Cuba And Mallorca's Globalisation

Towards the end of June 2016, it was announced that Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide had finalised an agreement to manage the Gaviota 5th Avenue Hotel in Havana. The announcement was an historic one. The hotel was to be the first one to operate under a US company since Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959.

More than a quarter of a century ago, Meliá Hotels International (as now is) opened the Sol Palmeras Hotel in Cuba. It was the group's first hotel on the island. At the time of celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary, father and son Escarrer restated their "unwavering commitment to the present and the future of the Cuban tourism industry".

Meliá is the largest foreign hotel operator in Cuba. Such is the company's status that it has a "position of honour" in the history of the development of the island's tourism. This position had brought with it 29 hotels under its management in Cuba at the time of the anniversary: 29 more than any US hotel concern. A history of joint venture investments with the Cuban government had stood Meliá in good stead, and it continues to. From the start of this year, four more hotels came under its management. Two others are to be added between now and 2019.

A few days ago, it was reported that four leading Mallorcan hotel groups are to invest some 1,000 million euros in Cuba this year. Meliá was one; Barceló, Be Live (Globalia) and Iberostar were the others. The report made, and cue the howls of criticism, including those of Més. Joana Campomar, for some reason hauled up in front of the press, insisted that rather than all this money going on Cuban investment it should be dedicated to improving working conditions and new technologies in the Balearics. She was hardly about to say, good on you, hoteliers, and why stop at just 1,000 million for Cuba?

The hoteliers, especially the major ones, are most people's Aunt Sallys. By most people I don't just mean islanders who dislike the massive amounts of money they make and the low wages they pay. There are also the non-islanders, for whom the hoteliers are the devil's work in depriving the Balearics of apartment rentals. It is curious of course, where the critical islanders are concerned, that they are probably exactly the same people who want highly restrictive rentals regulations because they can't find anywhere to live. In the same camp therefore, but with different perspectives, even if they can be hypocritical in not acknowledging that the hoteliers are basically batting on their behalf: more so now because of the wage agreement.

Admittedly, it can appear somewhat unfortunate that you have Fluxà, Hidalgo and Escarrer the Father being photographed sipping mojitos (or whatever) with the Cuban tourism minister and explaining their investment largesse. The fat cats just get fatter. Two of that threesome are on the Forbes Billionaires List. One who wasn't photographed - or rather two who weren't - were Carmen and Luis Riu. They are jointly listed by Forbes. Riu quit Cuba three years ago, citing the lack of quality of hotels under their management and a certain exasperation with Cuban red tape. Meliá, it would seem, have never had a problem with this, or have at least learned how to deal with it.

Investment in Cuba, or indeed in the various other destinations in which Mallorca hotels are active, grates with the lobby that has its issues with tourism. Those who want limits or de-growth in Mallorca's tourism tend to also be those who are anti-globalisation. The hoteliers, especially the leading companies, are the only real example of Mallorca engaging in globalisation.

But what do people expect? I personally endorse the notion of tourism limits on the island, but I have no problem with overseas investment. Why should I? These are businesses, after all, and very good ones. They invest abroad in order to grow. And one reason is that they have little scope to grow in the Balearics. They can't just stick up loads of new hotels because they're not allowed to. New hotel developments in the recent past are ones for land that had been allocated for tourism accommodation purposes. Future developments will require a quid pro quo. New hotel places will mean eliminating existing ones, and this policy would be unlikely to change even if a right-wing government comes into power.

With Cuba there is also the historical context. It was Cuba (and Puerto Rico) that once provided entrepreneurial opportunities for Mallorca, and the ties with Mallorca and with Spain remained strong despite the loss of both to the Americans. So, Cuba has always been a place to do business. And because the Americans banned all business contact, the island was wide open to the Spanish. It still is, despite Obama and because of Trump.

Mallorca has global businesses, whether some people like it or not.

Culture, Anger And Tourist Tax: Top Stories From 2016

Google very kindly make available statistics of the number of individual page views that each blog post receives. These are direct views in that they are to the specific URL of the post rather than having been read by regular followers of the blog. They are an indication of popularity, although I wouldn't say they were the best; my personal opinion of the diversity of subjects that appear on the blog would give a different result.

