Cuba's tourist arrivals fall 62 percent after the energy embargo and hotel walkouts

Cuba received 419,863 foreign visitors between January and July 2026. A year earlier the same seven months brought about 1.1 million. The National Office of Statistics and Information published the comparison on Tuesday. The drop is 62 percent, or about 709,000 people.

Canada, long the island's largest source market, sent 127,645 visitors. That is 26.7 percent of the 2025 figure and 350,737 fewer travellers. Cubans living abroad accounted for 88,525 arrivals, down from about 140,000. Visitors from the United States fell from 77,200 to 37,351. Russia, which had been a growth market, managed 21,374, less than 30 percent of last year's count. Mexico, Argentina, Spain, China, Colombia and France all recorded sharp declines.

June was the weakest recent month, with 28,100 arrivals. July improved only to 32,272, still a thin figure for high summer. Streets, beaches and private rooms that used to fill in the first half of the year are empty enough for ONEI to say so in an official bulletin.

The sanctions sequence

President Donald Trump imposed a hard energy embargo on Cuba in January under Executive Order 14380, after the fall of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela on 3 January. The order declared a national emergency on Cuba and put tariffs on countries and firms that sell oil to the island. Power cuts, already common, got worse.

Between May and July the State Department went after the tourism core. It threatened third-country operators that work with Cuba's tourism ministry or with parts of the military-run GAESA conglomerate. Measures include frozen accounts and exclusion from the US financial system. Spanish groups Meliá and Iberostar, present since the 1990s, and Royalton then suspended their Cuban contracts.

Prime Minister Manuel Marrero told deputies of the National Assembly in July that 73 percent of the country's hotels were closed after the foreign chains left. That is the occupancy number that sits behind the arrival statistics. Rooms that cannot be staffed or powered do not show up as available inventory, so the official hotel stock overstates what a visitor can actually book.

A sector that was already thin

Tourism was supposed to earn hard currency after a failed internal financial reform and years of older US sanctions. Inflation had already eaten household income before January. The new energy embargo removed the Venezuelan fuel cushion that had kept generation plants running. Airlines cut frequencies when hotels could not guarantee lifts, water or air conditioning.

Canadian tour operators, who fill Varadero and Cayo Coco in winter, are the swing factor. A fall of 351,000 Canadian visitors in seven months is larger than the entire US and Russian declines combined. Rebuilding that market requires fuel, functioning hotels and a legal path for the companies that used to run them. None of those three is in place in September.

July's small rebound does not change the year. Even if the last five months matched July, 2026 would still finish far below 2025. For an economy that priced hotel construction as a substitute for other exports, the ONEI table is a fiscal document as much as a travel one.