Tourism in dictatorships

A relative of mine told me a while ago that he plans to visit China during a vacation. Other relatives and friends of mine have visited Egypt, Tunesia, et cetera. My mother visited Chzechoslovakia when she was young during a summer for some sort of volunteer work exchange project or whatever, and amusingly enough she and her peers stayed at what was called a "labour camp" - I kid you not.

My perspective is a little more limited. I have visited Berlin, Budapest and other cities for genuine sight seeing, but by and large most of my vacations were with friends at various tourist resorts and consisted of chasing girls (and sometimes succeeding), getting drunk (always succeeding) and other meaningless activities. The point is, I've never actually set foot outside of Europe.

Anyway, with said relative who intends to go to China, we eventually got into a discussion of morality. I casually asked wether he had no qualms about being a tourist, a privileged person, in what is essentially a dictatorship. For whatever reason he was personally offended and the "discussion" didn't last long - his stance was essentially that it was none of his business how the Chinese (or Egyptians, Cubans or whatever) govern themselves and that it shouldn't concern him even while he was in their midst.

It's not something that I've put a lot of thought in till now, because so far I've never seriously contemplated visiting any of "those countries". When I started thinking about it, however, I wondered wether I could in good conscience ever do so. The thought that every native I would meet and interact with has significantly less freedom than I do might make me uneasy (and get in the way of enjoying my drink)

Thoughts?

I expect the natives will be concerned mostly with their day-to-day life, which would of course be the same whether they live in a Western-style liberal democracy or an authoritarian regime. Of those who do spend any amount of thought on it, quite a few would most likely not even want the former.

The exception would be totalitarian regimes like North Korea or failed states like Somalia. But you probably wouldn't be going there anyway.

I assume that we can go to countries such as the USA with a clear conscience as they never do anything morally ambiguous.

~:smoking:

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Originally Posted by Scotsperson

I expect the natives will be concerned mostly with their day-to-day life, which would of course be the same whether they live in a Western-style liberal democracy or an authoritarian regime. Of those who do spend any amount of thought on it, quite a few would most likely not even want the former.

The exception would be totalitarian regimes like North Korea or failed states like Somalia. But you probably wouldn't be going there anyway.

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I realize that the average person in a dictatorship spends more thought on stuff that is directly relevant to himself (employment, housing and whatnot) but that strikes me as a rather flimsy excuse.

When somebody mentiones "North Korea" it is universally remembered and recognised as a horrorible dictatorship. Most dictatorships are not that bad, and have even became "salonfähig". Before the events of the Arab spring it had become perfectly normal to travel to Tunesia or Egypt to enjoy their sunny beaches and whatnot. When trouble did break out in Tunesia, a French minister even suggested that France should send personel and aid to help Ben Ali's regime against the protestors :dizzy2:

But the naked truth is that those countries are dictatorships, and a western tourist who's only there for a couple of weeks actually enjoys more freedom than the natives do in their own country. If by a slip of the mouth such a tourist makes a casual joke about the regime, the authorities wouldn't lay a finger on him for the plain simple reason that they don't want a diplomatic incident or endanger their tourism industry. Yet for the native who overheard the joke and laughs about it, it could be a different story.

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Originally Posted by rory_20_uk

I assume that we can go to countries such as the USA with a clear conscience as they never do anything morally ambiguous.

~:smoking:

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Assuming that this is referring to the way that the USA deals with other countries, that's besides the point - the point of the OP is how people are treated in their own countries.

So... as long as countries only abuse and murder persons outside their border that is all fine and dandy and we should adopt a Western holier-than-thou attitude on those that treat their own in the same way?

~:smoking:

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Originally Posted by rory_20_uk

So... as long as countries only abuse and murder persons outside their border that is all fine and dandy and we should adopt a Western holier-than-thou attitude on those that treat their own in the same way?

~:smoking:

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If all this is a reason for you not to visit the US, be my guest. It just hasn't anything to do with the reasons I've outlined in the OP, which I've explained well enough I think.

If we use one of the arbitrary freedom indexes and only visit countries with equal or more freedom then:
One of them ranked 1. Norway, 2. Australia

So Aussies should only ever be tourists in Norway and Norwegians should never leave home.

=][=

The thing is what effect does tourism have on the locals and the local economy. Not all tourism is equal and a large portion is based on exchange rate exploitation ie sex tourism.

