Cuba’s Hotel Challenges: A Guide to All the Projects in Process

The surge in visitors to Cuba, brought on by the December 2014 detente between the island and the U.S., caught the Caribbean nation unawares. Hotels are overwhelmed and Cuba can't build new hotels fast enough to cope with the boom in visitors from the US and around the world. Last year 3,524,779 people visited Cuba, a 17 per cent increase on the year before. Over recent years Cuba has slowly been building mostly beach resorts for Canadian and European tourists with a few pockets of urban hotel activity in cities such as Santiago de Cuba (the much-needed city center Hotel E Imperial has just opened) distant Baracoa and in central Camagüey, a city not on the principal tourist circuit. In Viñales, where the accommodation situation is acute, one new small hotel is under construction opposite the church plaza to complement the existing offering of just three state-run hotels in the valley. In 2014, the Cuban government passed the Foreign Investment Law (FIL) offering foreign comp