Export Ban Drives Cuba To Non-US Analytics Software To Boost Tourism

dkatana writes with some crucial lines from an article at InformationWeek: Currently Cuba receives around 2.8 million visitors every year, half of them from Canada. Mintur, the Cuban Tourist Ministry, estimates that if Americans were free to travel to Cuba today, the number of visitors would increase by two million the first year. Last year the Cuban government was interested in getting its hands on analytics software to process the data generated by visitors on social networks. ... Because of the existing ban on American companies supplying technology to Cuba, Havana had to look somewhere else and found SocialVane, a small Spanish company on the island of Menorca, which has been working with the local tourist sector to analyze issues, trends, and potentials of the tourism industry.

Comments

Cold war is over

[danbob999]

Time to end that ridiculous embargo.

Re:Cold war is over

[danbob999]

It requires congress approbation. I don't think it happened yet.

Re:Cold war is over

[FictionPimp]

Except that cubans are just as easy now to get as ever and are not very expensive. In fact, my cigar aficionados do not want the embargo to be stopped as it could cause a rise in prices and in counterfeits.

Re:Cold war is over

[halivar]

I like Cohiba's, I really do. But I think a lot of the obsession is just the forbidden fruit tasting sweeter. For my part, I prefer Sumatran leaf to Cuban.

Re:Cold war is over

[Karem Lore]

There is multiple levels to this. The bill to remove the embargo was entered back in February, but is reliant on removing Cuba from the state terrorism list. Obama approved the recommendation and then there is a 45-day review period. From mid-April that takes us through to June.

Here's hoping...

Re:Cold war is over

[danbob999]

I am pretty sure at least one person in England owned land and/or businesses in the USA.
However I was talking about people living in the USA, not in England, but forced to emigrate because of the war. All those loyalists didn't keep their stuff (try bringing a land with you to Canada or England). Just like Americans who fled Cuba during Casto's takeover left a lot of belongings behind.
Some would say they choose to leave, others would say they were forced. The result is the same. They left some belongings and the revolutionary Cubans/Americans took over.

OMG

[JMJimmy]

The US isn't the centre* of the universe!?!

*Yes, I spelled it Canadian.

Re:OMG

[danbob999]

I'm not sure why (nearly) the rest of the world can't satisfy their needs

Because of this:

and in 1996 by the Cuban Liberty and Democracy Solidarity Act (known as the Helms–Burton Act) which penalizes foreign companies that do business in Cuba by preventing them from doing business in the U.S.

That stuff take a while to forget

[RivenAleem]

America should really get their act together and try to patch things up with Cuba sooner rather than later. When a larger country pisses all over their small island neighbours for decades, the small guys have a habit of holding a grudge.

Disclaimer: I'm Irish.

Re:That stuff take a while to forget

[gstoddart]

There's more to it than that. Far more.

Starting in 1901 when the US jammed the Platt Amendment into the Cuiban Constitution which America said entitles them to keep a naval base in Cuba (that's what Guantanamo is).

Carrying forward, the US was a backer of Batista, who was a petty little thug who did things like:

Back in power, Batista suspended the 1940 Constitution and revoked most political liberties, including the right to strike. He then aligned with the wealthiest landowners who owned the largest sugar plantations, and presided over a stagnating economy that widened the gap between rich and poor Cubans.[5] Batista's increasingly corrupt and repressive government then began to systematically profit from the exploitation of Cuba's commercial interests, by negotiating lucrative relationships with the American mafia, who controlled the drug, gambling, and prostitution businesses in Havana, and with large multinational American corporations that had invested considerable amounts of money in Cuba.[5][6] To quell the growing discontent amongst the populaceâ"which was subsequently displayed through frequent student riots and demonstrationsâ"Batista established tighter censorship of the media, while also utilizing his anti-Communist secret police to carry out wide-scale violence, torture and public executions; ultimately killing anywhere from 1,000 to 20,000 people.[7][8] For several years until 1959, the Batista government received financial, military, and logistical support from the United States.[9]

But, as always happens, he was a thug and a dictator but friendly to US business interests. So America liked him.

Basically the Cubans were poor and starving under a terrible government who cared more about US interests than its own citizens.

The American Mafia is largely whose stuff was nationalized:

In the 1950s, Havana served as "a hedonistic playground for the world's elite", producing sizable gambling, prostitution and drug profits for American Mafiosos, corrupt law-enforcement officials, and their politically elected cronies.[38] In fact, drugs, be it marijuana or cocaine, were so plentiful at the time that one American magazine in 1950 proclaimed "Narcotics are hardly more difficult to obtain in Cuba than a shot of rum. And only slightly more expensive."[38]

In a bid to profit from such an environment, Batista established lasting relationships with organized crime, notably with American mobsters Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, and under his rule Havana became known as "the Latin Las Vegas."[39] Batista and Lansky formed a friendship and business relationship that flourished for a decade. During a stay at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in the late 1940s, it was mutually agreed that, in return for kickbacks, Batista would give Lansky and the Mafia control of Havana's racetracks and casinos.[40]

So, let's not pretend that Cuba wasn't already under a corrupt dictatorship under which the citizens suffered hugely.

I'm not defending everything Castro did, but everyone likes to conveniently the history of American supported dictators allowing American organized crime to treat the nation as their own private playground.

Batista and the crooks really needed to go. And I'm afraid I have little sympathy for them.

