Cuba tourism could shake up Mexico and Caribbean

From the Oppenheimer Report by Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald:

For years, I have thought that Mexico and most Caribbean countries want Cuba to remain a dictatorship subject to U.S. travel sanctions for as long as possible, because an eventual opening of U.S. travel to Cuba would badly hurt their own tourism industries.

But now, I'm beginning to wonder whether that's true for all of Cuba's competitors.

After reading a new study by the International Monetary Fund, I can't help but conclude that Mexico would stand a lot to lose by an opening of U.S. tourism to Cuba, but many Caribbean islands would not suffer at all. On the contrary, the study says overall tourism to the Caribbean would increase by up to 11 percent.

The study, ''Vacation Over: Implications for the Caribbean of Opening U.S. Cuban Tourism,'' was published by the IMF as a ''working paper'' by its economist, Rafael Romeu.

It comes at a time when an opening of U.S. travel to Cuba looks increasingly plausible in the near future. Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is vowing to relax U.S. travel restrictions on Cuban Americans if he is elected. And, independently of U.S. policy, Cuba's ruling gerontocracy is not likely to be able to maintain the status quo for many years -- if anything else because President Raúl Castro is 76, and his No. 2, José Ramón Machado Ventura, is 77.

According to the IMF study, ''an opening of Cuba to U.S. tourism would represent a seismic shift in the Caribbean's tourism industry,'' and would ``increase overall arrivals to the Caribbean.''

This is because there would be a massive surge in U.S. tourism to Cuba, which would overwhelm Cuba's hotel room capacity and drive Canadian and European tourism currently vacationing in Cuba to be redirected to neighboring countries.