Later this year, for the first time in more than half a century, American tourists will be able to hop on a jet from any major U.S. airport and fly directly to Havana.
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.
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.
A Dow Jones/Factiva content provider since 2014
Subscribe to our Dollars & Sense podcast!
