EoW May 2010

Transat lant ic Cable

Saab uses the funds to develop environment-friendly cars. In January, GM agreed to sell Saab to Spyker for $74 million while retaining preferred Saab shares worth $326 million. The deal ensured the survival of the 72-year-old Swedish brand.

said he has 60 votes lined up: enough to win passage of the measure this summer. Similar legislation introduced in the House has 178 co-sponsors and needs 218 votes to pass. (“Cuba Readies for USA Tourists with Luxury Hotels,” 26 th March). According to Cuba’s tourism minister Manuel Marrero, his country is ready, able and eager to welcome as many as a million visitors from the USA, on no advance notice. In an interview with Bloomberg in Cancún, Mr Marrero said, “I’m convinced that today, with [our] available capacity, we could be receiving the American tourists without any problem.” Additionally, the tourism chief said, Cuba has scheduled ground- breaking on at least nine hotels in 2010; and some 200,000 rooms may be added in the “medium to long term.” Another tourism ministry o cial said that Cuba is also seeking investment partners for ten luxury hotels and golf courses geared to American preferences. Until the Americans return to Cuba, Canadians have been taking ❈ up much of the slack. In Havana, Jose Manuel Bisbe, commercial director for the Tourism Ministry, told Bloomberg that – despite the global nancial crisis – tourism to Cuba increased 3.5% to 2.4 million visitors last year, with 900,000 visitors from Canada leading the way. Mr Bisbe, who expects foreign arrivals to grow by a like amount this year, said, “Havana has been the forbidden city for so long that it will be a boom destination even in the low season.” Expectations of the Americans’ return to Cuba are also running high among such entrepreneurs as Daniel Garcia, who sells used books in front of the neo-classical building that housed the USA Embassy before Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.

Congress

The USA ban on travel to Cuba may be lifted this year, raising hopes of a tourist bonanza for ‘the forbidden city’ of Havana “This is a 50 year-old failed policy,” Senator Byron Dorgan told a meeting of American and Cuban tourist industry representatives in Cancún, Mexico, in a 25 th March phone call from Washington. “Punishing Americans by restricting their right to travel just makes no sense at all.” The policy assailed by the senator from North Dakota is, of course, the USA ban on travel to Cuba that has kept Americans – for 47 years, to be precise – from visiting the Communist island nation o the coast of Florida. Now it seems possible that freedom of movement over those 90 miles of water will be restored before the end of the year. As reported by Jonathan J Levin of Bloomberg News , Mr Dorgan, one of 38 co-sponsors of a Senate bill that would lift the travel embargo,

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EuroWire – May 2010