However as noted with the hypothetical joke about the regime it is very hard to separate tourists from the local workers and merchants. Where money flows so does information and vice a versa.

So as a way to inject ideas and money into an economy tourism generally beats oil and mining. Tourism requires a level of stability and idea acceptance far in advance of mining.

So instead of looking at all tourism as bad, look at the ones that have a positive effect. For instance some eco tours will end up creating national parks, funding rangers and looking after endangered species. Tourist service work for families is generally better conditions then factory working. Also the changes made in cleaning up a city for tourism improves life for the locals.

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Originally Posted by Papewaio

So Aussies should only ever be tourists in Norway and Norwegians should never leave home.

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I can support this. When's your next vacation, pape? I'll buy you a round!

I get the impression that I'm not taken seriously here...

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Originally Posted by Papewaio

If we use one of the arbitrary freedom indexes and only visit countries with equal or more freedom then:
One of them ranked 1. Norway, 2. Australia

So Aussies should only ever be tourists in Norway and Norwegians should never leave home.

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I didn't really say anything of the sort, did I now? Don't tell me you don't see a qualitative difference beteween Poland and Russia, for example. Things aren't always black and white but to insist both are simply different shades of grey is missing the point.

I seriously doubt wether the Norse or the Australians are more free than I in any meaningful sense, but let's take that as an example. If you visit my country, you're largely treated the same by the authorities as me, a native. The same can't be said if you visit some thirld world dictatorship that somehow manages to advertise itself as a tourist resort.

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Originally Posted by Papewaio

The thing is what effect does tourism have on the locals and the local economy. Not all tourism is equal and a large portion is based on exchange rate exploitation ie sex tourism.

However as noted with the hypothetical joke about the regime it is very hard to separate tourists from the local workers and merchants. Where money flows so does information and vice a versa.

So as a way to inject ideas and money into an economy tourism generally beats oil and mining. Tourism requires a level of stability and idea acceptance far in advance of mining.

So instead of looking at all tourism as bad, look at the ones that have a positive effect. For instance some eco tours will end up creating national parks, funding rangers and looking after endangered species. Tourist service work for families is generally better conditions then factory working. Also the changes made in cleaning up a city for tourism improves life for the locals.

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The point is the double standard. For an example of where this double standard isn’t present I could point to the cases where Dutch people (and other nationalities, I’m sure) get arrested, convicted and incarcerated in Thailand for many years for possessing small amounts of drugs for recreational purposes. The friends and relatives of the convict, who’re still in the Netherlands, complain and nag to the Dutch government that they’re not doing enough to get the guy out of prison. While I agree that the punishment itself is draconian, it’s not worse than a Thai citizen would receive, and my only reaction to the whole incident would be “you broke the law and got caught, what did you expect?”

This, and the apparent dissociation from reality that comes hand in hand with enjoying the sun and cocktails in a country that represses its own citizens, suggests that westerners expect to be treated better than the citizens of Cuba, the PRC, Tunesia etc – even when they’re on the territory of those countries. And to be frank, I think that the notion is obscene.

I don’t dispute that tourism brings in cash and can be beneficial for the locals in the long run. But you could easily argue that in an underdeveloped country with high employment and chronic food shortages, it would actually be beneficial to put kids to work in factories to manufacture clothes, shoes and whatnot to bring in cash from western consumers. Either way, they're not going to school (until any are built, anyway- protests and boycotts against child labour aren’t usually accompanied by an equivalent increase in development aid) and at least this way they're earning money and by extension can be fed. Yet very few people would chose to wear clothing they knew was manufactured in sweat shops by illiterate kids. And why? Because it would ruin the joy of wearing that sweatshirt or those jeans.

I think I get what you mean. I don't believe in vegetarianism, but I can see why someone might not want to go chill in a slaughterhouse. Similarly, you might believe that there's nothing that should be done about a situation in a country, but feel bad hanging out tweeting your friends back home from the phone in a country that doesn't allow cell phones (cuba until a couple years ago I think).

Sorry I reread your post and that's exactly how you explained it, oh well here's an example then:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...010202409.html

By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 3, 2009
HAVANA, Jan. 2 -- Tatiana González stood transfixed before the glass display case watching a single cellphone spin around and around on a carousel at the government-run store. It was a Nokia 1112, a simple, boxy gray workhorse of mobile telecommunications technology -- and González was in love.

