Where the Tourist is King

it's a Cuban joke, told by the people on the street:

Someone goes up to a Cuban boy in Havana and asks him, what do you want to be when you grow up? The boy thinks about it, then answers, "I want to be a tourist."

says Tom Miller of the boy's choice:

And why not? Tourists have access to much of Cuba that natives can't enjoy. Canadians and Europeans arrive by the charterful, whisked to Club Med-type resorts where the only Cubans they run into are the help and the entertainers. Industrial tourism has overtaken sugar and mining as the country's leading hard-currency earner, second only to cash sent by overseas relatives.

that's to put it mildly. tourists in Cuba get to stay in resorts Cubans are not allowed to visit (exept as workers, for a pittance). Tourists get the best food (paid for, of course, in hard currency, which Cubans don't have). Tourirsts can buy toiletries such as soap and deodorant which most Cubans don't have access to (no hard currency, no way to fight B.O., comrade ... we all stink for the future of the Revolution). In this socialist paradise, the Cuban people can't pay, so they get left out.

and, of course, the tourist has the ultimate freedom: the freedom to leave Cuba at the end of their vacation. Cubans are stuck there. they have nowhere to go. they can't leave Cuba without the permission of the government, which it seldom grants.

here's another joke that made the rounds a few years back:

what are the Cuban Revolution's three greatest accomplishments? health care, education, and women's rights.

what are the Cuban Revolution's three greatest failures? breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

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while on the subject of tourism, i am reminded of Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, a now-old but still relevant commentary of tourism and colonialism. From that book:

Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives -- most natives in the world -- cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go -- so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and borrdom into a source of pleasure for yourself.