MIAMI, United States – The Cuban government has revised and lowered its 2024 tourist arrival estimates by 16%, marking a decrease of half a million visitors (the forecast dropped from 3.2 million tourists to 2.7 million), according to data from the state’s National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI, by its Spanish acronym).
Cuba welcomed a total of 1,680,485 visitors during the first half of 2024, according to official ONEI figures. Although this number represents a 101.1% increase compared to the previous year, it shows only a 0.9% rise compared to the same period in 2023.
Despite expectations of recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic, the island is still far from reaching 2019 figures, when more than 4 million tourists arrived. In contrast, tourist destinations like Punta Cana (Dominican Republic) and Cancun (Mexico) have managed to surpass their pre-pandemic levels.
Canada remains the primary source market, though its visitors slightly decreased from 583,027 in 2023 to 577,549 in 2024. The number of Cuban residents living abroad who visited also dropped from 176,349 to 155,320. In contrast, Russia saw a significant increase of 166.7%, increasing from 67,612 tourists in 2023 to 112,721 in 2024. Other markets, such as the United States, Mexico, and Argentina, also showed growth, while traditional European source countries like Germany, France, Spain, and Italy saw declines.
After the release of traveler statistics for the first half of the year, economist Pedro Monreal remarked that “with half the year gone, the official visitor data doesn’t seem promising, with dynamics very similar to the same period in 2023 and far from the figures of the last normal years (2017-2019).”
In June, Cuban authorities had announced the arrival of 1.8 million tourists in the first six months of 2024. However, Monreal disputed this figure, arguing that to reach that number, 625,112 visitors would have had to arrive in June, which was highly improbable given that the maximum number of visitors in any recent June was 342,195 in 2018.
Monreal had already concluded in May that the figures provided by the Cuban government were “inconsistent” and did not reflect a true recovery of the tourism sector in the country.
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