Tourism development, economic opening up, and planning issues in Cuba since 1989

The demise of the Socialist bloc in 1989 has engendered structural changes in the economies and planning practices of Cuba and other continuing socialist countries such as China and Vietnam. Indeed, in the 1990s the Cuban government was obliged to promote a series of economic and institutional reforms (reviewed in Colantonio and Potter, 2006) that opened up the economy and identified international tourism and the external sector as the pivots of a new development strategy.