Viral video exposes collapse of Cuba's Puerto Escondido campismo site

A video of Puerto Escondido in Santa Cruz del Norte, near kilometer 80 of the Vía Blanca, drew more than 372,000 views and about 1,600 comments after showing a campismo site in collapse: destroyed cabañas, an abandoned swimming pool, and a dance floor falling apart. The creator walks through the remains with clear nostalgia, treating the place less like a ruined resort than a family memory that has outlived the system built around it.

Puerto Escondido opened on July 6, 1983 as the first installation in the Litoral Norte complex in Mayabeque, under the Campismo Popular program that began in April 1981. State media later marked Campismo Popular’s inauguration on May 16, 1981, and the original idea was plain enough: a mass recreation plan to bring workers and families closer to nature. At its peak, Puerto Escondido offered rustic wooden cabins with thatched roofs, a pool, a dance floor, and outdoor space for Havana families and young people heading for the coast.

The official Campismo Popular listing still presents Puerto Escondido as a scenic site with cliffs, a preserved seabed, beaches, coastal terraces, and dense vegetation, and it still places it in Santa Cruz del Norte, Mayabeque, with the contact number (015) 885 0060. That gap between the brochure image and the wrecked buildings in the viral clip is the point: a flagship seaside campground has become an emblem of what happens when low-cost recreation is left to rot.

Puerto Escondido is not the only site sliding backward. In Artemisa, San Pedro had 310 cabins in 2023 and 242 in 2025, a loss of 68 cabins, alongside cracked floors, bad bathrooms and destroyed recreation areas. Niurka Quintana Pérez, the provincial director of Campismo Popular, and Juan Jesús Gamiotea Pozo, director of San Pedro, put a local face on the deterioration. Río Jobabo has been described in even bleaker terms, with no water, no lighting, no campers and no life.

The causes are the familiar Cuban pileup: chronic underinvestment, poor maintenance, vandalism, illegal occupation of empty facilities and hurricane damage. Hurricane Rafael made landfall in western Cuba on November 6, 2024 as a Category 2 storm and brought severe wind and flooding across the region, adding another layer of damage that has been hard to undo. The scale of the loss is what makes the Puerto Escondido clip land so hard. Campismo Popular once said its first 25 years served 23 million 467 thousand people, and by its 30th anniversary the figure had climbed past 28 million vacationers. A place that once meant cheap seaside escape now looks like a ruin that still knows exactly what it used to be.