RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Cuba plans to gradually reopen its borders from November 15, when it expects more than 90% of its 11.2 million inhabitants to have received the three-dose pattern of the anti-virus vaccines created by scientific institutions on the island.
This was advised in a note published on Monday (6) by the Ministry of Tourism (Mintur), in which it explains that from that date on, the health and hygiene protocols established for the arrival of travelers will be made more flexible due to the emergency caused by the pandemic.
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The protocols that will govern from the reopening will be focused on the surveillance of symptomatic patients and the taking of temperature, the communiqué specifies.
In addition, diagnostic tests will be performed randomly, the PCR diagnostic test will not be required upon arrival, and the vaccination certificate of travelers will be recognized.
It also indicates that the opening of the internal tourist market will be initiated gradually in correspondence with the epidemiological indicators of each territory of the country.
MASSIVE VACCINATION CAMPAIGN
At this moment, the island’s health authorities are applying a massive vaccination schedule in its territory with which they project that, by the end of this month, all the possible population to be immunized will have received at least one dose of Abdala, Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus vaccines, three autochthonous formulas which have been authorized for emergency use in the country.
Cuban vaccination forecasts indicate that by next November, 92.6% of the 11.2 million people living on the island – including the population between 2 and 18 years of age – will have been inoculated with the three injections of the established pattern.
Cuba restricted the entry of travelers on March 24, allowing only residents to enter. On April 2, 2020, it closed its borders completely except for traffic of goods and exceptional cases to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the cause of covid-19.
In October last year, it reopened the airports, but contagions soared, many of them attributed to non-compliance with isolation protocols for travelers.
THE ANTICOVID PROTOCOL FOR TRAVELERS
The sanitary protocol established at this time requires that travelers need a negative PCR test to enter Cuba, performed no more than 72 hours before arrival, plus a second test at the border upon entering the country.
Both for individual tourist travelers and Cubans, residents or not, it is mandatory to undergo a “quarantine” period of 6 nights and 7 days, which in the case of nationals living on the island can choose between a paid hotel or a state isolation center free of charge.
For this reason, since January, flights from the United States, Mexico, Panama, Bahamas, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Colombia have been reduced to a minimum.
Cuba is currently going through the worst pandemic outbreak, with reports in recent weeks of between 8,000 and 9,000 infections per day and an average of 80 deaths, which places the country as one of the countries with the highest incidence of the coronavirus in Latin America.
Before the pandemic, tourism represented Cuba as the second official source of foreign currency income after selling professional services abroad and contributed around 10% of the gross domestic product (GDP).
Cuba received 225,417 foreign tourists and travelers from January to May, almost two million less than in the same period of 2020, according to data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI).
According to official data, the Caribbean country hoped to receive nearly 4.5 million international visitors in 2020 and reverse the 9.3% drop in 2019, when 4.2 million tourists traveled to the country, 436,352 fewer than in 2018.