Americans like to act like Castro overthrew a benign government, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Don't just look at the last 50 years, look at the last 100.

Re:That stuff take a while to forget

[gstoddart]

Anyway, I just related the textbook version; I wasn't aware of any US military deployments in Cuba (besides them leasing the Guantanamo Bay facility)

Leasing? America is NOT "leasing" Guantanamo in any legitimate use of that word.

America jammed the Platt Amendment into Cuba's Constitution at the end of a war, which unilaterally said "we get to keep a navy base here" ... in effect "we own joo, bitches".

Cuba has never cashed the checks, has repeatedly said they don't consent to Guantanamo, and don't want the Americans there.

Guantanamo is basically a forcible military presence in a foreign country.

It sure as fuck isn't 'leased' in any honest meaning of 'lease'.

"Someone can't buy thing, has to buy other thing"

[Anonymous Coward]

STUFF THAT MATTERS!

And Cuba will be fucked ...

[gstoddart]

the Cuban Tourist Ministry, estimates that if Americans were free to travel to Cuba today, the number of visitors would increase by two million the first year

I've been to Cuba 5 times in the last 8 years or so, and while I really like Cuba and the Cubans, I've also seen a considerable decline over that time.

The quality of the service has gone down. The resort staff are much less interested in good service and are now expecting tips. They doubled the size of the airport, but their internal stuff couldn't scale, so there can be days where it takes hours to check in for your flight.

Cuba has a lot of older resorts. It's still a really poor country with some shady infrastructure.

If you start throwing millions of Americans into that mix, I firmly believe the systems won't be able to handle it.

The last two times I was there the airport devolved into madness and chaos, because they had more passengers and aircraft than they could handle.

And there's going to be a lot of disappointed Americans as they discover that the effects of the embargo is a country which is impoverished and can't give them the kind of experience they want.

Honestly, for me, Florida is becoming more attractive than Cuba. The same weather, all the first world amenities, and none of the tourist stomach ailments.

I just don't think Cuba will weather a sudden influx of more tourists who are expecting first world luxuries. Cuba is beautiful and charming, but it's also small and poor.

Re:And Cuba will be fucked ...

[rubycodez]

Nonsense.

influx of money means the "system" of which you speak will grow.

plenty of other third world countries prove the point

Re:And Cuba will be fucked ...

[Dzimas]

Your perspective is completely wrong. Cuba isn't Disneyland, it's a country with a population of over 11 million people. Tourism is currently a significant source of income for many on the island, and even professionals with university educations are drawn to the resorts out of necessity - I know an air traffic controller who works full-time in Varadero and conducts private tours on the side to earn much needed money. He's one of the lucky ones.

Cuba needs industry and business. The country introduced reforms a few years ago to encourage small private enterprises, but access to capital and markets has kept people from being able to take advantage of those changes. As it stands, there is foreign oil investment from companies like China's Greatwall and Canada's Sherritt, but the nation's basic infrastructure is in crisis; a lot of the infrastructure was obviously built under the guidance of Soviet engineers -- concrete apartment buildings dot the outskirts of Havana that are familiar to anyone who has visited Vilnius or St Petersburg. The electrical poles are a classic Soviet concrete design, as are the 1970s and 1980s era bus shelters. Even shop doors cause me to do a double take, because they're right out of my 1990 memories from the Baltic states.

But anyway, I digress. What Cubans need is access to capital and encouragement to start small diversified businesses that extend the economy beyond rum, cigars and tacky booze holiday tourism. They also need access to the US market in a manner that isn't exploitative (American companies that see the island as a cheap labour source for large manufacturing facilities would not be beneficial, because the wealth would flow out of the country, as an example).

Re:And Cuba will be fucked ...

[gstoddart]

If you think an influx of money will magically fix a country which has a limited infrastructure and widespread poverty you're foolish and naive.

Maybe in the long run it will improve things.

In the short run I predict it will create a shitstorm which will be to the detriment of the Cubans.

You can't go from being embargoed to not embargoed overnight and expect that to work well at all. It simply doesn't work that way.

Until they can build up their infrastructure, and make some systemic changes to their economy, a sudden influx of Americans looking for McDonald's and five star resorts will not have good outcomes for Cuba.

I think it's long overdue to get rid of the embargo, but there's no way in hell I believe opening the floodgates to American tourists will have anything but a disruptive and negative effect for the immediate future.

Re:And Cuba will be fucked ...

[gstoddart]

Yes, Cuba does need business and capital, it does need to expand its economy, it does need better infrastructure, and the unfinished/rough cinderblock construction is everywhere.

They have lots of poverty, and lots of problems. Their internal transportation is a mess.

It's also true that I've met many educated people working on resorts because they could make far more money.

I am not disagreeing with a single thing you said.

What I am saying is Cuba's tourism industry is already stretched beyond what it can handle, and is in desperate need of some re-vamping and improving ... but that suddenly bringing in a few million extra tourists will not immediately fix these problems, but will exaggerate them.

If you just unleash the economic chaos on them and hope everything will sort itself out, you'll do a lot of damage to them. And, as you say, if that change is exploitative it will harm them even further.

I'm not saying this isn't a sign of improvement for Cuba. But I also don't think suddenly saying "OK, two more million tourists, deal with it" will work ... because I already know for a fact that their tourist industry is straining at the seams.

In the short term, this has the potential to be more harmful than beneficial, because you can't just go full steam ahead and expect that to ramp up like it would be in a first world country.