By Andrew Cawthorne
August 31
VARADERO, Cuba (Reuters) - Nobody looks down at a hotel doorman in Cuba. Chances are he is picking up in daily tips what a top brain surgeon or university professor earn in a month.
The same is true for a growing army of car-park attendants, waiters, hotel workers, trinket-sellers, guides and others lucky enough to work in Cuba's booming tourist industry. They are the Communist-run island's "nouveaux riches," a privileged elite with access to dollars that makes their compatriots' peso salaries look paltry.
In the recent words of President Fidel Castro, they are also part of an emerging class of home-grown "millionaires" who are endangering the egalitarian values of nearly four decades of Communist rule since his 1959 revolution.
Cuba's rapidly expanding tourism industry -- 1.2 million visitors and $1.5 billion in revenues in 1997 -- may be rescuing a needy economy still reeling from the collapse of its lifeline to the Soviet Union at the start of this decade. But the Castro government's opening of the sector since the late 1980s has also ushered in deep social changes and divisions that are irrevocably marking the island and its people.
'SOCIAL PYRAMID TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN'
The trickle-down effect of the once-illegal dollar is perhaps the most notorious influence, creating wealth distortions and anomalies that now abound across the island.
A woman in downtown Havana will braid a tourist's hair for $8, more than half an average monthly salary in the state sector that employs the majority of Cuba's workforce. A man in the town of Trinidad rents rooms to tourists at $20 per night, ensuring that his family, unlike others on his street, can get soap, shampoo and electronic goods from dollar-only shops.
A cleaning lady at a hotel in Cuba's most famous beach resort, Varadero, says her tips bring in more than the combined salaries of her four adult children and her husband, who are all university-trained professionals.
"The social pyramid has been turned upside-down. The most skilled and highly trained people are not the ones making the money," said economist Omar Everleny at the state-run Center for Studies of the Cuban Economy.
"The solution would be to raise wages in other sectors, but if they are sectors which do not generate foreign currency it is hard for the state to do that," he said.
While government salaries remain comparatively low and the dollar continues to rule, such income distortions are an inevitable by-product of the tourism boom. But the government is seeking to control the situation, and members of the small self-employed sector, including those offering food and rooms to tourists in their homes, are now paying taxes, a relatively new phenomenon in Cuba.
SOCIAL DISTORTIONS 'REPULSE' CASTRO
Castro himself, frustrated at having to introduce some capitalism, leads the official finger-wagging at the emerging moneyed class. "This excess money which a lot of people have is causing us a lot of damage. ... The more contact we have with capitalism, and the more we perceive what happens, the more repulsion I feel," he said in a recent speech.
Castro, 72, who is set to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his revolution in January, defiantly rejects calls to reform his one-party political system and the economy remains largely in state hands. But some analysts say tourism has become a silent agent of change on the island.
"The tourism phenomenon is revolutionizing Cuban society, bottom up, in some ways for good and in some ways for bad," one Caribbean diplomat in Havana told Reuters.
"It's helping spread wealth, it's encouraging capitalist practices, it's giving Cubans unprecedented contact with foreigners, it's a magnet for foreign capital, and it's allowing the outside world to get a good look at Cuba and vice-versa. They are all new trends for Cuba."
Despite the social implications, especially the more unsavory aspects such as the startling rise of prostitution that is an unwelcome throwback to Cuba's pre-revolutionary reputation as "the bordello of the Caribbean," Havana is in no doubt that future economic survival depends on tourism.
"Tourism has become the engine of the country," top tourist sector official Eulogio Rodriguez said at a recent conference in Havana.
Buoyant tourism officials project an annual 2 million visitors by 2000, up from an anticipated 1.4 million this year and a mere 300,000 at the end of the 1980s. They also foresee revenues rising to $3 billion by 2000, 15 times more than in 1989, and a jump in hotel capacity from 28,000 rooms now to 49,000 at the turn of the century.
Although the net gain from tourism is still only about a third of revenues, it already rivals sugar and nickel profits, and the state aims to increase efficiency in coming years.
Canada, whose government opposes the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba and maintains an official policy of "constructive engagement," is the largest source of tourists at the moment -- followed by Italy, Germany, Spain and France.
Joint ventures, mainly involving operation contracts, have drawn big-name hotel chains from Spain's Sol Melia and France's Accor to Jamaica's SuperClubs and Sandals.
AMERICANS DRAWN BY "FORBIDDEN FRUIT"
And all this with the U.S. embargo in place, blocking what would certainly be Cuba's biggest tourism market. Prior to Castro's revolution, Americans accounted for 90 percent of visitors to the island, and in a recent interview Economy Vice-Minister Alfonso Casanova estimated that without the embargo the influx of U.S. visitors would enable Cuba to pay off its roughly $11 billion foreign debt in 10 years.
The importance of tourism to the economy has never been clearer than this year when a disastrous sugar harvest, low prices for Cuba's nickel exports and a severe drought in the east have turned the screw on a tight financial situation.
Most come to Cuba to enjoy its enviable white-sand beaches and warm Caribbean waters, to buy its famous rum and cigars, to enjoy its rich music and dance traditions and to explore the impressive architecture of Havana and other towns. But there is also an element of political tourism and cachet in visiting one of the world's last remaining Communist outposts.
For Americans, who come in their tens of thousands each year despite Washington's official ban on spending money in Cuba, there is also a sense of "forbidden fruit" in visiting a country off-limits and vilified for so long.
"It's incredible. Coming here and seeing the old U.S. cars in the streets, the revolutionary slogans, the deteriorated architecture in Havana is like walking straight into a piece of history," said Dick, a Texas banker who asked that his family name not be used. "I would give anything to meet Fidel Castro too, but I suppose I'll just have to make do with seeing him on television every night."
Cubans' enthusiasm over the growing tourism trade is tempered by resentment at being barred from using hotels reserved for foreigners. Nowhere is this division more starkly evident than crossing the spectacular 11-mile (17 km) causeway from mainland Cuba to the tourist island of Cayo Coco.
Behind lies a world familiar to most Cubans: sugar fields where workers earn $15 a month, the gritty provincial town of Ciego de Avila with its gray buildings and spartan homes and roads where bicycles and horses vie with aging vehicles.
Ahead is a world still off-limits to most locals: a tourist mecca where brand-new jeeps whiz foreign guests between luxury hotels and the white-sand beaches and where a few drinks by the pool cost more than the average Cuban's monthly salary.
If the contrast is not stark enough, a police checkpoint on the causeway -- to keep "undesirables" off the island -- underlines the point.
On one of Cayo Coco's finest beaches, Cuban hotel worker and Ciego de Avila resident Lazaro Junco meditates on his daily two-hour bus journey between these two worlds: "It's difficult, it's strange ... I'm one of the privileged ones because I work here, but it's still hard for me to see all this. Why should foreigners be able to enjoy this and Cubans not?"
18:50 08-31-98
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.