up from 56,000 in 1981.

Government revenue from tourism in 1984 was well in excess of $100 million, Debasa said. It appears, he said, that tourism will be the country’s No. 2 earner of hard currency in 1984, after sugar exports, and by 1990, he added, “I am sure tourism will be No. 1.”

To accommodate more Western tourists, Cuba is starting a $280-million investment program that is to include a dozen new government hotels and an international airport. Eight of the hotels and the airport will be at the seaside resort of Varadero, 85 miles east of Havana.

Hotel companies from Spain, West Germany and France will provide the know-how for planning and construction, Debasa said. When completed in the late 1980s, the new hotels will double Varadero’s 5,000-bed capacity. They will offer “five-star” luxury, along with water sport facilities and nightclubs but no gambling, he said.

They will also be low-rise, built to preserve the coastal area’s natural beauty, Debasa said. “It is not going to be an Acapulco or a Cancun (Mexican resorts), where you don’t see the beach.”

Earthmoving has started for the new Varadero airport. Workers there include the Cuban construction brigade that was helping to build a new airport in Grenada--and that took up arms to resist the U.S. invasion in October, 1983.

Debasa, 43, has been in charge of the Cuban tourism agency, called Cubatur, since 1981. Before that, Cuba made little effort to attract Western tourists. “We were closed to the world,” he said.

The red tape required for a tourist visit was cumbersome, and visitors could not pay at hotels and restaurants with dollars or other foreign currency. Now, Cuban tourist cards can be obtained from travel agents abroad, and major hotels and restaurants on the island accept some foreign credit cards.

“Today we accept 16 currencies,” Debasa said.

The country from which Cuba receives the most tourists is Canada, followed by Mexico. The leading European countries are Spain, West Germany, Italy and France.

During the winter tourist season, Debasa said, an average of 19 regular and charter flights a week come in from Canada. Regular flights come in daily from Spain and Mexico, and charter flights twice or three times a week from Germany, Italy and France.

Debasa said the United States would be “the natural market” for Cuban tourism if it were not for a Reagan Administration ban on tourist travel to the island. The prohibition is part of a U.S. trade boycott against the Communist government.

An exception to the ban is made for trips by U.S. residents to visit relatives in Cuba. Debasa said 8,000 people of Cuban origin made such trips in 1984, down from 104,000 in 1979, when the family visits were first permitted.

Some Western diplomats in Havana are skeptical about Cuba’s expansion plans, with or without American tourists. One observed that accommodations, attractions and service are mediocre by most Caribbean standards and may fail to draw repeat visitors.

“You need more than palm trees and sand and warm water,” another said.

Debasa said steps are being taken to improve service. For one thing, hotel and restaurant employees are now allowed to accept tips, which until this month were officially prohibited under the country’s Communist philosophy.