Cuba to open first cable ski park in Ciego de Ávila

Cuba has set August 11 for the opening of its first cable ski park, a sea-mounted attraction planned for the north of Ciego de Ávila. The project is being pitched as a non-hotel product, a sign that tourism officials want to add something more active to the island’s standard beach-and-resort offer.

The park will be built on piles in the sea and folded into the wider Jardines del Rey tourism zone, the resort belt that includes Cayo Coco and Cayo Guillermo. Yaima Abreu, Palmares’ commercial director, said the site will sit alongside other nearby attractions already tied to that coast, including a dolphinarium and a climbing tower. Granma also said the complex will include gastronomic and photography services, turning it into a packaged stop rather than a single-sport installation.

That matters because the project appears aimed at visitors who want something different from a hotel pool or a day on the sand. Granma framed cable skiing as a particularly popular activity in Europe, which suggests the park is meant to appeal both to travelers who already know the sport and to visitors looking for a new Caribbean experience that is not built around the resort room.

Palmares is also preparing a broad sales push. Marketing specialist Yinet González said the attraction will be promoted through travel agencies, tour operators, airport terminals, tourist offices abroad, airlines, hotel chains, transport companies and bed-and-breakfast accommodation. That distribution plan shows how tightly the park is being tied to the existing tourism chain in Ciego de Ávila rather than launched as a stand-alone leisure site.

The timing also says a lot about Cuba’s tourism playbook. The island’s official statistics office, ONEI, says its tourism publications track arrivals, occupancy and overnight stays, and its preliminary August 2025 report showed 1,791,363 travelers through August and 1,259,972 international visitors, both well below the same stretch in 2024. Against that backdrop, a first-of-its-kind attraction in Jardines del Rey looks less like a game changer than a small, targeted effort to keep visitors in one area longer and spending on more than rooms and sunbeds.

For Ciego de Ávila, though, the park is a concrete addition, not just another slogan. Jardines del Rey has been built up since the 1980s, and Cuba is still layering new experiences onto that coast. A cable ski park will not fix the island’s wider tourism slump, but it does add a fresh activity to a part of Cuba already defined by resorts, cayos and packaged excursions.