Varadero Tourism Collapses, Hotels Shut and Thousands of Workers Laid Off

Varadero is chaos right now," said a worker at Hotel Los Delfines on 32nd Street, and the numbers bear that out. Cuba's premier resort corridor in Matanzas province, which prided itself on welcoming more than one million travelers annually over the last decade, now faces a 70% drop in visitors, a figure many in the industry never thought possible.

The collapse has been swift and visible. Without water, without reliable electricity, and with hotel lobbies standing nearly empty, many properties along the Varadero strip have simply closed their doors and laid off thousands of workers. Hotel Los Delfines is among them: management shut the property and relocated its remaining guests to the Club Tropical hotel rather than keep operating under conditions the Los Delfines worker described in stark terms. "There's no water in this area, the electricity goes out constantly, and because of that they decided to close the hotel and concentrate the tourists in the Club Tropical hotel," the worker said.

The infrastructure failures are not isolated incidents. Power outages have become a daily reality across parts of Varadero, compounding the damage already done by flight suspensions linked to Cuba's shortage of aviation kerosene. With fewer planes arriving and fewer tourists filling beds, the economic logic of keeping hotels staffed and running has broken down entirely.

For Beatriz, a Spanish tourist who has returned to Varadero every year for a decade, the deterioration is personal. Known simply as Bea to the staff at the Cuatro Palmas hotel, she described herself as almost part of the family here. That familiarity made this visit harder to process. "I knew the situation was difficult, but I didn't think it was this bad," she said. The practical consequences of the crisis followed her from Spain: "This beach is the best in the world, but the situation has become unsustainable. The electricity goes out far too often, and I even had to bring eggs from Spain."

Beatriz also noted a shift in how locals relate to her after years of loyalty to the destination. "They no longer see me here as a foreigner, but as an ATM," she said. "It doesn't matter what I give them, they always want more."

The broader stakes are hard to overstate. Tourism was once considered a backbone of Cuba's economy, the sector that would outlast the slow death of the sugar harvest. Now, reporting by Pablo Padilla Cruz in 14ymedio warns that tourism itself threatens to become "the same kind of corpse that the sugar harvest has already turned into." For the thousands of workers laid off across Varadero's closed hotels, that comparison is no longer abstract.