‘An Unrivalled Paradise’: The Production of Difference in the Cuban Ministry of Tourism's Auténtica Cuba

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.11.2.0310
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Date: 01 December 2019
• Pages: 310-331
• Author: Gabriela Bacsán
• Subject Matter: Cuban difference,afro-Cubans,tourism,paradise,revolution

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 11.2 WInter 2019

ACADEMIC ARTICLE

‘AN UNRIVALLED PARADISE’: THE

PRODUCTION OF DIFFERENCE IN THE CUBAN

MINISTRY OF TOURISM’S AUTÉNTICA CUBA

Gabriela Bacsán1

Scripps College, California, USA

Abstract

Utilising an interdisciplinary methodology that draws from cultural studies

and critical tourism studies, this article examines the production of difference

at the intersection of hedonism and revolution in the Cuban Ministry of

Tourism’s international campaign, Auténtica Cuba. I analyse how the campaign’s

feature film, Auténtica Cuba, carefully crafts a narrative of authenticity in its

construction of the island as ‘an unrivalled paradise’. I pay close attention to how

the production, commodification and marketing of Cuban difference for tourist

consumption is contested and perpetuated, especially as difference is embodied

by Afro-Cubans in the film. I conclude by considering whether the campaign

provides what Stuart Hall terms, effective translation, in its aims to challenge

the gendered, racialised and sexualised constructions of Cuba and Cubans as

objects for tourist consumption. As tourism shapes and is shaped by neocolonial

discourses of difference, this work is timely as – in light of the speculation about

future transformations on the island – it considers the implications of the state’s

renewed framing of the expansion of tourism development as central to the

work of the revolution.

Keywords: Cuban difference, Afro-Cubans, tourism, paradise, revolution

1 Gabriela Bacsán, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish, Latin

American, and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures at Scripps College. Her research

centres on contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures with

a focus on the intersections of sexuality, gender, and race.

‘AN UNRIVALLED PARADISE’ 311

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‘I invite you to get to know an unrivalled paradise’, boast the lyrics to one of the

songs that accompany the feature promotional film for the Cuban Ministry of

Tourism’s marketing campaign, Auténtica Cuba, which has been successfully

promoting international tourism to the island since 2010.2 The campaign’s con-

struction of Cuba as an incomparable paradise perpetuates discourses that dis-

tinguish the island as a commodity in the global capitalist market of tourism.

Notably differentiated as the ‘Pearl of the Antilles’, ‘Holiday Isle of the Tropics’

and ‘Land of Romance’, Cuba was effectively sold to foreign tourists, mainly

from the United States (US), as paradise through graphic advertisements that

drew on colonial imagery of the land and its people since the 1930s.3 While

international tourism to the island was halted with the triumph of the revolution

in 1959 as ‘the island no longer was pleasurable to visit’ (Schwartz 1999: 203),

Cuba did not completely lose its place as a commodity in the global capitalist

market. Due to several historical and economic processes, it acquired new mean-

ings as a ‘socialist utopia’, ‘forbidden fruit’ and ‘a place stuck in time’.4 Foreign

leisure travel was reintroduced decades later as the state reinstated a formal

tourism industry via the formation of the Ministerio de Turismo (MINTUR) in

1994 as a means for economic survival amidst what Fidel Castro termed, the

Special Period in Times of Peace (Pérez 2011). The reintroduction of foreign

tourism simultaneously brought great economic gains and adverse social conse-

quences, such as a notable resurgence of sex work and the perpetuation of racial-

ised social inequalities.5 This highlights a key conundrum for the Cuban state:

how to promote tourism for increased economic profit while regulating the

2 All translations are the author’s own.

3 See, for example, the travel advertisements included in Levi and Heller (2002). Written

accounts in travel guides also facilitated the commodification of the island during

the first half of the twentieth century as in these, ‘Cuba became a smiling, luxuri-

ant tropical land where romance, beautiful women, soft music-filled nights, and the

enchantments of Spanish culture awaited visitors’ (Schwartz 1999: xxi). Pérez aptly

notes that since the mid-1800s, ‘Cuba entered the North American imagination as the

“tropics” . . . a past in which to pursue undistracted pleasure . . . To be in Cuba was

to be transported back to a simpler time’ (2008: 22).

4 Most notably, the imposition of the US trade embargo and the loss of its principal

trading partner after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. As Schwartz aptly notes,

‘[e]nforced isolation has enhanced the island’s mystique’ (1999: 212). Babb adds that

since the 1990s, ‘tourism has met surprising success in appealing to desires of both pre-

revolutionary pleasures and enduring revolutionary culture and politics’ (2011: 50).

5 For thorough discussions on the resurgence of tourism, sex work and racialised social

inequalities in Cuba since the 1990s, see Allen (2011), Babb (2010), Cabezas (2009),

Fernandez (1999), Roland (2013) and Stout (2014).