SEX TOURISM AND CHILD PROSTITUTION IN CUBA
Re: Hilton Hotels Worldwide Bans Cuban Guests
Arch Kielly, LtCol, USAF, Retired
Communist Cuba is attempting to right its economic problems by permitting the sexual trade of its children for badly needed monetary resources.
A generation of young people may have been invested to make Cuba’s tourism more appealing to foreign tourists looking for more than beautiful beaches and soft trade breezes.
Fidel Castro maintains his grip on the Cuban people as long as Cuba is able to produce funds to keep his regime afloat. Take away tourism dollars and Castro may self destruct and free a generation of Cuba’s children from sexual exploitation.
Tourism is Cuba’s most important moneymaker, generating almost $2 billion last year. In Spain alone, twenty flights leave for Havana every week, carrying to the Caribbean island a yearly total of some 200,000 single male tourists, all in search of cut-price sex. (Tunku Varadarajan, “Time-bomb that Flies in From Havana,” The Times, July 10, 1996. Lexis-Nexis document.)