Castillo spoke at a workshop on tourism and biodiversity held at the Copacabana Hotel in Havana. The event was attended by local officials, specialists and people deeply involved in Cuba´s tourism sector development.

He recalled that this is a new way for tourism recovery, as it was mainly about meeting nationals´ leisure needs in the early years of the Cuban Revolution (1959).

Since the 1990s, tourism has been looking at prospects as an international industry.

In 1990, Cuba had 18,500 hotel rooms available for tourists to book and it was expected for 349,000 foreign visitors to arrive that year, but this multiplied (before the Covid-19 pandemic, Cuba received over four million holidaymakers per year, and now it is proposed to close 2023 with 3.5 million, with more than 70,000 rooms).

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