Promote Cuba destination. Image: MC

By María Josefina Arce

In one of the most beautiful sun and beach tourist destinations in Cuba, the Jardines del Rey group of keys, in the center-east of the country, the forty-second International Tourism Fair takes place, considered one of the most important exchanges in the sector in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This event is a space to show the potential for relaxation that Cuba offers, along with a great heritage and cultural wealth and the characteristic hospitality of its people.

It makes it possible to promote, among tour operators, travel agencies and airline representatives, the Cuba destination, after the negative impact on the so-called leisure industry that the COVID19 pandemic had in the world and whose recovery for our country is even more complex due to the tightening of the U.S. blockade.

This hostile policy, which in the case of that sector tries to discourage travel to Cuban territory, prevents the Caribbean nation from accessing the main tourist market in the area, which is the United States.

This context also includes the denial of access to the ESTA electronic visa to travel to the United States to 300,000 European citizens who have visited the Greater Antilles.

On this occasion, the International Tourism Fair will be dedicated to Latin America and the Caribbean, with its sights set, according to its organizers, on encouraging the arrival of travelers from Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, among other nations in the area.

The meeting was preceded by the holding, in the resort of Varadero, of the sixty-ninth meeting of the UN Tourism Regional Commission for the Americas, also an opportunity to appreciate the potential of that sphere in the archipelago and support for the work that authorities are developing to promote the recovery of tourism, an important source of foreign currency for the country.

Zurab Pololikashvili, Secretary General of UN Tourism, stressed that he was in Cuba to tell the world that you can come here, it is one of the safest countries I have visited, he stressed.

Likewise, last January the prestigious American media National Geographic designated Cuba as the first cultural destination to visit on the American continent this year.

The International Tourism Fair is, without a doubt, a favorable occasion to promote the destination of Cuba, which has a lot to offer visitors, and to establish new links and alliances that contribute to the development of the sector and, therefore, to the advancement of communities and the well-being of citizens.