HAVANA—The first U.S. cruise ship in nearly 40 years crossed the
Florida Straits from Miami and docked in Havana on Monday,
restarting commercial travel on waters that served as a stage for a
half-century of Cold War hostility.
Carnival Cruise Line's 704-passenger Adonia became the first
U.S. cruise ship in Havana since President Jimmy Carter eliminated
virtually all restrictions of U.S. travel to Cuba in the late
1970s. Travel limits were restored after Carter left office and
U.S. cruises to Cuba only become possible again after presidents
Barack Obama and Raul Castro declared detente on Dec. 17, 2014.
The Adonia's arrival is the first step toward a future in which
thousands of ships a year could cross the Florida Straits, long
closed to most U.S.-Cuba traffic due to tensions that once brought
the world to the brink of nuclear war. The straits were blocked by
the U.S. during the Cuban Missile Crisis and tens of thousands of
Cubans have fled across them to Florida on homemade rafts—with
untold thousands dying in the process.
The number of Cubans trying to cross the straits is at its
highest point in eight years and cruises and merchant ships
regularly rescue rafters from the straits.
The Adonia is one of Carnival's smaller ships—roughly half the
size of some larger European vessels that already dock in
Havana—but U.S. cruises are expected to bring Cuba tens of millions
of dollars in badly needed foreign hard currency if traffic
increases as expected. More than a dozen lines have announced plans
to run U.S.-Cuba cruises and if all actually begin operations Cuba
could earn more than $80 million a year, according to the U.S.-Cuba
Trade and Economic Council said in a report Monday.
Most of the money goes directly to the Cuban government, council
head John Kavulich said. He estimated that the cruise companies pay
the government $500,000 per cruise, while passengers spend about
$100 per person in each city they visit.
Carnival says the Adonia will cruise twice a month from Miami to
Havana, where it will start a $1,800 per person seven-day circuit
of Cuba with stops in the cities of Cienfuegos and Santiago de
Cuba. The trips include on-board workshops on Cuban history and
culture and tours of the cities that make them qualify as
"people-to-people" educational travel, avoiding a ban on pure
tourism that remains part of U.S. law.
Optional activities for the Adonia's passengers include a
walking tour of Old Havana's colonial plazas and a $219 per person
trip to the Tropicana cabaret in a classic car.
Before the 1959 Cuban revolution, cruise ships regularly
traveled from the U.S. to Cuba, with elegant Caribbean cruises
departing from New York and $42 overnight weekend jaunts leaving
twice a week from Miami, said Michael L. Grace, an amateur cruise
ship historian.
The United Fruit company operated once-a-week cruise service out
of New Orleans, too, he said. "Cuba was a very big destination for
Americans, just enormous," he said.
Cruises dwindled in the years leading up to the Cuban Revolution
and ended entirely after Castro overthrew the U.S.-backed
government.
After Carter dropped limits on Cuba travel, 400 passengers,
including musical legend Dizzy Gillespie sailed from New Orleans to
Cuba on a 1977 "Jazz Cruise" aboard the MS Daphne. Like the Adonia,
it sailed despite dockside protests by Cuban exiles, and continued
protests and bomb threats forced Carras Cruises to cancel
additional sailings, Grace said.
The following year, however, Daphne made several cruises from
New Orleans to Cuba and other destinations in the Caribbean.
Cuba cut back on all cruise tourism in 2005, ending a joint
venture with Italian terminal management company Silares Terminales
del Caribe and Fidel Castro blasted cruise ships during a speech on
state television.
"Floating hotels come, floating restaurants, floating theaters,
floating diversions visit countries to leave their trash, their
empty cans and papers for a few miserable cents," Castro said.
Today, the Cuban government sees cruises as an easy source of
revenue that can bring thousands more American travelers without
placing additional demand on the country's maxed-out food supplies
and over-booked hotels.
Before detente, Americans made surreptitious yacht trips to Cuba
during Caribbean vacations and the number of Americans coming by
boat has climbed since 2014, including passengers on cruise ships
registered in third countries and sailing from other ports in the
Caribbean. Traffic remains low, however, for a major tourist
attraction only 90 miles from Florida.
Aiming to change that as part of a policy of diplomatic and
economic normalization, Obama approved U.S. cruises to Cuba in
2015. The Doral, Fla.-based Carnival Cruise Line announced during
Obama's historic trip to Cuba in March that it would begin cruises
to Cuba starting May 1.
Unexpected trouble arose after Cuban-Americans in Miami began
complaining that Cuban rules barred them from traveling to the
country of their birth by ship. As Carnival considered delaying the
first sailing, Cuba announced April 22 it was changing the rule to
allow Cubans and Cuban-Americans to travel on cruise ships,
merchant vessels and, sometime in the future, yachts and other
private boats.
Norwegian Cruise Line says it is in negotiations with Cuban
authorities and hopes to begin cruises from the U.S. to Cuba this
year.
Cruise traffic is key to the Cuban government's re-engineering
of the industrial Port of Havana as a tourist attraction. After
decades of treating the more than 500-year-old bay as a receptacle
for industrial waste, the government is moving container traffic to
the Port of Mariel west of the city, tearing out abandoned
buildings and slowly renovating decrepit warehouses as breweries
and museums connected by waterfront promenades.
Cruise dockings will be limited by the port's single cruise
terminal, which can handle two ships at a time.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 02, 2016 11:55 ET (15:55 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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