Havana welcomes first cruise liners from US in 4 decades
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THE first United States cruise ship in nearly 40 years crossed the Florida Straits from Miami and docked in Havana yesterday, restarting commercial travel on waters that served as a stage for a half-century of Cold War hostility.
Carnival Cruise Line’s “Adonia” became the first US cruise ship in Havana since President Jimmy Carter eliminated virtually all restrictions of US travel to Cuba in the late 1970s.
Travel limits were restored after Carter left office and US cruises to Cuba only become possible again after President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro declared detente on December 17, 2014.
Hundreds of workers and passersby gathered to watch, some cheering, as the gleaming white 704-passenger ship pulled into the dock — the first step toward a future in which thousands of ships a year could cross the Florida Straits, long closed to most US-Cuba traffic due to tensions that once brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
The straits were blocked by the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis and tens of thousands of Cubans have fled across them to Florida on homemade rafts — with untold thousands dying in the process.
The “Adonia” is one of Carnival’s smaller ships, but US cruises are expected to bring Cuba tens of millions of dollars in badly needed foreign hard currency if traffic increases as expected. More than a dozen lines have announced plans to run US-Cuba cruises and if all begin operations Cuba could earn more than US$80 million a year, the US-Cuba Trade and Economic Council said in a report yesterday.
Most of the money goes to the Cuban government, council head John Kavulich said. He estimated cruise companies pay the government US$500,000 per cruise, while passengers spend about US$100 person in each city they see.
Before the 1959 Cuban revolution, cruise ships regularly traveled from the US to Cuba, with elegant Caribbean cruises departing from New York and US$42 overnight weekend jaunts leaving twice a week from Miami, said Michael Grace, an amateur cruise ship historian.
“Cuba was a very big destination for Americans, just enormous,” he said.
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