Ensconced in a gleaming white building complete with colonnaded façades and a luxury hotel, Cuba’s newly opened Manzana de Gómez shopping center stands out amid Havana’s colonial skyline. Inside the century-old structure, high-end shops peddle pricey wares by Lacoste, Mont Blanc, and L’Occitane en Provence. As reported by the AP on Wednesday, mallgoers gawk and take selfies in front of window displays, using cellphones that have become increasingly popular ever since the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, which runs the government, lifted its ban on mobile-phone ownership in 2008. Galleries on the ground floor exhibit cheaper but far from inexpensive wares targeted to Havana’s emerging middle class. Miami’s Yusnaby Post, a Spanish-language resource for Cuba news, recently tweeted out images of the mall and hotel’s cushy appointments:
Boasting boutique international brands making their first forays into Cuba, the upscale mall in the historic center of the island nation’s capital city has emerged as a ready-made symbol of the communist country’s national struggles with social equality and its budding embrace of capitalist consumerism. The five-story spectacle is the brainchild of Gaviota Tourism Group, a branch of the Cuban armed forces that offers services ranging from buses and car rentals to restaurants and catamaran excursions. Part of a complex network of government bureaucracies involved in the tourism industry, Gaviota might also be the closest thing the communist nation has to a private sector. The group owns the mall and its top-floor hotel through Cimex, its 20-year-old corporate outgrowth. But the hotel’s day-to-day operations are carried out by the luxury Swiss hotelier Kempinski—an example of an increasingly common arrangement for the nascent tourist economy, which lacks a deep bench of private-sector service professionals to draw on.
It’s understandable to cast the towering Manzana de Gómez as a monument to Cuba’s current moment, its ideological struggle between romanticized yet outmoded communism and rapacious consumerism. Many Cubans still frame the discussion that way. The death of former president Fidel Castro last November prompted paeans not only to the deceased revolutionary who helmed the country for nearly half a century but to the ideological ethos animating Cuban communism as well.
But are a few glitzy storefronts really proof that Cuba is selling out its communist bona fides? In truth, the ruling CCP has been chipping away at its own anticapitalist underpinnings for years. According to a study published last December by the Brookings Institution, the ascendant leaders of the 1959 revolution briefly closed the gate on “the excesses and vices of the tourism industry.” But since then, driven more by necessity than ideology, the government has periodically relied on tourism to replenish its coffers in tough times. Thirty years ago, when the collapse of the Soviet Union plunged the island into a period of economic isolation and stagnation euphemistically known as the “Special Period,” the Cuban government created state-owned groups like Gaviota and partnered with European hotel chains to attract tourist dollars. Government investment in tourism once again slacked off until the 2008 recession, flagging economic aid from critical allies like Venezuela, Brazil, and China, and the normalization of U.S.-Cuba diplomatic relations in 2014 once again compelled the government to reinvest in tourism. Its 2030 Vision Plan, unveiled in April of last year, casts “diversified tourism” as a cornerstone of “strengthening … the integration of the domestic economy,” promising investments in “marinas and boating, golf and condominiums, eco-tourism, agro-tourism, cruise ships, historical and cultural tourism, conventions, congresses and festivals, and, especially, health and wellness tourism.”
Cuba’s tourism boom has also been the product of domestic political change. In 2008, an infirm but no less dogmatic Fidel Castro ceded the presidency to his more reform-minded younger brother, Raúl. The leadership transition helped dispel antiquated socialist shibboleths, opening Cuba to incremental free-market expansions. Tourism has emerged as ground zero for those capitalist flirtations. Government-licensed small-business owners, called cuentapropistas, operate small bed-and-breakfast accommodations for tourists, as does the American app Airbnb. Cruise ships and international flights disgorge millions of tourists every year. Brookings estimates that the number of foreign visitors to Cuba will triple to 10 million in the coming years, raking in as much as $10 billion in foreign exchanges by 2030.
Today’s Cuba straddles two formerly competing economic systems in an effort to offset socialism’s economic flaws without jettisoning its aspirations toward social justice. Nevertheless, the Cuban government views the proto-capitalist market emerging in its midst with some suspicion. Nervous bureaucrats loathe to undermine their own authority clog the CCP, throwing up obstacles to change. Beset by regime critics agitating for broader political rights, President Raúl Castro has taken pains to prevent economic liberalization from snowballing into political reform.
But free-market growth, pushed by Cubans themselves, may be acquiring its own momentum. Illicit businesses have sustained an underground entrepreneurial flame that now burns more openly. “When more people get more proactive and more assertive, then other people—whether they like it or not—have to do the same,” Arturo López Levy, a former analyst with the Cuban government, told the New York Times in 2012. “They have to compete.”
Not unlike the Manzana de Gómez itself, however, that economy has a dark side. Despite an advanced medical sector, one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America, and an economic windfall through more open relations with the European Union, Cuba remains financially precarious. Economic recession brought on by reductions in deliveries of Venezuelan oil as Cuba’s South American neighbor tackles a crisis of its own has prompted calls for greater market liberalization and closer ties with the United States. Coupled with a growing middle class and increased economic inequality, most of Cuba’s 11 million citizens can’t come close to being able to afford the luxuries in which its newest mall traffics. “There are people who can come here to buy things but it’s maybe one in 10,” Rodolfo Hernandez Torres, a 71-year-old retired electrical mechanic who makes $12.50 a month, told the AP. “Most of the country doesn’t have the money.”
Others worry that the pendulum has swung too far toward laissez-faire capitalism, sacrificing critical government benefits and services on the altar of private-sector growth. Until recently, the Soviet-style Cuban government employed fully 85 percent of the country’s total workforce. In 2010, President Raúl Castro announced a plan to bolster private industry by laying off half a million redundant state employees, a 10 percent reduction in public-sector employment.
And in an ironic twist, Cuba’s capitalism-snubbing history has begun to feed its consumerist machine. Old Havana’s quaint colonial façades, classic American and Soviet cars, and even the visage of Fidel’s fellow communist revolutionary Che Guevara have become commercialized attractions, fodder for fashion designers, and catnip for celebrity Instagrams pimped as selling points to eager tourists. As one American visitor to Havana told the AP of the new mall, “I was very disappointed. I came here to get away from this. This screams wealth and America to us.”
