A record 2.84 million tourists visited Cuba last year, up 4.5 percent from 2011 figures (by comparison, only 326,000 tourists came to Cuba in 1989). More than one million of them came from Canada, with large numbers also visiting from the United States — mainly Cuban-American exiles and those on specially licensed humanitarian or people-to-people excursions. Other important sources of tourism to Cuba are Latin America, Russia and, increasingly, China.
Barbados, an island highly dependent on tourism, is reeling under continued economic difficulties in Europe — its main tourism market — as well as a pending hike in the U.K. airline passenger duty and several violent attacks against British nationals.
One of the Caribbean’s top tourism destinations, the Bahamas, now has a world-class international airport to boast about. Yet who will foot the bill for this strikingly modern, $409.5 million expansion project remains a matter of controversy.
Visitor traffic to the Caribbean region should increase by 4 percent to 5 percent this year, reports the Barbados-based Caribbean Tourism Organization. That follows strong growth in 2012 that saw the islands of the Caribbean welcome 25 million visitors — 5.4 percent more than in 2011 and the largest number of stay-over visitors in five years.
Jamaican security officials are cracking down on telephone and Internet lottery scams that prey on elderly Americans, then drain their victims’ bank accounts to finance drug trafficking and other illegal activities that fuel violence throughout the Caribbean island.
BOWIE, Md. — With a prayer and a speech, Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s former ambassador to the United States, has officially launched A Dollar A Tree for Haiti Inc.
Donna Christiansen, the U.S. Virgin Islands’ non-voting delegate to Congress, is aggressively defending her territory’s right to use rum excise-tax rebates to lure companies such as Diageo to its shores.
Puerto Rico isn’t a country, so unlike most of its English-speaking Caribbean neighbors, it doesn’t have an embassy in Washington. And it’s not a state either, so it can’t send to Congress the eight lawmakers — two senators and six representatives — its population of 3.7 million would warrant under statehood.
WASHINGTON — Diplomats representing the 15-member Caribbean Community have begun a public lobbying campaign against the use of federal excise-tax rebates by Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to subsidize rum production.
WASHINGTON — Veteran Dominican diplomat Roberto B. Saladín, an early champion of the “twin plant” program that for years linked the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico economically, accepted a public service award Friday night from the Greater Washington Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
On Jan. 12, 2010 — the day a powerful earthquake destroyed Haiti’s capital city and wrecked its economy — Paul Altidor was at the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, advising his government on a pending deal to privatize the state-owned phone monopoly.
WHEATON, Md. — Three years ago, the large squat building at the entrance to suburban Westfield Wheaton Mall housed a Circuit City. These days, the big-box retailer is long gone — a victim of bankruptcy and hard times — and has been replaced by the Washington, D.C., area’s first fully bilingual private institution of higher learning.
Last year, California-based Cuba Travel Services launched, with great fanfare, the first direct charter flights between Puerto Rico and Cuba since the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.
Hoteliers are generally optimistic that 2012 will bring a modest recovery to Caribbean tourism arrivals, but at a recent conference in San Juan, there was plenty of grumbling that for too long, hotels have been shouldering an unfair tax burden when compared to the cruise industry.
A tax originally imposed by the British government to fight global warming is being viewed in the English-speaking Caribbean as a penalty against long-haul air travelers — and regional tourism officials are furious about it.
A Dow Jones/Factiva content provider since 2014
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