Cruise ship leaves Havana for sail around Cuba

Posted on Monday, 12.16.13



Cruise ship leaves Havana for sail around Cuba

BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

JTAMAYO@ELNUEVOHERALD.COM



The cruise ship LV Louis Cristal set sail from Havana on Monday on the

first of its round-the-island trips, marking yet another effort to

establish Cuba as an attractive and profitable cruise industry destination.



Cuba Cruise, based in Calgary, Canada, chartered the vessel this year

for weekly sails through March 24 that will take on passengers in Havana

or Montego Bay, Jamaica, for 7-day circumnavigations of the island for

$746 and up.



The 1,200-passenger vessel will make stops in Havana, Holguín, Santiago

de Cuba, Cienfuegos and Punta Francés on the Isle of Youth, and offer

tours of beaches, nightclubs and colonial-era fortresses and architecture.



The Cristal, built in 1980, is owned and operated by the Cyprus-based

Louis Cruises, which operates largely in the Mediterranean. Cuba Cruise

was founded in January by cruise businessman Dougald Wells.



Several previous attempts to establish Cuba as a regular cruise

destination have failed, in large part because of economic sanctions by

the United States, which forbids U.S. tourism in Cuba and bars any ship

that docks at Cuban ports from entering the U.S. for six months

thereafter. The U.S. and Canada are the source of an estimated 70

percent of Caribbean cruise passengers, and most cruise ships plying

Caribbean waters are based in South Florida.



Asked if Cuba Cruise would allow U.S. tourists to board the ship in

Jamaica, Melissa Medeiro, media coordinator for Bannikin Travel and

Tourism, a Canadian consultancy representing the company, said it was

not up to Cuba Cruise to check on passengers.



"We encourage everyone to check with their local authorities," Medeiro

said. "But Cuba does not impose any restrictions [on U.S. tourists], and

Cuba Cruise does not discriminate against any nationality boarding the

ship."



After decades of rejecting mass tourism, Cuba began opening its doors in

the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its

massive subsidies to the island's communist government.



Spain's Sol Melia company launched one attempt in 1996, using the

840-passenger Melia-Don Juan for sailings from Cienfuegos on the

south-central coast. The ship's Cuba itineraries appear to have stopped

in late 1997.



The Russian-operated cruise ship Adriana, capable of carrying up to 300

passengers, sailed around the island at least four times in 2011. On one

stop in Santiago, it disembarked 62 passengers, according to a Cuban

news media report. There has been no mention of further dockings since then.



The 54,000-ton Thomson Dreams, capable of carrying up to 1,132

passengers, has made several ports of call in Havana in recent years

with mostly British and other European passengers.



Cuba's cruise tourism business peaked in 2005 with 122 ships reportedly

delivering 102,440 visitors — an average of 840 per ship. But it has

been in steady decline since then, according to the National Office for

Statistics (ONE)



ONE reported 30,000 cruise ship arrivals in 2006, 7,000 in 2007, 5,000

in 2008, 4,000 in 2009, 2000 in 2010 and a mere 1,000 in 2011.



Cuban officials have never explained the plunge in cruise arrivals. But

Fidel Castro's comments in 2005 that cruise visitors spent little and

left behind "rubbish, empty cans and paper" may have made Cuban

officials less interested in dealing with cruise lines.



José Antonio Lopez, then general manager of the state company that runs

the country's four cruise terminals, told the Reuters news agency in

2008 that Cuba has the port capacity to receive one million cruise ship

passengers and 600 ships a year. Havana alone can dock several ships of

up to 70,000 tons, he added.



U.S. cruise industry officials have estimated it could take at least

four years to update Cuba's ports so they can handle today's

150,000-plus-ton mega cruise ships. The world's largest cruise ship,

Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas, weighs in at 225,000 tons and

carries up to 5,400 passengers.



Cuba's tourism industry has been stagnating after steady growth since

the early 1990s, with 2.3 million foreign visitors in the first 10

months of this year, representing a 1.2-percentage-point drop from the

same period in 2012, according to ONE.



Source: "Cruise ship leaves Havana for sail around Cuba - Cuba -

MiamiHerald.com" -

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/12/16/3822505/cruise-ship-leaves-havana-for.html#storylink=misearch