Cuban World Heritage
The relationship between the United States and Cuba has been historically strained. Recently the U.S. has opened up relations with Cuba through relaxing the travel ban and lifting some trade restrictions. This opening up will allow easier travel to Cuba and will influence heritage tourism. There are nine World Heritage Sites in Cuba.
The Cuban government is a repressive regime and hopefully opening up the country to American influences will encourage residents to seek more open, democratic, and free market options.
During the Cold War tensions flared between the United States and Cuba as Fidel Castro and the Communist Party came to power in Cuba and their trade relations increased with the Soviet Union. John F. Kennedy expanded previous trade restrictions with a full economic embargo and tight travel restrictions. In 1961 with a cut off from all diplomatic relations the U. S. sought to overthrow Castro’s regime through covert missions such as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The Cuban Missile crisis resulted from an agreement between Cuba and the Soviet Union to develop a missile site on the island. This plan ended after fourteen tense days of negotiation in which the United States agreed not to invade Cuba in return for the missile site to not be used.
The embargo has been the major strategy used by the U. S. to put pressure on the Cuban government to allow free elections. The 1992 Cuban Democracy Act and 1996 Helms Burton Act strengthened the embargo. According to the Council on Foreign Relations these acts “state that the embargo may not be lifted until Cuba holds free and fair elections and transitions to a democratic government that excludes the Castros. (Raúl has said he will leave office in 2018.)” Economic sanctions are controlled by Congress and the CFR states that a repeal of the Helms Burton Act by Congress in unlikely.
Since 1961 diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba were stale but in the past two years there has been an effort to change that. President Obama’s visit to Cuba in March was the first U.S. presidential visit to Cuba in eighty-five years and followed the opening of diplomatic relations between the two countries. According to the Council on Foreign Relations a prisoner swap and Havana’s release of a jailed U.S. subcontractor was the start of diplomatic relations with the U.S.
Raul Castro who took office in 2008 began to liberalize sections of Cuba’s state run economy. The CFR states that Cuba’s private sector has swelled as a result of these reforms. Although an increase in the privatization of the economy is good news activists and dissidents are still detained. A peak in detentions occurred before President Obama’s visit to Cuba.
The Cuban government’s treatment of their citizens and oppression of fundamental rights is still of concern. The Human Rights Watch “World Repot 2015: Cuba” states that, “The Cuban government continues to repress dissent and discourage public criticism. While in recent years it has relied less on long-term prison sentences to punish its critics, short-term arbitrary arrests of human rights defenders, independent journalists, and other critics have increased dramatically. Other repressive tactics employed by the government include beatings, public acts of shaming, and the termination of employment.” The HRW also mentions that U.S normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba came with requests for a commitment to release 53 political prisoners and for international human rights monitors to be able to visit.
More tourism to the island and a closer relationship with American culture is hoped to support the growth of private industries in Cuba and encourage the Cuban people to fight for a more open and free society.
Cuba has nine World Heritage Sites. They include Old Havana and its Fortification System, Trinidad and the valley los ingenious, San Pedro de la Roca Castle, Santiago de Cuba, Desembarco del Granma National Park
Viñales Valley, Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in the South-East of Cuba, Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, Urban Historic Centre of Cienfuegos, and Historic Centre of Camagüey. Seven sites are cultural and two are natural sites. Cuba also has three sites that are tentative to the World Heritage Convention. Ciénaga de Zapata National Park, National Schools of Art, and Cubanacán, Reef System in the Cuban Caribbean are on the tentative list.
Old Havana and its Fortifications has a mix of baroque and neoclassical architecture which make the city unique. The city was founded in 1519 and was the largest port in the region in the sixteenth century. The architecture and character of the city is distinct as, “Old Havana, which is defined by the extent of the former city walls, has maintained the pattern of the early urban setting with its five large plazas, each with its own architectural character”. The site expresses outstanding universal value through being an example of an architectural style illustrating a historical time period. Old Havana is one of the most impressive historical cities in the Caribbean and the North American continent.
Trinidad and the Valley de los ingenios is a city that was founded in the sixteenth century and a valley the was used in sugar production. Trinidad flourished do to the sugar industry. The site is a living testimony to the history of sugar production in Cuba. Seventy-five former cane sugar mills, plantation houses and other structures that illustrate the history of sugar in Cuba compose the site. According to the World Heritage Convention, “The former plantations, mill buildings and other facilities and archaeological sites in the Valley de los Ingenios represent the richest and best-preserved testimony of the Caribbean sugar agro-industrial process of the 18th and 19th centuries, and of the slavery phenomenon associated with it.” The architecture and urban fabric of the city design of Trinidad still exist. The sites universal value is based on its architecture and evidence of Cuba’s historical relationship with sugar.
Cuba is one of the most biologically diverse tropical islands. Alejandro de Humboldt National Park is a World Heritage Site on the island that expresses this biological diversity. The Park is important to endemic flora, plants that are isolated and unique to the island. The park is in the Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa Mountains and is embedded into the much larger Cuchillas del Toa Biosphere Reserve. It is the best conserved remainder of forested mountain ecosystems in the Caribbean. The region is thought to be a Pleistocene refuge which contributes to the unique biological diversity of the site and it is believed that there are many species at the site yet to be discovered.
These three world heritage sites show the historic and natural beauty that Cuba has to offer travelers and explorers. With Diplomatic relations restored between the U. S. and Cuba, there is a new opportunity to visit Cuba. Increased tourism from the U. S. will hopefully invigorate the private sector and spread democratic ideals. There are already over three hundred Air BnB rentals in Cuba and Frank of Rueters states that tourism from the U. S. to Cuba in the past year has already doubled.