This caveat aside, the story that proved to be the most popular was that of 17 September, Promoting Culture: Where's The Strategy? This was about an agreement between the tourism and culture ministries - a "protocol", as they liked to call it - to promote cultural tourism. This required an investment of 600,000 euros to internationalise the islands' culture via a "tourism strategy". I was scathing of the whole thing, not least because an aspect of this strategy is supposedly to push filming on the islands. The relevant ministers, Biel Barceló and Ruth Mateu, admitted that there aren't the necessary tax incentives to do this, as there are in other parts of Spain. So they were going ahead with a "strategy" without having the wherewithal to implement it. Moreover, the "protocol" only lasts until the end of 2017. Could anyone make any sense of it, I asked. PR nonsense was my conclusion, and we haven't heard anything about it since September.

Number two was from 21 July - A Camel To Design A Camel: Tourist Tax. The introduction read: "How many government departments, local authorities, business associations, unions and others does it take to change the cash collected from the tourist tax into meaningful projects?" One camel was therefore the Commission for the Promotion of Sustainable Tourism, the body which decides how revenue is to be spent. The other was the tax itself with its ill-defined multi-purposes. As things were to turn out, the government used the drought as the justification (not unreasonably) to place emphasis on water projects. We are still waiting, though, to hear what these (and other) projects actually are. When there's a commission with such camel-like ingredients, should this come as any surprise?

In third place was the article about Balearic hotel interests in Cuba - Keep Taking Us To Havana, 1 December - while just behind in fourth spot was the post of 2 May, When Anger Takes Over: Mallorca And Cycling. This was prompted by the general chaos caused by the Mallorca 312 cycle event, which isn't a race as such but a trial. As I noted, it was a trial that "tested the over 4,000 cyclists and tested the patience of many people on the island". The event brought to a head the simmering (and not so simmering) conflict created by cycling. The value and benefit of cycling to Mallorca seems irreconcilable with attitudes of residents. Whether these attitudes are shared by a majority, one doesn't know. Perhaps they should undertake a survey rather than rely on social-media hysteria.

Chaos of a different sort came in at number five - More On Vueling And The Chaotic Spanish Air Industry, 16 July. At six was a subject that crept ever higher up the agenda in 2016. The Pariah Status Of Airbnb from 11 November noted that Airbnb didn't exhibit at London's World Travel Market, despite it being "arguably the most important business in the travel market right at the moment". This was the context for a discussion of the need for the regional government "to take tough and effective action against Airbnb and other such sites". Just how tough will be revealed when the holiday rentals' legislation is approved. Whether it will be effective is a totally different matter.

There was further anger on 23 April. Getting Angry In Puerto Pollensa (number seven) said that "emotions have been allowed to run high; rather too high". They were to do with the pedestrianisation fiasco and the Gelats Valls ice-cream kiosk. There was of course to be even more anger because of the separate fiasco of the sun loungers.

At eight was a tribute to a web-based business which doesn't attract the concerns surrounding Airbnb. Hotelbeds: The Best Of Mallorca from 14 July looked at this successful business, sold by Tui for a fortune, which is headquartered on Palma's Paseo Marítimo. There was a coincidence with this article. Although not the same type of business, Hotelbeds does have some similarity with Low Cost Holidays, which went belly up a few days later.

In ninth spot was The Mess Of Regulating Holiday Rentals, 21 May. "The regional government is getting itself into a right old pickle over holiday rentals' regulation" was the introduction to an article on the difficulties regarding legislation. The pickle has become increasingly pickled, what with the idea to zone Mallorca and the intention to allocate places for holiday rentals that don't coincide with areas of high residential need. The government's problems are such that it ignored the fact, as stated in the May article, that the sustainable tourism tax law mandated it to have regulation in place within six months of that law having been approved: it should have been at the end of September therefore.

