Jury Krytiuk, head of the Cuban travel department at Toronto-area agency A. Nash Travel Inc., says an affordable vacation in a relatively pristine landscape will be harder to come by in the years to come.
Prices will surge as restrictions on American travellers ease, he said, adding Cuba will also have to adjust its tourism infrastructure to accommodate an influx of new visitors.
“There’s a limited amount of accommodation, so there’s going to have to be a lot of hotels built, especially in the cities, to accommodate people who want to visit,” Krytiuk said in a telephone interview.
Docking facilities will also be prime targets for expansion, he said, since the island is not currently equipped to house the mammoth cruise ships most commonly used in Caribbean travel, he said.
The result, he said, is that Canadians visiting the island 15 years from now are likely to have a very different experience than those enjoying a vacation there today.
Sweden, a country of nine million inhabitants, welcomes more lone child refugees than any other country in Europe. In 2012, Sweden brought in 3,900 foreign children - 60 percent above Germany's admission rate. Next year, Swedish admission of unaccompanied children will double that number.
Sorsele - a town buried in Sweden's northern forest - tops the refugee-intake charts by a long stretch. Unaccompanied children account for a quarter of the 42 refugees that have settled here so far in 2014.
If it weren't for that influx of teens, this town wouldn't be able to field a boy's football team.
[. . .]
For Sorsele, a town that's been depopulating since the 1970s, there is more to immigration than claiming the golden boot. Locals say the town centre is not bustling like it used to. Many see its refugee admissions - which add about 4 percent to its total population every year - as an injection of both labour and spending power.
"Refugee admissions are a zero-sum game," Martin Dahlbom, head of the labour unit in Sorsele municipality, tells Al Jazeera, referring to state-administered benefits both asylum seekers and refugees receive. "So it's all about how well one does integrating them."
On a misty autumn morning, local teacher Inger Lundmark informs her students of the do's and don'ts of using the school's new tablet computers. Lundmark teaches a high school prep class for Afghan and Ugandan teenagers aged between 16 and 18.
Amanda Armstrong schedules her life around the tides. For the past year and a half, she’s had to navigate rising waters that saturate the lawn of her red brick house in Norfolk, Virginia, and sometimes fill a puddle out front with crabs and fish.
“We call it our little aquarium,” Armstrong, 40, said from outside the home along the Lafayette River that she rents with her family, where wetlands plants have sprouted up from the frequent doses of salt water.
Climate change is beginning to take a toll on real estate in the coastal city, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southeast of Richmond, as insurance costs soar and residents resort to putting their homes on stilts or opening up space underneath for the water to flow through. While most of the U.S. is in a housing rebound, prices in Norfolk fell 2.2 percent in October, according to the Virginia Beach-based Real Estate Information Network.
The city, which averages about a flood a month, is a harbinger of life in U.S. coastal communities. By 2045, within the lifetime of a 30-year mortgage, sea levels will rise about a foot along the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern shoreline, increasing tidal flooding in places including Atlantic City, New Jersey; Ocean City, Maryland; and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, according to an October report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Even with gradual sea-level rise, some elevations can undergo very fast change in vulnerability to flooding,” said Ben Strauss, vice president for sea level and climate impact at research organization Climate Central. “What’s happening in coastal Virginia is kind of a preview of what could happen much more widely.”
The latest viral story in China is the rags-to-riches tale of a young man named Mei Aicai. A working class high-school graduate who scored abysmally on China's college entrance exam, Mei now owns his own business, claims title to three-quarters of an acre of land, lives in a split-level house, and is married to an eighteen-year-old who -- the Chinese internet universally agrees -- looks like a model. One more thing: Mei achieved all his good fortune after leaving China for Ukraine.
For the Chinese public, the moral of Mei's story is clear: for anyone who lacks family connections, elite academic credentials, and a big bank account, it's now easier to achieve upward mobility in Kiev than Shanghai.
It's not hard to imagine what would have happened to Mei, with his modest background and limited education, had he remained in China. Faced with a slowing economy, high housing prices, widening income inequality and a tough job market for college graduates, millions of young Chinese now feel stuck on the lower-middle rungs of their country's ladder of success.
This widespread feeling has coalesced into an identity known as diaosi. The term is commonly translated into English as “loser” -- although its most literal translation would be a vulgar reference to the male anatomy -- and was originally used to describe young, under-employed internet-obsessed males. But over the past five years, it has escaped its derogatory connotations, transforming into a more pliable identity available to anyone who wants to distance himself from China’s money- and status-obsessed culture.
A lifetime of moving has taught Claudia Morales to start packing early, because like many 13-year-olds, her room “is always a mess.”
The hoodies go in her suitcase, but as usual, all her partially completed schoolwork ends up in the trash. Just a week later, Claudia has new notebooks, along with new textbooks, and three bulging suitcases to start unpacking 200 miles away.
She does this every year. Twice.
