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The Cuban economist Pedro Monreal published a thread of three tweets this Tuesday, in which he describes the Cuban regime's tourism investment policy as "irrational." He supports his claim with official data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) that reveals a devastating paradox: while the relative weight of tourism investment grew by 51.4% between 2014 and 2024, the number of international visitors dropped to just 73.1% of the level of that base year.
Monreal presented two charts based on official data that illustrate what he refers to as a structural "asynchrony" between investment and results.
The tourism investment index reached its peak in 2020 — precisely the year of the pandemic collapse — with a value of 192.7 based on a score of 100, while visitor numbers plummeted to 36% of the 2014 level and bottomed out in 2021 with an index of just 11.8.
"The official high priority of tourism investment in Cuba, amidst a prolonged context of declining international visitors, is irrational from an economic perspective: it disregards market signals, offers low returns on investment, and entails extreme opportunity costs," wrote the economist.
The second graph reveals the other side of the problem: agricultural investment has decreased to one-third of its level in 2014, falling to an index of just 33.3 in 2024, while tourist investment remained at 151.4.
Monreal was emphatic: "One of the worst effects of excessive tourist investment in Cuba has been the coexistence of a hotel surplus with a deficit of basic national food supplies. The disregard for agricultural investment is the most misguided ongoing decision in recent economic policy."
The data from ONEI confirms the extent of the imbalance. In 2024, Cuba allocated 36.843,8 million Cuban pesos —equivalent to about 1.535 million dollars— to tourism activities, accounting for 37.4% of all state investment.
The investment in agriculture was only 2,645.5 million pesos and in public health, 1,977.4 million, which means that tourism investment exceeded agriculture by 14 times and combined education and health by 11 times.
This pattern emerges as Cuban tourism plunges uncontrollably. Cuba received only 298,057 visitors in the first quarter of 2026, just 52% of the level during the same period in 2025, with a hotel occupancy rate of 21.5%. Eleven airlines have suspended flights to the island, including Air Canada, Iberia, Air France, and Turkish Airlines.
The food crisis that Monreal links to neglect in agricultural investment is equally serious: pork production fell by 93.2% in 2023 compared to 2022, rice covers less than 11% of national demand, and 97% of the population lacks adequate access to food according to independent surveys from 2026. Díaz-Canel himself admitted in June 2025: "We have not made the necessary investments in agriculture."
Just four days before Monreal's tweets, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero promised at FITCuba 2026 that Cuba would experience "a very strong next winter" in tourism and declared himself "optimistic" despite the more than 240 sanctions imposed by the Trump administration since January 2026.
Monreal concluded his analysis with three possible explanations for what he referred to as "the blunder": "technical incompetence, bureaucratic foolishness, or rent-seeking by certain actors."
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