If U.S. citizens gain the right to travel to Cuba, experts are saying the immediate flow of visitors from the United States to the island would be great.
“If the travel ban is lifted, you’ll probably see hundreds, hundreds of American yachtsmen going to Cuba the next day,” according to Timothy Ashby, a former U.S. Commerce Department official.
An International Monetary Fund (IMF) study estimates that if the travel ban were to be lifted, as many as 3.5 million Americans might visit the island annually. Cuba’s facilities and infrastructure could not handle numbers that high, so the government would probably limit the maximum to 500,000 in early years.
We are familiar with the pro/con arguments for lifting the ban by now, but for fresh words on some (as well as info on current Cuban tourism industry initiatives), read this Reuters piece by Jeff Franks. The “Americanization” issue is addressed, for example, in terms of European travelers. The two points typically cited in this vein are (1) that the United States hopes its tourists would “Americanize” the island by pressuring for economic and political opening, and (2) that Cuban leadership dreads a large number of Americans arriving and stirring up trouble. But the third side is this: Europeans now make up 40% of Cuba tourists, and many come because it is so rare and intriguing that modern American culture is not pervasive on the island. If Cuba becomes Americanized, it would be a less attractive destination for these individuals, and they might well go elsewhere.
The Cuban tourism industry, meanwhile, must take all these considerations into account as it attempts to guess at what the United States might decide.