And in tenth place was The Environmental Crisis Coming Our Way of 17 May. This quoted a spokesperson from the environmentalists GOB who said that this will be "a crazy year, the infrastructure will not cope". Was it all environmentalist hot air? The prognosis was for: "airport stretched beyond its limit; Palma crowded out by ships and passengers; roads chockful of hire cars; ever more thousands of apartments being rented out; the hotels full; limits needing to be placed on the numbers on unspoiled beaches; supermarket supplies questionable; water supplies threatened; outdated sewage-treatment plants incapable of taking the pressure. Too many planes, too many ships, too many cars, too many people." 2017 will be no different.

There was in fact an eleventh post. It had the second highest number of page views but it wasn't a story, just a very short and simple post. It was the one to say that, after a few days of downtime when the Blogger system changed and I couldn't post, I was back. Heartening, I guess.

Keep Taking Us To Havana

It may be that someone did actually say "take me to Havana" in the days when airplane hijacks suddenly became popular and the Cuban capital was on the list of favoured destinations for the asylum-seeker. Closed off, to US airlines at any rate, the island nation had acquired a certain mystic, courtesy of Fidel Castro.

In the 1960s, when various individuals supposedly started to wander into cockpits in order to request a detour, Spain remained committed to the 1953 agreement with the US (and Vatican) by which the Franco regime was to legitimise itself in the view of a doubting international community. A pro-American policy wasn't, however, to prevent the regime from establishing a relationship with Castro, and this owed much to the coincidence of 1959: Castro staged his revolution, while Spain adopted the Stabilisation Plan which was to underpin the country's economic revolution.

Prior to the rise of Castro, Franco had been seeking to exert Spanish influence throughout the one-time empire of Central and South America. This was via a combination of the concept of "Hispanidad" and the stifling Catholicism that had characterised the Franco regime from the time of the Civil War. The clash of ideologies that Castro's revolution represented might well have shattered relations with Spain, with the threat to these relations initially equal on both sides. Cuba expelled the Spanish ambassador in 1960 for having interrupted Castro while he was criticising Spain. The regime, for its part, was under pressure from external forces (especially the Americans) and because of dissenting voices internally.

But through the 1960s a realpolitik emerged that was based far less (if at all) on the previous nationalist-religious philosophy and very much more on economic necessity. The dogmas of the Falange were discarded in favour of the technocracy of Opus Dei. The pragmatic technocrats, so important in having guided Spain to a more stable economic future courtesy of, for example tourism, viewed Cuba purely in economic terms. Trade with Cuba, rather than lessening, increased during the 1960s, and by the 1970s there was pretty much full-scale economic cooperation.

For the regime, Cuba held special significance. This had been one of Spain's most important colonies in the nineteenth century. The economic relationship was such that Mallorcans were among those who grew rich through trading with the island (and also Puerto Rico). When Cuba was lost during the humiliations suffered at the hands of the Americans at the end of the nineteenth century, national (and military) pride was shattered. Franco had sought to restore this. Despite what the Americans felt about Castro, events of 1898 still influenced thinking.

The ties with Cuba, strengthened by the PSOE government of Felipe González, were such that in 1990 the old relationship with Mallorca's entrepreneurs was truly revived. In that year, the Sol Palmeras hotel was opened. The following year, Castro attended the opening of the Meliá Varadero hotel, just as he had been at the inauguration of the Sol Palmeras.

The way had been opened up by a businessman from the Canaries, Enrique Martinón, who was the first to really sense the tourist possibilities in Cuba. Sol Meliá, as was, entered into a 50-50 joint venture with the Cuban state corporation. Mallorca's hoteliers were thus beginning a lucrative association with Cuba, the main problem to which was to be the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act, otherwise known as the Helms-Burton Act, under which foreign companies could be sued for "trafficking" land confiscated from Americans after the Castro revolution. At least one hotel, Las Americas, was on land that had belonged to the Dupont family.

The Helms-Burton Act was met with a unified response of opposition by the European Union, but in the same year that it was passed, José María Aznar of the Partido Popular came to power. He adopted a much tougher attitude towards Cuba, and the EU accepted a "common position" - proposed by Madrid - to pursue democratic reforms in Cuba. This political move pleased the American government, but it was also a means - so it seemed - for a deal to be struck: Spanish companies would not be pursued by Helms-Burton. Aznar, for all his hardline stance, was to go to Cuba in 1999. He stayed at the Havana Meliá, showing his support for Spanish entrepreneurs and protesting against Helms-Burton and the US embargo.

