Cuba’s high-peak season posts record highs in the number of visitors

Cuba showed satisfaction over the good faring of its high-peak tourist season that brought in some 770,000 visitors to the island nation’s beaches, urban hotels and nature destinations regardless of an unfavorable and a tight-rope international situation. Cuba’s tourism vice minister Marta Maiz Gomez said “this has been a good season” with 19 percent more arrivals than in 2002 and 2 percent more than in 2001, by far the best year up to now.

“People give high marks to security, that’s why so many visitors pick the island nation to spend their vacations on,” Mrs. Gomez stated during the opening ceremony of Cuba’s 23rd Tourism Convention that got cracking last Monday.

The Convention –with a projected turnout of a thousand attendants, 900 of them from as many as 60 countries- is taking place at the Plaza America Conference Center in Varadero, a beach paradise some 87 miles east of Havana. The conclave’s objective is the unveiling of Cuba’s new tourist products to the eyes of tour operators, travel agents, airline execs and journalists, with a marked interest in highlighting the island nation’s potentials in events, incentives, nature, ecological tourism and culture.

The Cuban high-ranking official added the island’s tourist destinations posting the highest growth figures are Havana, Varadero, Jardines del Rey (in the northern keys off the province of Ciego de Avila) and Holguin in northeastern Cuba. Last year, the Caribbean island was visited by 1,686,162 tourists, a figure somewhat shy of the 1.9 million visitors Cuba was aiming at, and 5 percent less than the year before, sources said. If official forecasts hold true, the 2003 projections will account for a 12.7 percent increase and will send average occupancy rates to 61.7 percent.