Packaged Vacations: Tourism Development in the Spanish Caribbean

Epilogue: Observations from 135 Degrees

Epilogue Observations from 135 Degrees Historian Anthony Pagden has illustrated that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European explorers often appealed to their personal experience in the Americas to validate their authority on New World topics.1 In historical methodology, however, appeals to documents as authoritative statements generally take precedence over the experiential knowledge of investigators. This creates an immense paradox for historians of tourism: the need to work in stuffy archives in order to establish the evolving reality of an activity best suited to sun, sand, and tropical landscapes. The preceding chapters have established a documentary basis for understanding the packaging of tourist poles in the Spanish Caribbean. This epilogue will integrate on-site observations from around the world, as if from a beach chair, or from a 135 degree angle, with a final comparative analysis of three of the major poles discussed in the book: Varadero, Punta Cana–Bávaro, and Cancún. Havana/Varadero When I traveled to Havana and Varadero in early 2004, it was clear that the fear engendered by the Helms-Burton Act (see chapter 8) had largely subsided . In Havana’s Plaza San Francisco, under the imposing shadow of the Lonja de Comercio, the city’s principal commercial building, the local Benetton store had shut its doors, not in preparation to leave the country, but instead for remodeling. On Obispo Street, the traditional pedestrian commercial artery of Old Havana since the eighteenth century, Cubans—as well Epilogue 186 as foreigners who spoke French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and distinctively British, Bahamian, and Irish strains of English—stopped to gawk at clothing stores covered with the names of European designers. In Miramar, Havana’s upscale suburban area and diplomatic core, the Miramar Trade Center stands surrounded by European hotels: the Habana Meliá (Spain), the glassy LTI Panorama (Germany), and the more subdued Novotel Miramar (France). Across the street from the Habana Meliá and kitty-corner to the Trade Center, the Galeria Comodoro, Cuba’s finest shopping center, buzzed to a rock-and-roll beat and hosted upscale shoppers at its Mango (Spain), LaCoste (France), Façonnable (France), and Benetton (Italy) boutiques. Workers and shoppers alike took a moment to enjoy fresh French bread at the Pain de Paris bakery. To the east of Havana, Varadero continued to welcome the world to its beaches. Instead of traveling overland from Havana, as most tourists had done during the 1950s, many Europeans, Canadians, and Latin Americans arrive on the peninsula via direct flights to the Varadero International Airport . The modest airport that has been carved out of the scrubby plain to the east of the city is a testament to the degree of Europeanization this once isolated part of Cuba has achieved. The Cuban Ministry of Tourism lists Canadians , Italians, Germans, the English, and Spaniards as the most frequent travelers to the island. An Air France office in Varadero shares building space with a Cuban snack bar on First Avenue. Russian tourists snap photos in front of Al Capone’s old home near the eastern point of the peninsula. Germans and Italians stroll the beach, darkly tanned, in their Speedos, while Hungarians and Germans sit at a bar using English as their pidgin language to debate the merits of the best soccer players in Europe. Chinese tourists frolic in the water, taking pictures of each other, as the sun sets to the west of the peninsula. At the upper end of the peninsula, the Du Pont mansion shares San Bernardino Crag with its Spanish neighbors: Meliá las Américas, Meliá Varadero, Sol Palmeras, and the Iberostar Bella Costa. Miniature passenger trains run tourists to the Plaza Americas Shopping Center, where French and Canadian shoppers peruse Italian and Spanish designer clothing before munching on pizza, whose ingredients have been imported from Toronto by the Canadian chain Pizza Nova. This polyglot jungle provided a stark contrast to the more monolingual American beach haven to the west in Cancún, Mexico. And so does the flat, more horizontal skyline of Varadero, whose design has largely been left in the hands of Europeans and Cubans who have learned from the experiences of their Caribbean neighbors. Epilogue 187 Punta Cana–Bávaro In January 2006, I visited Punta Cana–Bávaro in the Dominican Republic and had an opportunity to see the struggle between sustainable tourism and unplanned mass tourism. On a Wednesday morning, I toured the Grupo Puntacana community and...