Despite the fact that fewer and fewer visitors are traveling to the island and hotel occupancy has fallen, the government allocated almost 40% of its investments in 2024 to activities related to the industry

Tourists drive through Havana in a classic American car, in an archive photograph..

The bartender recalls the day when, while working in his cantina facing the Caribbean Sea, a German tourist ordered a fish fillet.

— “I don’t have any, sir. What I have is pork, beef, and chicken,” said the bartender, who won’t give his name because he’s not willing to lose his 25-year job at a hotel in Cayo Largo del Sur.

— “But you have all that sea and no fish?” the tourist replied.

On other occasions, the bartender has had to come up with a way to satisfy a customer. There was the case of a tourist who asked for a Cuba Libre, one of the most famous Cuban cocktails, made with white rum, Coca Cola, and lemon. If any of the above ingredients are missing, the bartender does not hold back: “I told him: ‘Look, I can’t make you a Cuba Libre, but I can make you something else.’ If I have lemon soda, I say that I am going to make an aphrodisiac drink that in my city is called Santo Libre. That is a lie, it is lemon soda with aged rum. But the customer accepts and I tell them: ‘Tomorrow, you tell me.’ Sometimes you solve the situation, but sometimes you can’t. Canadians are great beer drinkers and, if there is no beer, there is nothing to invent,” he says.

His hotel, a facility operated by the Gran Caribe group and the Blue Diamond company, is located in the Canarreos archipelago, a paradise in the southwest of Cuba. For him, there have been no better years than those between 2012 and 2015, when tourists arrived en masse at the hotel, on planes that left from Italy, Canada, or Germany and landed directly on the Cayo. Or American tourists, who reached a record number of 173,550 in 2014, the same year that former U.S. president Barack Obama announced the normalization of diplomatic relations with Havana.

People use their cell phones in the doorway of a Havana hotel during a power outage, in October 2024.

Although he acknowledges that 'the offensive' against the sector has not yielded the expected results, Díaz-Canel stressed what has been achieved at the cost of Cubans' further impoverishment.

If at this point anyone harbored any doubts that the Cuban regime has only allowed the limited existence of a private sector on the island insofar as it serves its primary objective, to remain in power, Miguel Díaz-Canel dispelled them this Friday, criticizing that this sector seeks to enrich itself rather than "support the Revolution" in remarks at the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) Central Committee's 9th Plenary Session.

"As long as there is confusion about the relationships that must exist between the State and the non-State sectors, and the role of each in the economy, we are going to stumble, with misunderstandings, deformations, and corruption, illegality, and not in a constructive environment," said the president, according to the regime's Cubadebate portal.

According to the Cuban leader, it is necessary to ensure that "at the territorial, municipal and national levels, that sector must be aligned with the Economic Plan, so that it is really participating in our economic and social development strategies, from the locality to the nation, as otherwise everything will be nothing but empty discourse."

"Today they produce goods, provide services, and engage in exporting and importing, but if they do so however they like, without conforming to the plans, without paying taxes to support development needs, then everything is empty discourse that we end up never realizing," he lamented.

"If we are not able to fix that, we will have a non-State sector that's not with the Revolution, that's not contributing to the Revolution, that's thinking only of itself and not of everyone, and that is ideological," the state media source quoted the first secretary of the PCC as saying.

"It is up to us, as a Party, to organize that by ensuring that all state institutions fulfill the functions that they must, thereby shifting from diagnosis to the necessary ordering and control actions," he said.

At another point in his speech, Díaz-Canel admitted that the offensive carried out against the private sector, and also against the State one, has not yielded the results the Government expected. Despite this, he pointed to the few achievements that the economic package, announced in December 2023 to "correct distortions," has yielded so far an initiative that does not work, according to Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz at the PCC Central Committee's Plenary Session.

"The offensive we have carried out is to organize what was disorganized, in both the State and non-State sectors. Although its results are still not what they should have been, in a few months it has had an impact on controlling tax evasion, on the Budget, on the ordering of relationships, and on the group work of these entities, as well as including closure of some businesses that were totally illegal," Cubadebate quoted him as saying.

At the beginning of December, despite the widespread crisis that Cuba is suffering, the Government boasted that there were "signs of an ordering of macroeconomic issues," which it attributed to the aforementioned shock plan, termed "Government Projections to Correct Distortions and Boost the Economy in 2024."

At a meeting of the Council of Ministers to evaluate the plan Minister of the Economy and Planning Joaquín Alonso Vázquez referred to "several indicators whose results ratify the complexities that the country is currently facing, such as imports of goods, foreign exchange earnings from exports, energy carriers, and the transportation of cargo and passengers."

However, according to the minister, "there continue to be signs of an ordering of macroeconomic issues" such as "the trend towards a decrease in inflation, both in the monthly index and the year-on-year one, as well as a reduction in the fiscal deficit, the results of the current account, and monetary circulation indicators, which are gradually progressing towards the expected results."

On his X account Cuban economist Pedro Monreal, however, pointed out that "by announcing supposed 'signs of an ordering of macroeconomic issues', the Cuban Ministry of the Economy is distorting the reality:  expected economic contraction in 2024, plus year-on-year inflation probably between 25-30%, which indicates stagflation."

According to the analyst, by reporting a notable reduction in the budget deficit without offering concrete data on expenses and income, Cuba's Finance Ministry evaded analysis of what seems to be the application of a harsh fiscal austerity policy.

"Going from an initial fiscal deficit forecast of 147 billion pesos in 2024 to a result of 29.7 billion at the end of October, could only have been achieved —in a scenario of economic contraction— with an acute reduction in expenses," Monreal wrote.

During the same Plenary Session Jorge Luis Broche Lorenzo, a member of the Secretariat of the Party's Central Committee and head of its Department of Attention to the Social Sector, complained of "the lack of correspondence between the levels of contribution to the private sector budget in relation to its growth dynamics."

In a recent analysis DIARIO DE CUBA showed that Cuba has one of the highest tax burdens on the planet, which, increasingly, weighs on the non-State sector. At the same time, although, in principle, the revenue collected is used to meet social needs and services and finance public policies, in 2024 Cubans have seen a decline in all the services they receive: transportation is disastrous, garbage fills cities, blackouts and drinking water shortages plague the population, while the number of people in poverty is on the rise.