Abstract
This chapter highlights the shifting perspectives of development theory and practice. It demonstrates that the development industry's history of adoption and castings off of new strategies leads us to question the viability of tourism as sustainable development. As with tourism, development debates fuse compellingly with those on globalisation, particularly globalisation as cultural flows and neoliberal economic policy. International aid, the daughter of the myth of development, is paradoxically the clearest testimony of non-development. In the context of tourism in Cuba this has meant that the increased mobility of international tourists is in stark contrast to the immobility of the majority of the Cuban population. Human rights give a language of political contract to matters of poverty, injustice, and armed violence. Global conjunctions, historical perspectives of development, and moral imperatives of recent development trends inform tourism and what is taking place in Cuba.