Description
Critical scholarship convincingly presents tourism in the Global South as a form of neocolonialism. Research demonstrates that Western/Northern tourists and corporations exploit the people, states, cultures, environments, and economies of the tourist destinations for their own benefit. Feminist scholarship further reveals the ways gender is employed that make possible the subordination and exploitation of these destinations. This paper investigates the degree to which tourism in Cuba is consistent with these gendered socio-cultural constructions and patterns of exploitation. In contrast to most destination states, the Cuban state has exerted considerable control over the tourist industry, including purposefully collapsing the industry following the 1959 revolution and deliberately resuscitating tourism in the early 1990s but largely keeping it under state control. Drawing on fieldwork in Cuba, this paper assesses whether the Cuban state’s strict management of the industry on the island has mitigated the neocolonial exploitation and gendered patterns that are endemic in the industry in much of the rest of the Caribbean.
Key words: neocolonialism, Global South, tourism, gender, Cuba
