Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the evolution of recent state-led tourism campaigns from the 2000s onwards, analysing the strategic projection of images through tourism as a negotiation and reflection of the shifting realities of contemporary Cuba more generally.

Paper long abstract:

Cuba's urgent imperative to generate hard currency following the Soviet bloc collapse in 1989 meant, amongst other rapid reconfigurations of the economy, strategic and accelerated development of the dormant tourism industry. With the threat of total economic collapse, but in full recognition of the adverse social effects and ideological compromises that such developments represented, the revolutionary government placed strict parameters on the industry, limiting foreign investment and control, allowing increasing degrees of activity in the informal sector (legalising but regulating micro-enterprises which had swiftly sought to profit from booming tourist numbers) and retaining creative and administrative control of marketing campaigns. Beyond the 'world-making' authority that scholarship has attributed to tourism marketing (Ballerino Cohen, 1995; Hollinshead, 2004), the specific context of Cuba during the 1990s and 2000s merits special consideration: tourism allowed the projection of carefully selected images to establish political sympathy in the wider world during austerity and crisis (Sanchez and Adams, 2008) but also undermined socialist aspirations, provoked accusations of an inevitable backslide to pre-revolutionary social ills, and exposed the limits of state control. This paper considers the thematic and aesthetic evolution of state-led tourism campaigns during the specific political, economic and social-cultural context of this period, with special focus from 2006 to the present day, as well as reflecting on the multiple voices in formal and informal spheres that emerged alongside them.