HAVANA – The number of Americans visiting their country’s long-time enemy Cuba is steadily increasing under the Obama administration, according to Cuban government figures, with the highest number in years likely in 2011.
Some 63,000 US citizens visited Cuba in 2010, up from 52,500 the previous year and 41,900 in 2008, according to a report by the National Statistics Office.
US citizens are forbidden to travel to Cuba without their government’s permission under a wide-ranging trade embargo against the island imposed nearly five decades ago.
In the years following Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the highest-known number of US visitors peaked at 70,000 under US president Bill Clinton, then dropped to an average of 30,000 in the last term of US president George W Bush.
The 2010 numbers do not include 350,000 Cuban Americans estimated by travel providers and US diplomats to have come to the island last year. Because Cuba considers them nationals, they are not listed in tourism statistics except within the broader category of “other”.
In 2009, President Barack Obama gave Cuban Americans a green light to visit their homeland at will and, in January, loosened restrictions on Americans travelling to Cuba for professional, religious and humanitarian reasons.
The combined figures of US travellers and Cuban Americans made the US Cuba’s second-largest tourism provider after Canada. Before the 1959 revolution that put Fidel Castro in power, Cuba used to be an American playground, with hundreds of thousands of Americans visiting to gamble and have a good time.
But, since the early 1960s, few have made the trip due to a general travel ban imposed by a US trade embargo against the island.
The current rise in US visitors is a result of the Obama administration loosening travel restrictions to encourage more “people to people” contact in hopes of aiding political change .
Travel providers report they are swamped, despite delays in implementing the measures, and forecast that more than 100,000 Americans not of Cuban descent will come to the forbidden island this year.
Cuba has said it had 2.53 million tourists in 2010, with Canada providing the largest number, at nearly 945,000, followed by Britain at 174,000 and Italy at 112,000.
According to official figures, overall tourism was up 11.3 per cent in the year to May, compared with the same period last year. – (Reuters)