This December, thousands of migrant farmworker children are making their annual trek to new schools in California, but they do so also at other times throughout the country. During growing season, their parents rent low-cost housing in federally subsidized labour camps, but state rules mandate that families move at least 50 miles away when the camps close for the winter.
“We have a life we need to live,” she said. “I like both places, but when I grow up I expect to have good work and buy a house where we can stay permanently.”
Claudia gets straight As at one school, somewhat lower grades at her other. But as years pass and coursework gets more complex, the odds rise against her. Eventually, about 90 per cent of kids living in seasonal worker housing drop out of school, according to the San Jose-based non-profit human rights organization Human Agenda.
Sliding around beneath the surface of Los Angeles is something dark, primordial, and without form. It seeps up into the city from below, through even the smallest cracks and drains. Infernal, it can cause fires and explosions; toxic, it can debilitate, poison, and kill.
Near downtown Los Angeles, at 14th Place and Hill Street, a small extraction firm called the St. James Oil Corporation runs an active oil well. In 2006, the firm presided over a routine steam-injection procedure known as “well stimulation.” The purpose was simple: a careful and sustained application of steam would heat up, liquefy, and thus make available for easier harvesting some of the thick petroleum deposits, or heavy oil, beneath the neighborhood.
But things didn’t quite go as planned. As explained by the Center for Land Use Interpretation—a local non-profit group dedicated to documenting and analyzing land usage throughout the United States—“the subterranean pressure forced oily ooze and smells out of the ground,” causing toxic “goo” to bubble over “into storm drains, streets, and basements.” The sudden appearance of this nauseating black tide actually destabilized the nearby road surface, leading to its emergency closure, and 130 people had to be evacuated. It took weeks to pump dangerous petroleum byproducts out of the basements and to resurface the street; the firm itself was later sued by the city.
Tar pushes up through cracks in the sidewalk on Wilshire Boulevard, near the La Brea Tar Pits. (Geoff Manaugh)
While this was an industrial accident, hydrocarbons are, in fact, almost constantly breaking through the surface of the city, both in liquid and gaseous form. These are commonly known as seeps, and the most famous one is an international tourist attraction: the La Brea Tar Pits, with its family-friendly museum on Wilshire Boulevard. The “tar” here is actually liquid asphalt or pitch, and it is one of many reasons why humans settled the region in the first place. Useful both for waterproofing and for its flammability, this sticky substance has been exploited by humans in the region for literally thousands of years—and it has also given L.A. some of its most impressive paleontological finds.
In other words, precisely because they are so dangerous, the tar pits are a veritable archive of extinct species; these include mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, and dire wolves, examples of which have been found fatally mired in the black mess seeping up from the deep. Groups of these now long-dead creatures once wandered across an otherworldly landscape of earthquakes and extinct volcanoes, an active terrain pockmarked with eerie bubbling cauldrons of flammable liquid asphalt.
ore than a million Canadians will travel to Cuba this year. The only places beyond our borders that attract more of us are the United States and Mexico. There is no other tourist destination on earth where Canadians are so dominant, and possibly none where the tourist economy is more vital to the nation’s immediate economic health. With little in the way of formal policy and with no real intent on the part of the beach-bound hordes, we’ve established a relationship with Cuba that is unique in both our histories. We’ve colonized Cuba on vacation by accident.
This is a story about what happens when the unarticulated, half-hidden nature of that colonial relationship is suddenly exposed. It’s an economics lesson in the form of a parable, a traveller’s tale about the strange connection between master and servant in this de facto tourist colony.
So let’s begin, in fairy-tale fashion, in a tower atop a castle: the rooftop terrace of Hotel Casa Granda in Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second-largest city. The Casa Granda is an old colonial half ruin overlooking a wide square and an elegant cathedral. It’s an atmospheric, Graham Greene kind of place, five storeys tall and colonnaded and shedding white paint. I found myself there at sunset one January evening, sipping a mojito and pondering the real value of ten convertible Cuban pesos.
Because Cuba is among the few nations on earth with two official currencies, a never-never-land economy caught in its own distended bubble halfway between the collapsed Soviet bloc and the contemporary global capitalist order, visitors can find themselves wondering more than usual about exchange rates. There is the regular, nonconvertible peso, officially the Cuban peso or CUP, used to buy staple goods at state-run shops. And there is the convertible peso, the CUC—the hard currency, which is used for luxury goods and provides the default banknotes for the tourist economy. In government accounting, CUCs and CUPs are valued one to one, but informally the CUC is worth about the same as the Canadian dollar, while the CUP has a street value of a nickel at most. CUPs are worthless outside Cuba, except as souvenirs.
Filling out a state store ration card.
Earlier in the day, I’d had ten CUCs snatched from my hand, and I was up on the roof of the Casa Granda trying to figure out what exactly had happened and how I really felt about it. It’s rare, once you’re well into the mortgage-and-kids phase of adulthood, to encounter a whole new category of emotion, but I was pretty sure I’d done just that out there on a dusty Santiago back street, and now I was probing the feeling to discern its dimensions.
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