Cuba’s constitution guarantees its people access to its beaches, but many locals are unable to enjoy the island’s pristine white sands and crystal clear blue waters.
While foreign tourists flock to such paradisiacal Havana sites as Varadero, which was this year named the second-most beautiful beach in the world by American travel web site TripAdvisor, Cubans are typically found elsewhere.
“Not many tourists come here,” said Rey Gonzalez, 43, who was enjoying a day at Guanabo, a beach east of the capital.
Photo: AFP
Guanabo’s sand is not as white and the water not quite as clear as Varadero’s, but that mattered little to Gonzalez, who was there with his family.
“For me, all the beaches are the same: sand, the sea ... you don’t see the difference when you’re swimming,” Gonzalez said.
Sitting on a stretch of beach where numerous stray beer cans were visible, Lazaro Palomino, 34, added: “We like the beach, whether it’s clean or dirty.”
Even so, Palomino recognizes that Varadero is on a different level.
“All Cubans would love to go. I went once and I came back in shock” at its beauty, Palomino said with a chuckle.
Like everything else in communist Cuba, beaches are a political issue.
“In Cuba, there are only Cuban beaches, which are part of the nation’s heritage,” said Jose Luis Perello, a tourism expert.
He quotes article 23 of the constitution, which asserts that the country’s 271 beaches are “socialist property belonging to everyone.”
It has been that way since the communist revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959.
Before that, the coast was covered by private beaches reserved for members — who were mostly white.
Even former dictator Fulgencio Batista, who reigned twice, first from 1940 to 1944 and then from 1955 to 1959, was unable to obtain a membership card because he was mixed race.
However, while the revolution established universal beach access, the shoreline remains a place viewed with suspicion.
“It was linked to the illegal exodus” of people trying to flee the island’s communist rulers “and was the entry point to the country of little groups with certain interests,” Perello said, alluding to the failed US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
Despite the official party line, dissidents such as late writer Reinaldo Arenas complained that they could not go to certain beaches that were reserved for members of trade unions.
Likewise, for many years, Cubans were banned from hotels, and today they are still not allowed to board boats.
Another reason Cubans are kept off their island’s beaches is tourism. Last year’s 4.75 million visitors brought in US$3.3 billion — money the Cuban government sorely needs as it struggles under crippling US sanctions.
At least one hotel in Varadero advertises an exclusive beach, and locals say security guards kick them off hotel beaches.
For locals, just getting to the beach can also be a challenge.
Most do not own a car and cannot afford the bus fare to take them to the shore.
Caridad Vidangel, 48, managed to reach Bacuranao, but only after taking a bus and then a horse-drawn carriage.
“If we could, we’d go somewhere else,” she said of the beach, the closest one to her home. “I’ve never been to Varadero. I’d like to ... but it’s impossible.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS