23 MAY 2019: The battle for Cuba’s economic future is being waged on its beaches. And at its all-inclusive resorts, dive sites and cobblestoned colonial plazas. As much of Cuba’s economy stagnates or declines, the country has launched a full-scale effort to turn virtually the only bright spot – tourism – into an engine that can help the rest of the communist island through its worst economic crisis in two decades.

In government meetings and propaganda, it has now set a goal of drawing 5 million tourists in 2019.

“In the middle of the hardening of the blockade on Cuba, the activation of Title III of Helms-Burton by the president of the United States, we’re assuming responsibility for injecting foreign exchange and developing the economy,” said Ivis Fernandez, the top tourism official in Matanzas province, home to the beach resort town of Varadero.

Helms-Burton Act is a US federal law which strengthens and continues the United States embargo against Cuba.

Across the Florida Straits, the Trump administration is intently focused on scaling back tourism to the island as part of a campaign to smother the Cuban economy and force its government to sever ties with President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela.

Trump recently activated a section of the 1996 US law known as allowing lawsuits against foreign companies doing business on properties confiscated after the island’s socialist revolution.

His administration has also pledged to limit the legal reasons under which Americans can visit Cuba, saying too many people are disguising illegal tourism as educational, religious or other types of travel.

The US has also prohibited Americans from patronizing a series of hotels and other facilities run by the military conglomerate that controls many of the most important sectors of the Cuban economy.

Cuba began to open the island to tourists after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent loss of billions a year in aid. In 1996, Cuba had 30,000 state-owned hotel rooms and about a million tourists a year.

Last year it had about 70,000 rooms, with another 24,000 in privately owned bed-and-breakfasts.

In total, Cuba drew 4.7 million tourists in 2018, a 1.3% rise over the previous year that puts its latest goal of 5 million within reach. Visits to the island are already running 7% higher than the same period last year, when some 639,000 US travellers took a trip, the second-highest of any nationality except Canada.

Official figures show that 257,000 Americans visited Cuba in the first four months of 2019, a 93% rise over the same period last year. Meanwhile, about 142,000 came on cruise ships, a form of travel that remains legal and is largely responsible for the rising number of American travellers to Cuba. Only 40,000 American cruise passengers visited Cuba in the first four months of 2018.

Cuba is currently trying to revive businesses ranging from agriculture to textiles by turning them into part of the supply chain for the tourism business. State-run factories, warehouses and workshops are largely in disrepair after years of embargo and central planning, and many of the millions earned by hotels and tour buses must be turned around and spent on imported goods ranging from food to bedsheets.

“The big problem with tourism as a foreign-exchange earner is the amount of importing that it has to do,” said Jose Luis Perello, an economist and expert on tourism. “In order to keep developing tourism we need national industry to become more dynamic.”

Still, experts say that the state-run tourism sector brings in $3 billion a year and the private side brings in the same, despite being nearly one-third the size.

The paradise-like beaches of Varadero, currently have 21,200 hotel rooms and the city is trying to build 1,000 more per year for at least the next five years, managed in partnership with hospitality giants Melia and Barcelo of Spain and Fiesta Americana of Mexico.

While Spanish hotel chain Iberostar could be a major potential target of lawsuits under the activation of the Helms-Burton provision, owner Miguel Fluxa did not appear worried at an international tourism fair last week.

“I do not know (what is going to happen with Helms-Burton),” he said. “The only thing that I know is that any step we have taken we have taken according to the law.”