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Abstract
The growth of Caribbean tourism other than to Cuba is partly a post–Cuban revolution phenomenon. After the Cuban revolution in 1959, U.S. travel restrictions in 1963 closed U.S. tourism to one of the preferred Caribbean destinations of U.S. travelers. In 1953, the last year of tourism statistics in Cuba before the revolution,1 Cuba received almost half of all tourist arrivals to the Caribbean; by 1980 Cuba had less than 3 percent of the market compared with the same set of countries.2 For example, in The Bahamas—despite a long history of tourism promotion that started with the Tourism Encouragement Act of 1851—it was the U.S. embargo on Cuba that provided “the main stimulus to the tourism industry,” with U.S. tourists switching to The Bahamas (The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism 2016). Tourist arrivals to The Bahamas grew from about 150,000 in 1954 to more than a million in 1968. Mexico also followed suit with the directed development of Cancun as a tourism destination.
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