If nothing else, this all highlighted what by then were one hundred years of US-Spanish tensions where Cuba was concerned. Meliá was obliged to disinvest in the US, having set its stall out in Cuba, a loyalty that Castro recognised, but any difficulties were not to get in the way of Mallorcan hotelier expansion. Iberostar appeared in 1998, and with Meliá now forms by far the strongest presence. There are currently some 58,000 hotel places in Cuba. Roughly half of them are under the control of Balearic hotel chains.

From Cuba With Love: Havaneres

In 1860, a composer by the name of Sebastián de Iradier Salaverri went to Cuba. He himself was from the Basque Country and was born in the small town of Lanciego. Sebastián was to die five years after his voyage to Cuba. He didn't live to appreciate quite what he had done, because musically Sebastián had in effect created a musical genre.

One hundred years after he wrote his defining song, a version of it was to be sung by someone who was very much responsible for a musical genre. In the 1961 film "Blue Hawaii", Elvis Presley adopted a somewhat less raunchy style than the one he had been previously famed for. He sang a song that was like a lullaby, but it was an upbeat lullaby with a lusciousness that may have been appropriate for Hawaii but which had been created in Cuba. The song was "No More". Don Robertson and Hal Blair were credited as the writers, but a third name was credited as well - Sebastián Iradier. The song was his. Its original title was "La Paloma".

This is a song that has been recorded hundreds of times. It has been renamed, reinterpreted and reproduced in different languages. Notable among those who have sung it in Spanish is Julio Iglesias. An English version of the original was to be recorded by Nana Mouskouri. What all these versions shared, including the one transported to Hawaii for Elvis, was the genre that Sebastián Iradier was responsible for - the habanera.

Strictly speaking, Sebastián didn't invent the genre. He popularised what already existed. Some twenty years prior to his composing "La Paloma", an article had appeared in an Havana newspaper "La Prensa". It spoke of "the love in the dance". The habanera was both song and dance, something rooted in Cuban culture.

In 1875, the opera "Carmen" by the French composer Georges Bizet was premiered in Paris. It featured a habanera - "Love Is A Rebellious Bird" - and so the style, it might be said, had entered the musical mainstream, where it has stayed ever since.

The habanera, through its clear association with Spain because of the one-time colonial relationship and Sebastián Iradier's song, was to follow different pathways. One of these led to Catalonia where other musical traditions from the Americas, such as rumba, were to undergo a Catalanisation. A popular culture of the Catalan "havanera", a song typically sung in a tavern, took hold, but as with other aspects of Catalan culture it was to suffer from Franco's repression.

Despite this, in 1948 a book was published of the scores of various songs, and these were to help what was a havanera branch line of the so-called "Nova Canció", the new song of the Catalans that was a movement from the 1950s.

In 1966 in a tavern in the tiny fishing village of Calella de Palafrugell in Girona (Catalonia), they held a small song festival. That 1966 "cantada" has become one of the most celebrated occasions in marking out the rediscovery of Catalan folk music tradition. There is still an annual festival, a gathering of havaneres. The tiny village, and it remains tiny, attracts some 30,000 people each July. This year, as will be obvious, marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the more extraordinary moments in contemporary cultural development.

The havanera and groups of havaneres crossed over the sea to Mallorca. Local groups began to be formed and were part of the peculiar mix of traditional and modern that characterised Mallorcan popular music by the late 1960s. That was an era of cheesy pop, of angst-filled folk and of the truly bizarre - I really must tell the story some time of Los 4 de Asís, the quartet of singing Franciscan monks.

Havaneres are now highly popular. Groups such as Sotavent, who come from Alcudia, are regular performers at fiesta time. These aren't exclusively fiestas in coastal areas, but these are where you might most typically run across havaneres. And in one coastal area - Puerto Soller - they've been holding a gathering ("trobada") of havaneres: the seventh such festival. This is a gathering just like it was fifty years ago in a tiny fishing village in Catalonia.

* The video comes from an IB3 "Alcudia special" from 2010. Some of you may be able to recognise town hall councillors past and present.