Tourist dreams turn sour after Cuba lights go off

Tourists ride in a classic American car on a street in Havana on October 21, 2024. Agence France-Presse

HAVANA — Roberto Jimenez was hoping for a dream vacation in Cuba, but instead found himself among the tourists whose visits turned into a nightmare due to an island-wide blackout.

“We came on holiday to enjoy ourselves, to get to know Cuba,” the 46-year-old Mexican businessman said.

“Things went badly for us,” he told AFP as he walked through Havana with his friend Rodrigo Ramirez and their partners.

READ: Hurricane Oscar makes landfall in Cuba amid huge power outage

Jimenez, on his first visit to the tourism-dependent island, said that a hotel in northeastern Cuba where the group stayed before going to the capital was repeatedly hit by power cuts, making even charging cellphones a struggle.

On Sunday night, when the Communist-run country was reeling from a more than 48-hour blackout, the friends tried to leave their Havana hotel — fortunately equipped with an electric generator — to enjoy a stroll around the city, but soon gave up.

“We didn’t even go out, we just looked out, everything was very dark,” said Ramirez, 49.

READ: Storm ‘Oscar’ hits Cuba as island grapples with blackout

On Friday, lights went out across Cuba — which has been experiencing an acute energy crisis for months — after the collapse of the nation’s largest power plant crippled the grid.

By Monday, according to authorities, electricity had been restored to around half of Havana’s two million inhabitants, but other regions remained without power.

“It’s bad because it affects tourism and tourists say: ‘I’m not going back to Cuba,'” Jimenez said.

When he gets home he will only talk about one thing: “That we spent the whole vacation without electricity.”

Airport queues

Amaya Garcia, 54, from Spain, arrived on the island with her husband on Friday and planned to spend three days in Havana and four in Varadero, the country’s main beach resort.

“Let’s see what awaits us there (in Varadero),” said Garcia, who was greeted in the near darkness on her arrival at Havana’s international airport.

“When we were going through security at the airport, the power went out several times, so the queues took much longer,” she said.

The closure of the island’s entertainment venues added to the disappointment.

“We didn’t have high expectations. We already knew that the country wasn’t doing particularly well, but the blackout was tough,” Garcia said.

Unlike other Caribbean destinations, Cuba’s tourism sector has not recovered from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic or the tightening of US sanctions under former president Donald Trump.

Cuba, which is facing its worst economic crisis in three decades, received 2.4 million tourists in 2023 — far short of the hoped-for 3.5 million as well as the record 4.7 million arrivals in 2018 following a historic rapprochement with the United States.

The chances of hitting a goal of 3.2 million visitors this year seem to be slipping away.

Konstantin Makarov, a Belarusian who has visited Cuba eight times, was making the most of his vacation despite the blackout.

In Cuba, “life is different, slower,” he said as he visited the seafront with his fishing rod.

“People know how to enjoy life,” added the 37-year-old computer engineer, who said Cuba reminded him of Belarus 25 years ago.