14ymedio, 4 May 2016 — In its Tuesday edition, the official Communist Party newspaper Granma commented on the arrival of the Carnival Lines cruise ship Adonia in Cuba, with the headline: “US Cruise ship arrives in Cuba without a single tourist on board.” The contrived phrase refers to the prohibition on Americans traveling to the island as tourists.
The artist Lázaro Saavedra has created a satire on the title in a text, which is circulating by email. According to the controversial artist, this information was written by “a phantom journalist for a phantom newspaper. The phantoms of the phantom cruise ship Adonia are received in the phantom city of Havana and walk through its streets.”
The funny thing is, that while the United States government does not permit the travelers to behave like tourists, but rather like citizens who are fulfilling the mission of bringing the two peoples together, the Cuban government does not accept that a foreigner coming to the island on a tourist visit can have interactions with “politically incorrect” people and, thus, is forced to play only the role of a “pure tourist.”