Cuba’s New Tourism Minister Appointed

Cuba’s Council of State made a decision Wednesday to release Tourism Minister Ibrahim Ferradaz, who had taken over that post in 1998, and appointed architect Manuel Marrero Cruz as new chief of the island nation’s leisure industry, Granma newspaper informed.

Mr. Ferradaz, who served as Minister of Foreign Investment and Economic Collaboration from Dec. 1995 to 1999 when he was appointed Tourism Minister, “will now be assigned new responsibilities,” the Cuban daily’s brief press release explains.

The replacement comes at a time when the travel industry has panned out to be Cuba’s powerhouse in terms of hard-currency income money and right on the heels of a major slowdown triggered by the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S.

For his part, Mr. Cruz, 40, was until now serving as executive president of the Gaviota Tourism Group, one of the local companies owned by the nation’s Revolutionary Armed Forces.

In a special report before the Cuban Parliament late last year, Economy Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez said “tourism has achieved a major recovery this year following the shrinkage occurred between 2001 and 2002, and posted an estimated 12.7 percent growth in the number of foreign arrivals.”

The same stats underscore that a record high 1.9 million tourists visited the island nation in 2003 and that the local leisure industry raked in some $2 billion for a solid 16 percent increase from 2002.