Some 120,000 Mexican tourists are expected to visit Cuba this year thanks to the reopening of borders and the lifting of medical requirements to enter the country, said Sonia Beltran, tourism adviser at the Cuban embassy in Mexico.
“Tourism in Cuba is already partially recovering after the opening of the borders in November last year, and the prospects are good,” she stressed.
The adviser said that from April 4, the sanitary requirements for entering the country have been lifted, which means that tourists no longer need to take a PCR test and they are not required to have a vaccination certificate. Only face masks are mandatory and there are random Covid tests at the airport.
These measures are similar to those taken by the Mexican government since the start of the pandemic, which has placed Cuba among the top 10 most visited countries in the world in 2020 and 2021.
Beltran explained that from January 1 to April 17 this year, a total of 399,777 international travelers visited Cuba. Of that number, 4,979 were Mexican tourists, an improvement over the 441 Mexicans who visited the country during the same period in 2021.
In this respect, Mexico ranks 11th out of the top 20 source countries for tourists, behind such countries as Canada, USA, Russia, Germany, etc.; however, Mexico is the leading source of tourists in Latin America, ahead of Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela.
The tourism adviser noted that the increase in flights in recent months is due to the increase in the frequency of flights from Mexico to the island, with 41 flights from Mexico City, Cancun, Mérida and recently from Monterrey currently operating weekly.
Airlines currently flying to Cuba include Viva Aerobus and Magnicharters, but by December this year, Aeromexico could join companies flying to destinations such as Havana, Varadero, Santa Clara, Camaguey, Holguin and Santiago de Cuba.
“If Aeromexico starts offering flights to Cuba, although nothing has been confirmed yet, we expect more than 120,000 Mexican tourists to visit the country by the end of 2022,” Beltrán said.
A total of 2,500,000 international tourists are expected to arrive in Cuba this year, representing a recovery of just over 50% of Cuba’s tourism sector, compared to the 4,275,561 travelers who visited the country in 2019, the year before the pandemic.