Cuba: She Used to Sell Tourist Packages, Now She Sells Ice
By Raul Medina Orama (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Hotels deserted and all operations suspended since February 2026, workers without salaries, and entire families in Caibarién and nearby municipalities forced to reinvent themselves to survive: that is the situation nearly seven months after most of the facilities in the tourist hub of Villa Clara, Cuba’s northern cays were shut down.
“Many of us are living partly on the charity of former guests who became friends and send food or money to help us support our families,” said Yanet, who worked for more than a decade at a hotel managed by the Gaviota Group, part of the Gaesa business holding company controlled by the Cuban military. told elTOQUE.
In speaking with El Toque, the woman in her early 40s who entered the tourism industry because it offered higher earnings than virtually any other job in Cuba, explained how she feels today about having to accept help from former guests: “I find it humiliating, because I should be able to provide for my family through my work, but there’s no other choice.”
Yanet never imagined that unemployment would reach her when layoffs began and the hotels with the lowest occupancy rates in Cayo Santa María, Las Brujas and Ensenachos closed because of fuel shortages and the country’s deepening overall crisis. Given Yanet’s specialized skills and her years of experience as a full-time employee, she believed she would remain in her position until better times once again brought thousands of Canadian and European tourists to the beaches and resorts north of Caibarien.
Her hotel was among the few that remained open for several more days, until, in mid-February, guests began being relocated to what was then the Paradisus Los Cayos — renamed Los Cayos after Meliá ceased operations in July. It is the only hotel still open among the more than 20 that had operated in the area.
But after the first week of March, Yanet joined the ranks of unemployed tourism workers, including her husband, who had lost his job during the first wave of closures.
Neither of them received any salary guarantees. “No severance pay, nothing. We were paid through the last day we worked, and that was it,” said the woman, who lives in Camajuaní.
According to Yanet, the hotels offered — through the municipal labor offices — “jobs in whatever positions were available, but no town has that many openings, much less jobs suited to every tourism worker.” Most of the positions were related to municipal services, she said, and did not match the occupations of those coming from the tourism sector.
At the Cayo Santa María facility where she worked, a few technical service, security and gardening employees remain — “the bare minimum” workforce — enduring precarious conditions during periods of up to two weeks in which they must stay at the hotel without being able to return home.
“They basically don’t even have food there. Their electricity is being cut off, their water is being cut off,” the source said. That is why, she maintains, “no one else is going to work under those conditions, stuck away from home for that many days.”
Everyone has had to find alternatives on their own. Yanet’s husband ended up working as an agricultural day laborer. Taking advantage of the solar panels at their home, she began making and selling ice, offering cold soft drinks, and trying to get a small laundry service off the ground. Even so, the income is not enough. “There’s very little money, and everything gets more expensive by the day,” she summed up.
Yanet is not alone in this situation. She says the hotel closures have caused widespread unemployment among people she knows and forced several of her friends to reinvent themselves or seek work in the private sector.
So far, there is no official figure for how many people have lost their jobs in Villa Clara, but the phenomenon is part of a collapse that authorities have acknowledged nationwide. Prime Minister Manuel Marrero admitted before the National Assembly of People’s Power that 73% of the country’s hotel facilities remain closed, a situation he described as a “near-total shutdown” of tourism services and attributed to the departure of seven international chains that had managed 46% of the country’s hotel rooms.
According to Marrero, that corporate exodus has left 25,000 workers “available,” the official euphemism uses to refer to the unemployed.
Yanet says economic activity in her municipality has been affected by the decline in foreign currency flowing into the town: farmers who supplied the hotels lost those sales, while businesses that provided support services to the tourism industry have also suffered.
In Caibarién, Pablo — a former tourism worker — describes an impact that extends far beyond the hotels. In his view, the closures have been “disastrous” for the municipality’s economy, not only because employees who worked “on the cays” represented an important share of the economically active population, but also because they were customers and consumers at local private and state-run businesses that are now seeing their revenues fall.
Among those most affected, he mentions food suppliers; artisans who lost a place to sell their work to foreign tourists; and musicians, dancers, choreographers and designers who were left without job opportunities — as well as companies involved in hotel maintenance.
The decline of the tourism industry is yet another blow to the economic ruin of Caibarién and nearby towns. The local fishing fleet, once significant, has now been dismantled, as have the port facilities. Likewise, nothing remains of the sugar mills in Caibarien and Camajuaní either.
According to Pablo, traveling from Caibarien to other municipalities such as Remedios or Camajuaní in search of work is so expensive that it is hardly worth the effort or expense. He predicts that unemployment will remain high as long as there are no industries capable of absorbing the workforce that once worked on the cays.
The Ministry of Tourism, meanwhile, insists that a large portion of the main tourist destinations remain operational, although it acknowledges that Los Cayos is the only hotel open in Cayo Santa María.
Data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) confirm the scale of the decline. According to the official agency, Cuba received 419,863 “international visitors” through July 2026, representing a 37.2% decrease compared with the same period the previous year. Canada, Russia and the United States registered the sharpest declines among countries sending tourists to the island.
Cuban authorities attribute the collapse in tourism to US sanctions, particularly those imposed in 2026 by the Trump administration against the Gaesa military conglomerate.
Economist Elias Amor, who closely follows the figures published by ONEI each year, believes that the sustained decline in hotel occupancy — which no longer covers even average operating costs — ultimately explains the departure of the international chains. He describes what has happened as “the absolute failure of the communist regime’s tourism policy.”
However, despite the industry’s decline and the steady decrease in foreign arrivals in recent years, the Cuban government has prioritized investment in the sector while neglecting public services and other areas of the economy that directly affect people’s lives.
For now, the industry once described by government officials as “the locomotive of the Cuban economy” has been derailed in Caibarien. In the towns of northern Villa Clara, the most urgent question is not when the hotels near the so-called “Villa Blanca” will reopen, but what people can do in the meantime to put food on the table.
“We don’t know what the future of our jobs will be. It’s uncertain, just like the future of this country,” Yanet concludes.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.