ABSTRACT
The United States and the Soviet Union were challenging each other's ideological systems all over the world and, in the Caribbean, through their two surrogates, Puerto Rico and Cuba. When Cuba inevitably opens up, tourism is bound to become the mainstay of its economy almost overnight, nourished by major capital investment from a jubilant United States and the expatriate Cuban community in Florida. By the early 1970s, tourism was beginning to obtain a measure of respectability, although the community at large still appeared to remain sceptical and the academic world remained adamantly opposed to tourism as a means towards national development. The Organization of American States (OAS) also began to provide tourism with technical assistance, albeit with fewer resources, and the Canadian government made a real impact by significantly upgrading several of the airports in the eastern Caribbean. In the market itself, the airlines serving the Caribbean out of North America, which generated more than three-quarters of the region's tourists.
