Development Tourism

Lessons from Cuba

Rochelle Spencer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138250253
• eBook ISBN: 9781317151715
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry

Tourism in Cuba - described by Fidel Castro as 'the evil we have to have' - has been regarded both with ambivalence, and as a crucial aspect of development and poverty alleviation. The result is a remarkable approach to tourism, one which often compels tourists to become agents of development through solidarity. Drawing on her experiences of working in an NGO in Cuba, the author uses a multi-sited ethnographic approach to investigate tourism motivations and experiences, and to examine the very nature of development. Her analysis covers a wide range of issues including social change, globalization, social theory, and sustainability. Also discussed is the way in which tourism in Cuba relates to broader debates surrounding transformation, capacity building, social action and solidarity.

PART 1
Critical Perspectives Underpinning Development and Tourism

Chapter 1
Development and the Rise of Tourism as a Strategy

The interconnections between globalisation, development and tourism are a crucial nexus in analyses of North-to-South exchange and in relation to ‘empire’ (c.f. Hardt and Negri (2000); Nederveen Pieterse (2004) in relation to arguments for and against purported empire). The recent shifts in paradigmatic approaches to the alleviation of poverty throughout the Third World provide a rationale for the move to incorporate tourism strategies within development. By highlighting the shifting perspectives of development theory and practice, I demonstrate that the development industry’s history of adoption and casting off of new strategies leads us to question the viability of tourism as sustainable development. In fact it alerts us to the likelihood that tourism may only be a temporary strategy within the development arena. I include this exposition of the shifts in development modes and praxis to embed my research of tourism within a development context. This is vital because the study tours that are the focus of this research are operated by NGOs as part of their programmatic initiatives and the major intention of the tours is to expose participants to (and thereby assist in) Cuban development.

Just as perspectives in development studies have changed over time from economic to social, to environmental, to ethical, so too have perspectives in tourism studies, with the emphasis on economic factors changing to include sociocultural and environmental perspectives. Thus changes in development and tourism studies bring to light the parallel trajectories that discussions on development and tourism in Third World countries have followed. What I find particularly intriguing is the similarity of moral imperatives driving more recent trends in social change initiatives such as sustainable, pro-poor and rights-based development with those that arise within tourism.¹ As with tourism, development debates fuse compellingly with those on globalisation, particularly globalisation as cultural flows and neoliberal economic policy. We can begin to understand the emergence of debates about global tourism and its inferred development potential providing a background for the focus on ‘new’ tourism and its associated moral underpinnings discussed in Chapter 2.

Globalisation: Reality and Myth

Recent shifts in development thinking stem from the prevailing neoliberal ideology guiding the world economy, where we see that many things have globalised but not wealth and development in any pervasive sense. Current debates around globalisation dovetail with theoretical disputes concerning the ongoing pursuit of development and modernisation. As Sachs concludes, since the 1980s the age of development “has given way to the age of globalisation” (1999: xii). As with capitalism and modernity, globalisation is a “megatrope” (Knauft 2002: 34). Globalisation, of the neoliberal economic policy kind, has become increasingly dominant since the 1980s but there are other prevailing meanings of globalisation; the increased integration into a world economy and the effects of improved communication and transportation systems on multidirectonal cultural flows. Theories of globalisation thus inform debates about global tourism and its development potential from the 1980s onwards.

Some scholars suggest that both development and globalisation are nothing more than myths that have been constructed by Western exploitative economic interests to promote Western democracy as political modernisation (Crush 1995; Kothari, Minogue and DeJong 2002). Until the 1980s development aid was a major tool of the Cold War and with the breakdown of the Soviet Empire, the presumption is now that there are no obstacles to global modernisation. We might question then how globalisation differs from previous periods of global interconnectedness, because parallels between modernisation and globalisation can easily be drawn over various historical periods. Bourdieu (2001: 2), for example, says globalisation is:

a simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive pseudo-concept that has taken the place of the word ‘modernisation’, long used by American social science as a euphemistic way of imposing a naively ethnocentric evolutionary model that permits the classification of different societies according to their distance from the most economically advanced society, which is to say American society …