She coveted that phone. She confessed she had dreamed of that phone. But she would have to wait just a little longer before she could cradle it to her ear. How much longer? "I hope a year, no more," said González, who toils as a manager of medical records in a hospital, earning $21.44 a month.

That Nokia 1112? The government is offering the phone, charger included, for $58.

This is the hard math of the Cuban revolution, as it celebrates its 50th anniversary and a rickety state-run socialist economy struggles not only to feed, house and care for its people but also to offer them a nibble of global consumer culture.

In his first year as president, Raúl Castro has added a few items to the menu of island life. Since taking over from his ailing older brother Fidel, who has not been seen in public since July 2006 when he underwent what is believed to have been intestinal surgery, Raúl has decided that Cubans can now, legally, purchase once-forbidden fruit, such as DVD players, microwave ovens, desktop computers and mobile phones. It is an experiment that Havana residents have embraced -- especially the cellphones. They're crazy for them.

Everyone agrees a microwave is a useful tool, but a cellphone is the icon of modernity. Since Castro began allowing the purchases in April, and then slashed prices in half in December, mobile phones have become the new status symbol in proletarian Havana, but with a Cuban twist. Cubans don't actually talk on their cellphones. They use them as pagers.

"I never talk on mine. Never, never. If I talk, I talk because it's almost like an emergency, and even then, I talk for a minute, that's it," said Vladimiro Pérez, who stirs mojitos at a swank hotel bar in Old Havana and earns a pittance in salary but hundreds of dollars more in tips from the Canadian and European tourists keeping the island afloat in hard currencies.

The United States entered and exited the Age of the Beeper in the 1980s, but Cuba has just arrived at it. All over Havana, a visitor sees people looking at the cellphones, not speaking into them.

When Pérez and other Cubans get a call, they rarely answer. Instead, they look at the number, find a land-line telephone, which is ubiquitous and dirt cheap to use, and return the call. If they're feeling flush, they might type a message. "We just type," explained Pérez, wagging his finger. "No talk."

The Cuban government has not released official tallies of cellphone users, though a person who works in the technology field in Havana estimated that there were no more than 250,000 users in a nation of 11.2 million.

Even so, the obstacles to entering the cellular world are almost impossibly high for most Cubans. First, there is getting the phone. Most Cubans appear not to have purchased that Nokia 1112 so beloved by Tatiana González but to have worked a deal for a used phone on the gray market -- or more likely, were given one by a relative living abroad. Those old, outdated Ericksons gathering dust in a drawer in Miami or Madrid? They're headed to Cuba.

Now the hard part. To open a mobile phone account with the state telephone monopoly, ETECSA, a user must go, with a cellphone in hand, to one of the few offices in Havana, stand in line for an hour and then pay $65 to activate the service -- a bargain compared with the $130 the government used to charge. This money is not paid in Cuban pesos but in the parallel currency used by foreigners, Cuban "convertible pesos," known as CUCs and pronounced "kooks." These are huge sums for Cubans, whose average monthly salary is around $20.

"It is a very expensive habit for a Cuban," said Philip Peters, a Cuba expert at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., who writes a blog called the Cuban Triangle. Peters said he doubted the Castro government feared that texting and paging Cubans would use the phones to organize against the state.

Standing in a two-hour line at the ETECSA shop at the Miramar Trade Center, a young woman said the Samsung cellphone she has had for more than a year was a gift from an aunt who lives in Spain. "I used it as an alarm clock," she explained, "while I saved my money to activate the line."

As every cellphone owner learns, the price of minutes in Cuba is cruel. Local calls between cellphones cost 65 cents a minute. Cellphone calls to a land line are slightly more. Calls abroad? Ordinary Cubans interviewed for this article laughed. No one calls abroad. Dialing the United States costs $2.70 a minute. Europe will set a caller back $5.85.

A couple of younger Cubans waiting in line to open an account said they have friends who have never spoken on their cellphones. But texting, at 17 cents a message, is popular.

To use their cells, Cubans purchase prepaid cards; the most common denomination is 10 convertible pesos. Several Cubans said they learned to limit their calls by buying only one prepaid card a month. There is no credit in Cuba.

And although some plugged-in sophisticates in Havana have BlackBerrys, there is no Web surfing, no YouTube watching, no e-mailing on cellphones. The bandwidth is not available for them. Cuba connects to the digital world via Italian satellite. Because of the U.S. trade embargo, there is no undersea fiber-optic cable connecting the island to Florida.

