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Cuba received only 528,271 travelers between January and April 2026, which represents 53.6% of the same period the previous year, according to data published by the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) of the Cuban regime.
The figure represents 457,716 fewer travelers than in the same period of 2025, a decline that the government itself acknowledges in its official statistics.
Of that total, only 328,608 were international visitors, accounting for 44.2% of the level recorded the previous year, with a loss of 414,382 foreign tourists in just four months.
The year-on-year comparison is devastating: from January to April 2025, there were 742,990 international visitors, representing a collapse of 55.8% in Cuban tourism in just one year.
Canada, historically the main source market for the island, recorded the most dramatic decline in absolute terms: it fell from 346,109 visitors in January-April 2025 to only 125,444 in the same period of 2026, a drop of 63.8%.
In March 2026, the situation reached a breaking point: only 511 Canadians visited Cuba, compared to 98,663 in the same month the previous year.
The rest of the markets also did not escape the downturn. United States fell from 48,629 to 21,066 visitors (-56.7%); Russia from 46,285 to 21,050 (-54.5%); France from 18,129 to 7,276 (-59.8%); Spain from 13,691 to 7,019 (-48.7%); and Italy from 12,108 to 6,157 (-49.2%).
Even the Cuban community abroad reduced its travel by 41.2%, decreasing from 78,478 to 46,173 people during the period.
The causes of the collapse are structural and have been building up for years.
The energy crisis with massive blackouts is deteriorating the visitor experience, while the chronic shortage of Jet A-1 aviation fuel has led to more than 1,700 flight cancellations and the withdrawal of Canadian airlines such as Air Transat, Air Canada, and WestJet, as well as Russian airlines like Aeroflot and Nordwind.
Aeroflot began operating repatriation flights to bring stranded Russian tourists back from the island, and the Ministry of Economic Development of Russia advised its citizens not to travel to Cuba while the fuel crisis persisted.
This is compounded by the deterioration of hotel infrastructure, with issues related to maintenance, water supply, and food quality, as well as a decline in competitiveness compared to other Caribbean destinations.
The downward trend has been evident for years: Cuba closed 2023 with 2.4 million tourists, 2024 with 2.2 million, and 2025 with a mere 1.81 million, well below the official target of 2.6 million. Hotel occupancy in 2025 was at 18.9%, the lowest in decades.
If the current trend continues, Cuba could end 2026 with fewer than one million international visitors, marking the island's worst tourist year since the pandemic and solidifying the collapse of an industry that the regime has always portrayed as a driver of the national economy.
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