Tourism And Informal Encounters In Cuba

Based on a detailed ethnography, this book explores the promises and expectations of tourism in Cuba, drawing attention to the challenges that tourists and local people face in establishing meaningful connections with each other. Notions of informal encounter and relational idiom illuminate ambiguous experiences of tourism harassment, economic transactions, hospitality, friendship, and festive and sexual relationships. Comparing these various connections, the author shows the potential of touristic encounters to redefine their moral foundations, power dynamics, and implications, offering new insights into how contemporary relationships across difference and inequality are imagined and understood.

This dynamic intersection of outsiders into the private spaces of daily life is the subject of this book, which details the physical and social adjustments of the owners and visitors of casas particulares. The work includes a background history of international tourism in Cuba before and after the revolution, as well as the attractions of Trinidad de Cuba, the site of the study, for tourists. The book then delves into the micro-geography of domestic and everyday spaces in casas particulares with thorough and engaging accounts by tourists and owners navigating this new territory.

A collection of essays from scholars evaluating tourism as a means of simulating economic growth and fighting economic inequalities in poor countries. It takes a look at the successes and failures of tourism in this role, and considers why tourism as a catalyst for economic development can be a controversial device.

The multiplicity of tourism encounters provide some of the best available occasions to observe the social world and its making(s). Focusing on ontological politics of tourism development, this book examines how different versions of tourism are enacted, how encounters between different versions of tourism orderings may result in controversies, but also on how these enactments and encounters are entangled in multiple ways to broader areas of development, conservation, policy and destination management. Throughout the book, encounters and controversies are investigated from a poststructuralist and relational approach as complex and emerging, seeing the roles and characteristics of related actors as co-constituted. Inspired by post-actor-network theory and related research, the studies include the social as well as the material, but also multiplicity and ontological politics when examining controversial matters or events.

Cuba has experienced many social, economic, and political changes since Raul Castro retained presidency of the island nation in 2008. This comprehensive volume examines how Cuba has restructured some of its core economic policies in order to tackle stagnation; these include allowing for more legalized private enterprises, reducing the number of State-employed workers, and fostering additional outside investments. The authors explore the surge of entrepreneurial activity in tourism among Cuban residents due to these reforms, whether that be offering new tourism products or expanding traditional ones. Though the current diplomatic climate suggests continued uncertainty, the ripple effect of a potentially thawing relationship between Cuba and the USA resulted in an unexpected surge of international tourists wishing to experience Cuba before it opened to the American travel market. This book highlights the factors that are influencing, and in some cases complicating, tourism planning and development in Cuba. The authors explore a wide range of topics including tourism and land-use policy, competitiveness, responsible practices, gender and ethical advertising, the role of tour guides, emergence of casa particulares, experiential learning and solidarity, and authenticity through local art. This book will interest students, researchers, politicians and investors with a focus on Cuba. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Tourism Planning & Development.

Tourism in Cuba - described by Fidel Castro as 'the evil we have to have' - has been regarded both with ambivalence, and as a crucial aspect of development and poverty alleviation. The result is a remarkable approach to tourism, one which often compels tourists to become agents of development through solidarity. Drawing on her experiences of working in an NGO in Cuba, the author uses a multi-sited ethnographic approach to investigate tourism motivations and experiences, and to examine the very nature of development. Her analysis covers a wide range of issues including social change, globalization, social theory, and sustainability. Also discussed is the way in which tourism in Cuba relates to broader debates surrounding transformation, capacity building, social action and solidarity.

This edited collection examines the emergence, development, and future of tourism ethnography, emphasizing the interpretive-humanistic approach honed by anthropologist Edward Bruner. Original chapters by thirteen leading anthropologists critically engage theories and concepts including authenticity, the touristic borderzone, and contested sites.

This book considers the recent growth of tourism in transitional societies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Research in Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru reveals that tourism often takes up where social transformation leaves off and may even benefit from the formerly off-limits status of nations that have undergone periods of conflict or rebellion.