Until the changes announced by Raúl Castro last year, ordinary Cubans were not permitted to open cellphone accounts. But foreigners could -- so many of the first Cubans to have and use the devices were top government officials, special workers for foreign companies, and the hotel hustlers and street prostitutes, girlfriends and boyfriends of foreign visitors, who were given or sometimes sold a phone and an account number.

Cubans speak some of the highest-speed Spanish in Latin America, but even that cannot save them from the ticking clock and cost of cell minutes. Many Cubans don't like to give out their cellphone numbers, for fear they will be called -- and have to answer a number they don't recognize. They never use voice mail.

A Cuban with a BlackBerry explained that like the United States and Europe, Cuban society will be changed by the cellphone. "We will be reachable," said the man, who was sharing a glass of homemade wine with friends on New Year's Eve. "But we don't want to answer."

But surely you could go not just to enjoy yourself but to see what it was really like?

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Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro

I think I get what you mean. I don't believe in vegetarianism, but I can see why someone might not want to go chill in a slaughterhouse. Similarly, you might believe that there's nothing that should be done about a situation in a country, but feel bad hanging out tweeting your friends back home from the phone in a country that doesn't allow cell phones (cuba until a couple years ago I think).

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I don't really understand the relevance of your first example, but the second will do. Though I don't recall ever saying that nothing should be done about the situation in those countries.

Speaking of slaugherhouses, I once had a summer job at a meat packing facility; they're not good places to chill. You never realize exactly how repulsive pork smells until you're surrounded by pig carcasses. Didn't turn me into a vegetarian though.

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Originally Posted by rory_20_uk

So... as long as countries only abuse and murder persons outside their border that is all fine and dandy and we should adopt a Western holier-than-thou attitude on those that treat their own in the same way?

~:smoking:

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Don't visit us, we'll kill you: http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news...19/detail.html

If we do this to our own people, imagine what we'd do to you. :stare:

I had a couple of soldiers visit China on R&R from Afghanistan, and during their 2 week stay their hotel room was broken into three times. All that was ever taken were subtle pieces of proerty, like SIM cards, thumb drives and memory chips from cameras. Hows that for creepy?

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Originally Posted by Major Robert Dump

I had a couple of soldiers visit China on R&R from Afghanistan, and during their 2 week stay their hotel room was broken into three times. All that was ever taken were subtle pieces of proerty, like SIM cards, thumb drives and memory chips from cameras. Hows that for creepy?

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Sorry, those aren't "subtle pieces of property." Those are memory storage devices. Probably more than petty theft.

I take it they didn't stay at the Hilton?

They stayed at one of the nicest hotels in the country, according to what they were telling me. They reported the thefts to the Embassy and to the S2 shop when they returned to country. Nothing important was on any of the devices, just some pictures of lesbian girls doing PT and lesbian girls traveling the countryside. But yeah, nothing ever came of it. Had there been photos of combat ops, or equipment, things may have been different, but I doubt it.

Meh just come to Sydney. Parramatta is referred to as Lebanese Town... Plenty of middle east food in Auburn, Merrylands and throughout the city.

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Originally Posted by Major Robert Dump

They stayed at one of the nicest hotels in the country, according to what they were telling me. They reported the thefts to the Embassy and to the S2 shop when they returned to country. Nothing important was on any of the devices, just some pictures of lesbian girls doing PT and lesbian girls traveling the countryside. But yeah, nothing ever came of it. Had there been photos of combat ops, or equipment, things may have been different, but I doubt it.

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Sorry, I have to stop being so subtle sometimes: They got rolled by MSS. They weren't looking for porn, they were looking for information.

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Originally Posted by Vladimir

Sorry, I have to stop being so subtle sometimes: They got rolled by MSS. They weren't looking for porn, they were looking for information.

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Yeah, I figured. Why bring up porn? The soldiers were gay females, if thats what you mean

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Originally Posted by Major Robert Dump

Yeah, I figured. Why bring up porn? The soldiers were gay females, if thats what you mean

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:laugh4: Sorry. That's just where my mind went.

"lesbian girls doing PT and lesbian girls traveling the countryside"

Well to the Chinese it may very well have been porn.

"Cheap holiday in other people's misery"
Johnny Rotten - Holidays in the Sun

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Originally Posted by Idaho

"Cheap holiday in other people's misery"
Johnny Rotten - Holidays in the Sun

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Not to forget the line....

I'm looking over the wall.....and they're looking at me!