For many anthropologists, to invoke the global is to highlight the speed and density of interconnections between people and places (Tsing 2000), as well as disconnections, exclusion, marginalisation, and dispossession (Appadurai 1996, Ferguson 1999). It is argued that the key difference from previous global interconnectedness is located in the speed by which global forces penetrate across cultures (Harvey 1989). There is far more interaction throughout the world over a shorter timeframe, resulting in immediate consequences in one region from the actions in another. Giddens (1989: 520) states that “Our lives … are increasingly influenced by activities and events happening well away from the social context in which we carry on our day-to-day activities”. The emergence of international institutions since the 1940s such as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, transnational corporations and the more recent growth of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the global reach of their policies is indicative of this (Hardt and Negri 2000). Technological advances, economic and political shifts, cultural change, increased communication and travel, are driving forces for globalisation and are all closely linked. The so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ on global deregulation of financial markets, post-Fordist production and the proliferation of transnational corporations led to economic transformations and rapid growth in financial flows. At the same time, and closely linked to economic change, we saw political shifts in the decline of State intervention and the emphasis on deregulation, privatisation and liberalisation. These changes occurring within the climate of globalisation have inspired a rethinking of the role of the nation state and particularly its involvement in development (Kothari and Minogue 2002: 18-19). It has also meant that the profits generated from increased flows of international tourists into Third World countries are flowing offshore to transnational corporations.

In addition, and some might say, as a countervailing force, there has been an increase in international social movements and increasing awareness of global issues. Throughout the 1980s, social movements (environmentalism, human rights, indigenous rights, and feminist causes) established themselves through NGOs and moved beyond the boundaries of nation states by producing transnational avenues of financial and political support (Tsing 2000). This has had the effect of uniting people beyond national borders on issues such as the environment, human rights, war, refugees and resettlement. Additionally, advances in technology have led to increases in the speed, intensity and quantity of global flows of information, ideas, capital, goods and people, which raise questions about the uneven distribution of the benefits of globalisation. In the context of tourism in Cuba this has meant that the increased mobility of international tourists is in stark contrast to the immobility of the majority of the Cuban population.

Appadurai (1990) suggests that we can understand globalisation as a series of global disjunctive flows that create different ‘scapes’. For example financescapes include capital flows and ethnoscapes include the cultural worlds conjured by migrants. In this way, he refers to the paths taken by those things that are in flow as:

hav[ing] different speeds, axes, points of origin and termination, and varied relationships to institutional structures in different regions, nations or societies. Further, these disjunctures themselves precipitate various kinds of problems and frictions in different local situations. Indeed it is the disjunctures between the various vectors characterising this world-in-motion that produce fundamental problems of livelihood, equity, suffering, justice and governance. (Appadurai 2001: 6)

For example the media flows across national borders that produce images of well-being unrealisable by national living standards are examples of the disjuncture referred to by Appadurai. We might also consider tourist flows across borders that produce notions of wealth, status and freedom unrealisable by many people in Third World countries as yet another example. These disjunctures highlight that globalisation produces uneven benefits and many locally manifested problems (Appadurai 2001: 6). As has been the case with development, globalisation needs to be interrogated.

Neoliberal Orthodoxy:
Intersections between Development, Globalisation and Tourism

The relationship between developing countries and tourism is dynamic and framed within broad global flows and social changes. In order to demonstrate in what manner tourism has increased in developing countries, discussions of tourism invoke the term globalisation and refer to a global community, a continually shrinking world in which countries are increasingly interdependent. Globalisation is hardly a new phenomenon – capitalist development has historically been global by nature. What differs today is the rapid nature of global processes and change. It is often argued that tourism contributes to the creation of globalising cultural forms that tend to erode cultural differences. Critics of this view dismiss the idea of an impending global homogenous culture. Tsing (2000: 39) states that “no anthropologist I know argues that the global future will be culturally homogenous; even those anthropologists most wedded to the idea of a new global era imagine this era as characterised by ‘local’ cultural diversity”. MacMichael (1996) refers pointedly to Western developmentalism rather than development, stating that it more accurately indicates the nature of much development ideology which is based on economic theories of technology and modernisation. He argues further that developing countries should be given opportunities to develop in ways that respect local culture and are more in keeping with local culture. Indeed, Butcher (2003: 98) points out that the view that cultural difference is generally ignored in development has resonance within tourism where such perspectives are also commonplace.

