Javi and Zami find Varadero nearly empty, a resort in decline

Javi and Zami came back from Varadero with something closer to a field report than a vacation clip. After two days moving from one end of the resort to the other, the Cuban creators showed a place that no longer matched the lively beach destination they remembered from childhood: empty streets, almost no tourists, and attractions that looked broken, closed or badly underused.

The clearest image was the parking lot in front of the Todo en Uno complex, where a Saturday in May once would have brought a packed scene. Instead, the lot held only a single bus. The contrast carried through the rest of the video. The roller coaster was technically running, but it could not safely operate with just one rider because of blackout risk, while other rides were out of service. At Parque Josone, they found a dirty pool that was not functioning. At Parque Los Enamorados, the ostriches that visitors once associated with the site were gone.

The decline was not only visual. The video also pointed to the economic spillover that comes when a resort loses traffic. Artisans and family members who once sold at fairs in Varadero appeared to be out of work. Horse-drawn carriages had been replaced by electric tricycles, and the fare structure reflected the island’s broader cash-strapped reality. In an earlier May video, Javi and Zami had already described Cuban crisis conditions with the phrase “tristeza donde quiera que uno mire,” and the Varadero footage gave that line a specific place on the map.

That is what makes the scene in Matanzas so damaging for Cuba’s tourism story. Varadero is still sold as a flagship beach destination, with more than 20 kilometers of shoreline, and in 2022 tourism officials said it had 56 operating hotels and more than 16,000 renovation actions across the resort. But the numbers coming out of the broader sector have turned sharply lower. The Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Información reported 528,271 travelers through April 2026, equal to 53.6 percent of the same period in 2025, after 448,857 through March, or 59.0 percent year over year.

That gap between promotion and reality is now visible in Varadero itself. The silence Javi and Zami kept finding was not the quiet of a full resort at rest. It was the silence of a place where the visitors, the workers and the money no longer arrive at the scale Cuba promised.