The Soroa tourist complex, known as the Rainbow of Cuba, has been closed to the public for over four months —including the summer months— with no reopening date or signed agreement with any manager, according to a report by El Artemiseño.
The facility, located in the municipality of Candelaria, Artemisa, includes a hotel, an orchid garden, accommodation villas, and the Castillo en las Nubes hotel, situated in the heart of the Sierra del Rosario, designated a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO.
Of a workforce that once numbered around one hundred, only six security guards and about 15 employees remain on site for basic maintenance tasks. The rest have been reassigned both within and outside the hotel, and many are unaware of the status of the negotiations regarding the future of the complex.
The conditions at the site are precarious: there is no stable electric supply or potable water, which hinders any partial operations. The access road is practically overgrown with vegetation, reducing the dual lane to a single path.
These shortcomings are compounded by the damage left by Hurricane Rafael in 2024. According to the report, those effects "have still not been resolved" two years later.
The Tourism Delegation of Artemisa confirmed to the media that "there are non-state economic actors interested in managing the complex," but the interested party has not been publicly identified and there are no defined timelines.
This interest is part of the package of 176 economic and social transformations that the Government approved in June, in which Axis 17 opens tourism to new private management modalities: leases, usufructs, concessions, private travel agencies, private tour guides, and participation of foreign investors and Cubans living abroad.
The author of the article warns that the delay in defining the management model exacerbates the risk of irreversible deterioration: "If there is no promptness in the established schedule to approve the model to be followed at the relevant levels; if the workers are unaware of the what and the how… if the decision strays away from the immediate present, the cost to revive it will be much greater."
The closure of Soroa occurs at the worst time for Cuban tourism in decades. Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz acknowledged before the National Assembly that 73% of the country's hotel facilities were closed and that about 25,000 workers were in a state of availability.
Cuba received only 387,591 international visitors from January to June of 2026, a decline of 60.7% compared to the same period the previous year.
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