Cuba poll
A new CNN poll shows that 64% of Americans think travel to Cuba should be unrestricted, while 71% believe that the U.S. should re-establish diplomatic relations. As always, embargo supporters were vocal in its defense without ever explaining how it can be considered anything but a total failure in achieving its goals.
Momentum just keeps building and building.
7 comments:
Several Cubans have pointed out to me that they don't have the capacity to deal with a sudden influx of U.S. visitors--hotel rooms, taxis, etc., and worry about what might happen with a huge surge So I wonder if there's a way to do it slowly.
We went to a briefing at USINT this week and they had a similar point. By their agreement with the Cuban Government they can only have a certain number of U.S. citizens working there. So if they don't get an increase in personnel before the travel band ends, they too will have more than they can handle in terms of lost passports, people in jail from bar fights and other such citizen services.
I any case, I find the parallel interesting.
It will be much interesting to see the details of the CNN poll in terms of home state or current location, national origin if not a US national, age -very important-, education level and gender. That will help to better understand the change of trend in the last fifty years since the Cuban regime took power and forty six years since the missile crisis. Otherwise a given figure only should not be sufficient reason for a radical change of foreign policy as it seems it is happening.
I don't think age is that important unless the poll is in Florida. In recent years it has been clear that a solid majority of the country is uninterested in the embargo and would prefer the right to travel to Cuba if they want.
Even in Florida support for the embargo is going down.
In any case, Obama doesn't care about Cuban exiled votes because he will never get them anyway.
To say that Cuba can't handle the influx is nothing more than an excuse. Cuba is a poor country, and in poor countries, labor is plentiful. Somehow I think the hotels and taxis would have no problem finding willing employees very quickly.
Cuba already has a tourist industry that deals takes about 1.8 million Canadian and European tourists. It's a matter of scaling that industry up.
I wonder about the growth of the niche medical tourist market. Cuba already caters this area to Latin America, and its not a reach to imagine American hopping over to Cuba for surgery and recuperation/vacation.
Actually, one key concern is not about the tourist industry per se, but rather the threat of inflation from a massive injection of money.
Post a Comment