The news from Havana is as predictable as it is satisfying. Cuba’s tourism industry, once the lifeline of a decrepit regime, has cratered. Visitor numbers have plummeted by over 40% this year. The usual apologists will wring their hands about ‘economic warfare’. They will mutter about ‘blockades’ and ‘imperialism’. Let us call this what it is: the withering of a parasite under the sun of reality. The UK, alongside its allies, has maintained a strategy of targeted sanctions against the Castroite tyranny. This collapse is its vindication.
The romanticism of the Cuban Revolution has long curdled into a grotesque parody of itself. The faded Chevrolets, the crumbling balconies, the beaches that once promised hedonistic escape now lie empty. Why? Because tourists, particularly the discerning British traveller, have finally realised that a holiday in Cuba is a moral compromise few can stomach. They have voted with their wallets. The regime’s response has been its usual grotesque mixture of repression and blame-shifting. But the statistics do not lie.
This is not merely an economic story. It is a story about the triumph of principle over sentimentality. For decades, the Left in Britain and elsewhere has treated Cuba as a curious museum piece, a defiant ‘alternative’ to the American Empire. They have ignored the political prisoners, the suppression of dissent, the state-sponsored hypocrisy. The collapse of tourism, I argue, is a direct consequence of a sustained and intelligent sanctions policy. It is a policy that the UK, post-Brexit, has pursued with a clarity that our European partners often lack.
Of course, the usual suspects will claim that sanctions hurt the people, not the regime. This is a tired canard. Sanctions impose costs on regimes, forcing them to choose between survival and reform. Castro, now his brother, has chosen survival, but at a terrible price. The people of Cuba deserve better. They deserve to be freed from a system that has kept them in poverty for sixty years. A collapse in tourism, which funnelled hard currency directly to the state, is the fastest way to force change. It is a harsh medicine, but the patient is terminally ill.
Let us draw a historical parallel. We remember the collapse of the Soviet bloc. It came from within, yes, but the pressure of Western economic isolation was a crucial accelerant. The UK played its part then, and it plays its part now. This is not jingoism. This is a sober appreciation of how power works. The Cuban regime, like all tyrannies, survives on oxygen. Deny it that oxygen, and it suffocates.
I am fully aware that this position will annoy the bien-pensant readers of this newspaper. You will call me a reactionary. You will cite the success of Cuban healthcare or education. But those successes, such as they are, have been achieved at the cost of freedom. A state that can educate and heal but cannot permit a free press or a democratic election is not a state worthy of admiration. It is a prison with decent facilities.
The collapse of Cuba’s tourism sector is not a tragedy. It is an opportunity. An opportunity for the Cuban people to finally demand the liberty they have been denied. An opportunity for the West to say, with one voice, that tyranny will not be subsidised by package holidays. The UK-led sanctions strategy has worked. Now, let us have the courage to see it through. The ruins of the Cuban tourist industry are not a monument to Western cruelty. They are the first stones of a new edifice: a free Cuba.
