Thursday February 22 9:49 AM ET

Cuba Says Lost $16 Billion From U.S. Tourist Ban

By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - The U.S. ban on its citizens visiting Cuba has cost the island nearly $16 billion in lost tourist revenue over the past four decades, a government adviser said on Thursday.

But the adviser, Miguel Alejandro Figueras, told a symposium on the tourism industry at the World Trade Organization (news - web sites) (WTO), that the number of U.S. visitors ignoring the veto and potential prosecution was steadily growing.

On top of that, Figueras said, tourists from other countries were flocking in, their numbers soaring to close on 1.8 million last year -- well over double that of the mid-1990s -- and foreign investment in the sector was soaring.

``Tourism is now described as the driving force of the Cuban economy,'' said the official -- an adviser to the Havana Ministry of Tourism -- and now accounted for some 43 percent of foreign currency income, against only four percent early in the last decade.

The United States imposed the travel ban in 1961 as part of an overall economic boycott a year after Fidel Castro (news - web sites)'s leftist rebel forces overthrew a right-wing dictatorship and declared a program of nationalization.

Figueras said the revenue loss figure -- 10 times Cuba's entire export income in 1999 -- was based on the value of the U.S. tourist trade before Castro came to power and on the growth of overall U.S. tourism to the Caribbean area since then.

He said some 25 million U.S. citizens could have been expected to travel to the island -- the largest in the Caribbean and only 90 miles (140 km) off the coast of Florida -- and past patterns suggested they would have spent $14 billion.

Tour Ships Would Have Boosted Revenue

Additionally, revenue from tourist ships that would have called at Cuban ports over the 40 years of the boycott would have amounted to $1.7 billion.

Travel industry analysts said the calculation failed to take into account an inevitable decline in U.S. visits after Castro established a communist economy and standards in the hotel and related service industries went into free-fall.

``But there is no doubt that the ban has made a mighty big hole in the Cuban economy over the years,'' said one tourist trade official who declined to be identified. ``However, recently they (the Cubans) have done a great job in overcoming it.''

Figueras said that last year, despite threats of court cases and fines, 76,898 U.S. tourists, excluding Cuban-Americans who have special dispensation for family emergencies, had visited the island, four times more than in 1995.

However, the total of visitors from all countries had soared from 746,000 in 1995 to nearly 1.8 million in 2000 -- or nearly one fifth of the resident population of the island.

The majority -- nearly 950,000 -- came from Europe, up from 375,000 five years earlier, while 783,000 came from North and Latin America and the Caribbean, just over double the figure in 1995. Many of these were Canadians.

One in 10 Cubans in the civilian economy now worked in the area of tourist services -- 100,000 directly employed in the industry and 2000 indirectly.