No hotel for Cubans in provincial capital
PINAR DEL RIO, Cuba - January 16 (Rafael Ferro Salas, Abdala Press / www.cubanet.org) - There are no hotel rooms for Cubans in the provincial capital of Pinar del Río, a city of 200,000; travelers and those looking for a place to have an intimate tryst must find other solutions since the three hotels open to Cubans were diverted to other uses.
"If you need a hotel... even for one night, your only option is the bushes in the outskirts of the city," said one young man accompanied by his girlfriend.
Young people feel doubly left out, since the existing hotels had modest discotheques where they could get together. Now, they say, they have even fewer entertainment options.
The three hotels that used to allow Cubans to enter, El Globo, Italia, and La Marina, have been reassigned to other uses. Italia and La Marina now house people who lost their houses to one of the recent hurricanes, and El Globo has been taken over by "social workers," in reality young people from outside the province who are auditing government enterprises for fiscal irregularities, as part of the government's effort to eradicate administrative corruption.
There are other hotels in the city, but their rooms must be paid for in dollars, and Cubans are denied access to them no matter what currency they may be willing to pay in.
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