Globalisation provides a framework to apprehend the cultural, economic, and political aspects of global change (Allen and Massey 1995; Mowforth and Munt 2003). Simply, cultural globalisation refers to a trend toward homogenisation of culture, a single global monoculture, brought about essentially by global consumerism. As we shall see, the critical school of tourism theorists sees mass tourism as the inauthentic consumption of places and cultures, which tends to reduce local people, traditional cultures and indigenous knowledge to commodities. Such simplistic views of tourism need to be problematised within broader understandings of how local people in developing countries harness tourism to their own advantage, for example, utilising pro-poor or rights-based development models as a framework for tourism and a topic I shall return to.

Economic globalisation refers to the way fiscal processes now cover the world. The rapidly expanding international tourism industry increasingly incorporates developing countries as ‘new’ destinations. At the same time, the boom in other industries such as telecommunications and transport has facilitated the globalisation of tourism. However, globalisation is not just indicative of economic change, but also of a politically changed world that some scholars argue reinvokes empire while others suggest contemporary globalisation falls short of empire (c.f. Hardt and Negri 2000; Ferguson 2002; Nederveen Pieterse 2004). The reach of large-scale international organisations such as the European Union, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB), World Trade Organisation and international environmental organisations like Greenpeace evidence this politicisation of supranational organisations. The work of these organisations is felt all over the world and impacts differently on different groups of people, highlighting the power relations that underscore uneven development. Domination is now exercised through financial and economic regimes. US-imposed sanctions on Cuba and Iraq evidence this pattern. Political globalisation typically centres on the loss of sovereignty of nation states through increasing transglobal organisations and politics and the consequent breaking down of national borders (Mowforth and Munt 2003).

The post WWII emergence of supranational institutions and agencies has had a significant impact on global development and on international tourism. International organisations like the WB and IMF have had pervasive effects on the development of Third World countries by imposing structural adjustment policies which force them to adjust their economies in order to secure further loans. WB and IMF have become more involved in tourism mainly because, even when commodities are at low levels or agriculture is eroded by subsidised competition or services are non-existent, developing countries, can and do, offer venues for tourism. The WB and IMF perceive that given input from the development community, tourism is an area where developing countries have a comparative advantage and could operate sustainably and profitably. This can be seen through numerous initiatives like the World Tourism Organisation signing an agreement with the WB and accords with the regional Development Banks so that they place tourism higher on their agendas, and the World Tourism Organisation supporting new research and funding thousands of new micro projects by 2015 worth hundreds of millions of dollars as a contribution to the Millennium Development Goals. In addition, the World Tourism Organisation in its capacity as the new UN tourism organisation has focused on increasing trade liberalisation and is developing with the World Trade Organisation and UNCTAD² a number of initiatives to enhance tourism exports as a development tool (Lipman 2004).

Other intergovernmental structures that transcend the autonomy of the nation state include NAFTA³ and ASEAN.⁴ The political relationships forged by these institutions have extended their reach globally and have adopted the development language of sustainability. At the same time there has been an emergence of international NGOs. Through this global political environment, we see that sustainability does not simply pertain to the environmental context. Sustainability refers to ongoing profits through adaptable patterns of capital accumulation and even the survival of indigenous cultures which Western middle classes experience when travelling to developing countries.

The global nature of tourism inevitably dovetails with processes of modernisation, industrialisation, economic development and the complex nature of social change in this period of global interconnectedness. As mentioned, the debate on globalisation intersects with discussions on development, particularly in relation to the uneven and unequal nature of both development practice and globalisation. In the context of tourism, an example that highlights global interconnectedness and how countries have become interdependent is the October 2002 bombing on the island of Bali in Indonesia. Bali thrives on international tourists. When a night club on the island was the target of a political religious attack, killing many Balinese and Australians, the Foreign Affairs Department in Australia advised Australian tourists to avoid travelling to Bali and this advice was immediately copied by other countries. The Balinese tourism industry came to a grinding halt and subsequently the local economy almost collapsed. This example illustrates impacts of globalisation in that Bali, a developing island economy dependent on its international tourism industry, is more adversely affected by the cessation of tourism to the island than are its Western tourists.

