One+ editor Jessie States is attending the MITM-Americas trade show in Havana, Cuba, this week and will be reporting on her experiences there. Check back frequently to hear more about Cuba, the show and the region's meeting and event opportunities.
Suppliers to the U.S.: Cuba is Ready
As the U.S. meeting industry looks to government officials to open Cuba’s borders to American incentives and events, the island’s conference industry leaders have one message: We are ready.
“Cuban people and the American people are very close,” said Amneris Pérez Villaverde of cubatur, a DMC that regularly hosts booths at EIBTM, IMEX and Barcelona trade show Feria. “In spite of everything, there is a wonderful chemistry between us.”
Yanis Guerrero of the Habana convention center concurred, adding that the venue already welcomes groups up to 6,000 from Europe (especially France, Spain and Holland) and increasingly Canada, in addition to Latin American countries.
“We are ready for the U.S.,” she said. “We have 30 years experience preparing events.”
MITM founder Ramon Alverez has a unique perspective on Latin America’s conference industry. He started his career years ago at Iberia, but later spent several decades in incentives and events. He played important roles in the founding of Site and even MPI.
He says that Cuba has greatly expanded its conference business in the past decade. And unlike other Caribbean nations, Cuba’s resorts lie within city centers instead of in secluded areas, offering delegates a chance to experience the local culture just steps from their conference rooms.
He also points to the Cuban people-known for their hospitality, friendliness and overall good humor—as an asset for the region’s meeting industry.
“This is a culture that embraces joking and dancing and music. They are a happy people,” Alverez reflected.
Even when the U.S. brings an influx of delegates and tourists in the coming years, Alverez says, nothing will change the culture’s innate bonhomie.
“The Cubans have a strong culture-just look how they have taken over Miami,” he laughed. “I don´t think they will change very much when Americans arrive, except for perhaps as far as their income.”
La Femme de Cuba
Cecilia Sourbe smiles deeply when she speaks of her two-month-old son in the South of France. Her Cuban husband is there while she returns to Havana, promoting incentives and meetings at MITM-Americas for her company Cuba Autrement.
Sourbe met her husband here in Havana two years ago—she a French national working for Autrement, he a disc jockey at a local radio station. In fact, the incentive and meeting travel group recruited Sourbe from her home across the Atlantic for her affability, her passion and her industry knowledge.
Sourbe speaks in an accented but fluent English, her voice rising and falling with musical tembre. She speaks of the events she has planned: scavenger hunts in the old city on coco taxis; chauffeured visits to Modern Havana; cocktails in cultural project Callejon de Hamel in the center city, where an artist has graffitied the walls of buildings in beautiful rolling scroll. On Sundays, people gather in the streets and dance the Rumba and drink cocktails in the streets.
Sourbe describes Salsa lessons with one instructor per delegate, for hundreds of attendees across the city, tours and events at the Revolution Museum. She takes groups for nights at the Tropicana, classic car rides to the Hotel National, where 1950s VIPs and celebrities listened to the Buena Vista Social Club.
I close my eyes and imagine the possibilities. We make plans to meet later, quand je peux parlons en francais...
MITM Unabridged
Cuba is ready for conferences from anywhere in the world, according to Conrado Martinez Corona, president of the Cuba CVB, when I asked what the region expects when the U.S. meetings market arrives. It is hard to imagine U.S. meeting professionals paying exchange rates and an additional 10 percent fee (together upwards of 22 percent) to change their U.S. dollars into the Cuban convertible peso. I ask if he thinks the rate will change when the borders open.
“It is too early to answer that question," he responded.
But Cuba undoubtedly already offers a grand experience for attendees across the globe especially in its top markets: Latin America, Canada and Spain. According to Corona, Cuba has already greeted some 50,000 visitors this year and nearly 300 international events in pedagogy, medicine, economics, science and sports.
MITM itself attracted an even number of buyers and suppliers, purposefully kept to a total 200 (including 12 U.S. purchasers—who were warned not to meet with Cuba suppliers per U.S. law). The show actually sold out in mid September, with venues, DMCs and CVBs from across the Americas and buyers from 16 mostly European countries. Ramon Alvarez, president of GSAR Marketing and host of MITM, said the group programmed more than 2,600 buy-supplier encounters, estimated to generate 13 million euros in Cuban business opportunities.
Meanwhile, Cuba plans to further enter the meeting and travel market this May with FITCUBA, an ongoing annual event, that in 2010 will focus on meetings and incentive travel. For more, see an upcoming issue of One+ magazine.
"The diversifying of Cuba touristic strategy gives priority to congress and incentive travel offers. We are engaged in placing the country in a better international position when referring to these spheres and making proper use of the social and scientific development attained, the rich and attractive culture, the political security and stability as well as the well-known and all-pervading congeniality of our people," Corona said.
