ABSTRACT
After 1959, Fidel Castro advanced a tourism policy that countered what he viewed as the previous government’s promotion of a decadent US-focused tourism that damaged Cuban culture and society. This essay attends to the legacy of tourism leisurescapes after 1959 to investigate the intersection of the built environment and government attitudes toward tourism, particularly during the boom of revolutionary hotels being built in the 1970s. The revolutionary hotels were meant to suggest vacation parity among Cubans as one component of a larger social system of equality, largely through their visual coherency and placement across the island. Through an analysis of vacationing policy and hotel building practices, this essay contends that despite their use to suggest a sense of stability, these revolutionary hotels did not offer a wholesale reinforcement of revolutionary ideology or official tourism policy. Because of this, these hotels can be considered unstable spaces and representations that reveal the cracks and tensions between what the government promised and what citizens experienced.