In discussions of global interconnectedness, most accounts of globalisation are Western as a result of the expansion of capitalism – the export of Western goods, ideas, values, and people. Arguably globalisation thus represents Western ethnocentricity. It is claimed by some that globalisation has helped First World governments and businesses to determine a Western inevitability that incorporates a global economy, culture, politics and environment (Mowforth and Munt 1998). Examining globalisation closely can help in our understanding of issues of sustainability. As with development, sustainability is uneven in nature in developing countries as concern for the environment has resulted in a ‘green’ politics. From a tourism perspective Mowforth and Munt (1998) state that it is necessary to trace how debates about the environment, development and sustainability relate to ‘new’ forms of tourism. The first important point they make is that sustainability is defined, interpreted and practised differently according to the interests of different groups. Sustainability is a contested concept that is socially constructed around competing agendas. Secondly, any discussion of sustainability should consider the different ways in which it is practised, how sustainability is appropriated by social classes as a means to represent identity, and how local communities use policies of sustainability to exclude tourists (Mowforth and Munt 1998).

This is relevant to NGO tours in Cuba for two reasons: first because development-oriented NGO tourism offers small group tours to development projects and grassroots organisations in an effort to be small scale and therefore easy to sustain in that they do not impact largely on small communities being visited. Second, participation in what are considered to be sustainable forms of tourism feed into a Western middle class identity. Such tourism is emerging in Cuba as its depressed planned economy has been reinserted into the capitalist world market. Throughout the 1990s elements of capitalism have been reintroduced and concessions made to market mechanisms, such as foreign investment, a temporary legalisation of the US dollar, a free market in agricultural produce, the expansion of self employment, and a tourism led recovery. Thus the sustainability of tourism as a development tool in Third World countries emerges precisely because development practices have proved to be unsustainable and for Cuba in particular this is a crucial point in time as it strives towards reinsertion into a global economy. Hence, tracing the trajectories that have led to an impasse within development is important because it shows us that national governments and international institutions have lost much of their legitimacy and non-governmental organisations such as Oxfam and Global Exchange emerge from and operate within this context.

An Intellectual Heritage of Development

The continued existence, and in some cases the exacerbation of, poverty in developing countries juxtaposed with the immense volume of research and funding being undertaken to counteract these problems indicates that institutionalised development programs intended to improve livelihoods have been fraught with shortcomings. Likewise, theory and attempts to represent the meaning of development remain enormously vexed. Critical interpretations are continually rethought while notions of an apparent ‘impasse’ in the framing of theoretical questions reflect the very contentious nature of determining the best way to ‘do development’. At the same time, neoliberal imperatives continue to drive forward new waves of capitalist modernisation. The current move in development thinking towards the use of tourism as a tool to help reduce poverty can be seen as one recent manifestation of shifts in aid models and leads us to the very basic question of why development policies have recently embraced tourism. A partial answer indicates that as a tool, tourism intersects with models of development that have come before it – sustainable, participatory, pro-poor and rights-based – in productive but not unproblematic ways.

Importantly, this move to enlist tourism signals that development in recent decades has been deeply entwined in both conceptual and material aspects of globalisation, particularly through neoliberal economic policies, the increasing integration of developing countries into the world economy, and the effect on multidirectional cultural flows of improved communication and transportation systems. This then raises a second question: to what extent can development utilise these global flows of tourism? These lines of enquiry illustrate the centrality of development and globalisation to an in-depth understanding of the particular tourism forms and experiences taking place in Cuba. In a position to learn from past mistakes in international tourism development, Cuba claims to sup...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• Maps of Cuba
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• IntroductionCuba: Rhythm, Resilience and Revolution
• PART 1 CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES UNDERPINNING DEVELOPMENT AND TOURISM
• PART 2 ON THE GROUND: CUBA, SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT, AND NGO STUDY TOURS
• PART 3 RIGHTS-BASED TOURISTS IN CUBA
• Bibliography
• Index