DAY 1
I arrive at Cancun's Mexicana gate gasping, my lungs full of air, but not using it for anything like breathing. My hair is drizzled weeping willow. All adventures should start out just so, with a mad dash through customs and security, or some such heart attack. After that, challenges are bread crumbs-on-linoleum, mere annoyance. And thus I find my own cold-sweat way on board a flight to Habana. Delays, it seems, are no match for the magnetic draw of Cuba at night.
The flight is only 45 minutes, which I spend taking notes about the design of airline magazine Loop. I reflect on how geeky that is. I don't know what to think of Mexicana's "Japanese-style peanuts with lemon," definitely curious. The seats are comfortable with ample legroom—I have no complaints.
Landing in Cuba at night, I don't know what to expect. All I see are the lights of city interspersed with a midnight black, which could be anything at all. I spend 45 minutes carrying the MITM-Americas trade show sign around, asking anyone official (looking) "¿Usted sabe?" until someone sits me in front of a glass window, crosses my name off a list and sends me on my taxi way to the Melia Cohiba hotel.
The streets remind me of other Latin American sities in Central Colombia and Brazil, but somehow smaller, though not in population or size. Some that should be deserted are full of people yelling as the cab passes, hands out-stretched for a ride. Others are dim, lit only by lamps in street-crowded homes.
When I reach the Melia, I am exhausted. It is past any reasonable hour for sleep. I check into a room on the 19th floor and unpack only essentials. I am too tired to go downstairs for a nightcap and too frugal to call room service—I have lost some US$50 from a total $160 due to conversion rates and fees. I can't find the damn ice machine. So I drink lukewarm tap water and fall to fitful sleep.
This morning, I awake at 7:30 a.m. (long before I cared to), and head down to breakfast, a massive continental with upwards of 10 stations of various meats, eggs, cheeses and breads. I choose some rolls with a side of olive oil (whoa, garlic!) and a random plate of black beans. I sigh.
Today, I see Cuba.
DAY 2
Everything looks different in daylight, no? There are colors, most faded, pastel blues, yellows, peaches. People stand on the seawall and fish.
The streets of Old Havana are like many old New World cities, crowded with pedestrians and motor bikes and hidden plazas, the walls covered in scaffolding and fresh and peeling paints. There must be one government licensed-guide per tourist. They are aggresive, but not pushy, more friendly, really, sad almost, not to watch money walk away, but to lose a chance for company.
I amble with a small hotel map and knowledged gleaned from a 2003 Cuban guide book I found at a used book store, but nothing is where it should be. I happen upon the Museo de Ron Havana Club and pay CUC$7 for a tour and tasting. Who am I to argue with Fate? My guide describes the rum as refined and excquisite. I can't agree more.
I have lost my map somehow and wander the streets of the old city sans direction. Along Cuba Street gaping street-side doors offer views of Old Havana life, aging women sit on old vinyl furniture watching their stories on 20-inch 1970s TV screens. The kitchens smell of slow-cook black beans. Other doors show crumbling stairs that lead to occupied and deserted tenements. A woman attempts to back a stroller out of a small wood opening too small to be a door.
On the Calle de la Obra Pia, I find the Torrela Vega cafeteria, which serves three-course Cuban comfort food and a drink of choice (mojito) for CUC$7. The restaurant seats locals along the outside of the building and tourists in a small, pine-lined plaza across the narrow street. After a salad, I choose the moros y cristanos (Moors and Christians aka black beans and rice) and viandas fritas (fried veggies).
Stray dogs are everywhere, and I follow a small one for a while, thinking he might take me some place of interest. Above all the street noise and traffic, conversation, horns and whistles permeate the sounds of music. A man plays his guitar solo on a plaza bench, music blares from boxes on bicycle pagodas, an old woman pipes old-time boleros to the street from her second-story window.
The locals here are easy to pick out. Handsome workmen in tight shorts and T-shirts, officials in ties, young women of all types in tight shirts and leggings, wisened matriarchs in chairs on narrow sidewalks. Children run by, some in school uniforms, others in colorful shorts-and-shirts, a Dora the Explorer backpack.
Without map, I find my way back to the hotel shuttle by photo, retracing my steps through backstreets and plazas, though I give up at some point and hail one of hundreds of city cabs. I retire to my room at the Melia Cohiba for a pre-event nap. Tonight begins the 2009 MITM - Americas with a cocktail reception at the hotel pool.
At the opening event, we are served mojitos and recieve an introduction from the Cuban tourism minister and Ramón Álvarez, president of event producer GSAR Marketing. Synchronized dancers perform alongside the pool, jumping in and out of the water in always-changing costumes. I visit with buyers and vendors I know from past shows and greet new delegates I have not yet met.
The curious and most intriguing element of MITM—and the reason I keep returning—is its healthy diversity of international buyers from dozens of countries across the globe, especially Eastern Europe. (But I will speak to this in a later post.) For now buenos noches—or as they say in Cuba, bueno noche.