The rebound of Cuba’s travel industry a few weeks after hurricanes Gustav and Ike hit the island nation is now a fact. “The devastating effects have been overcome,” said Cuban Tourism minister Manuel Marrero on Sept. 27 during the observance of World Tourism Day

Despite the havoc wreaked by hurricane Gustav in Pinar del Rio on August 30, the province’s tourist infrastructure was up and around by as much as 90 percent in October and the first visitors of the ongoing high-peak travel season were beginning to trickle in. A similar situation is going on in other travel destinations across Cuba that were hit hard by hurricane Ike a week later. In Santa Lucia (Camaguey), Trinidad (Sancti Spiritus) and Holguin, the hard work paid off and now the country’s 46,000 hotel rooms, the incoming agencies, the transport companies and other tourism-related service providers are back in business. Preliminary estimates of the damages caused by both tropical storms between August 30 and September 9 reckoned losses in the neighborhood of $5 billion. Maritza Ballester, of the Forecast Center at the Meteorological Institute, revealed some astounding information for this magazine issue. When hurricane Gustav was pounding the country, the meteorological station in Paso Real de San Diego in the Pinar del Rio Province gauged gusty winds of up to 211 miles per hour —the fastest ever logged in the world for a tropical hurricane— while winds were somewhere between 93 and 150 miles per hour in other parts of that same territory of western Cuba, even faster in the vicinity of the Viñales Valley. Lodging facilities in this well-known piece of scenery —UNESCO declared it World Cultural Site— like Los Jazmines, La Ermita and Rancho San Vicente, were severely smacked but they are now back to normal. During its nearly 625-mile-long swirling tour from east to west or off the Cuban archipelago, hurricane Ike’s gusty winds peaked 115 miles per hour in the province of Holguin. Local hotels endured the windy onslaught, with some of them reporting damages that have now been restored. As a matter of fact, a group of German, Canadian and British tour operators paid a visit to the destination for a firsthand look at the hardworking efforts that they wound up praising with high remarks. As a curiosity, Cuba had not been pounded by back-to-back hurricanes in such a short span of time since 1948. This time around, both Gustav and Ike made landfall on the island nation as devastating hurricanes, the former as a category 4 and the latter as a category 3 in the Saffir-Simpson Scale. However, thanks to the colossal endeavor of tourism workers the country’s travel industry is now entering the high-peak season with virtually all of its hotels and services back on their feet and ready to successfully meet the commitment of chalking up this year a 13 percent growth from 2007.