With winter nights drawing in across North America, Canadian “snowbirds” – citizens who flee their freezing temperatures for sunnier climes every year – are planning their annual trips to Florida or the Caribbean.

Traditionally, Cuba has been hugely popular among Canadians, drawn to the pristine white sands of beach resorts like Varadero.

They fill the void left by Americans wary of the trip restrictions imposed on them under the continuing US economic embargo of the largest island in the Caribbean.

Figures display that almost one million Canadian tourists visited Cuba last year, the top country of origin for visitors by some markup.

As such, a recent selection by the Canadian tour operator, Sunwing Vacations throng – one of Cuba’s leading trip partners – to remove 26 hotels from its Cuba financing collection is a blow to the island’s struggling tourism industry.

Sunwing took the selection after Cuba endured a four-day nationwide blackout at the complete of October, caused by failures with the country’s aging vigor infrastructure.

This was followed by another national power cut last month, when Hurricane Rafael barrelled its way across the island, worsening an already-acute electricity crisis.

A third countrywide blackout then happened on Wednesday, 4 Dec, after Cuba’s largest power plant broke down.

“Cuba has had some volatility in the last few weeks and that may shake customer confidence,” Sunwing’s chief marketing officer, Samantha Taylor told the Pax information trip website last month.

“There are incredible places to leave in Cuba,” she stressed, keen to emphasise that the business isn’t pulling out of Cuba altogether. “But we also recognise that if clients are a little uncomfortable, we require to provide them options.”

Specifically, that involved drawing up a list of what they called “hidden gems” – alternative holiday destinations in the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas and Colombia.

The implications for Cuba are obvious.

With tourism now the island’s loan amount economic motor, and the main source of foreign money profits after remittances, that an significant tour operator is pointing its customers towards other countries’ beaches over crumbling vigor infrastructure is a real concern.

“Our communication to Canadians is that tourism is one of the economy’s priorities,” said Lessner Gómez, director of the Cuban Tourism Board in Toronto in a statement. “The Ministry of Tourism has been preparing for the winter period to deliver better services, uninterrupted supplies, a better airport encounter, and more and recent car rentals.”

While Cuba’s tourism agency tries to ease fears about the extent of the electricity blackouts, few can deny that these have been extremely challenging months on the island. Hurricane Rafael was only the latest storm to hit Cuba in a frenetic Atlantic hurricane period in which more powerful and more frequent storms are the recent normal.

Of course, severe weather is a issue across the Caribbean. But for Cuba, there are other complications in play.

Donald Trump’s re-election to the White House and his selection for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, stand to make life even more complicated for Cubans than it already is.

“This is probably the Cuban Revolution’s hardest instant,” says former Cuban diplomat, Jesús Arboleya. “And unfortunately, I view nothing on the horizon whatsoever which allows for an optimistic view of the upcoming of US-Cuba relations.

“Donald Trump has handed US policy towards Cuba to those sectors of the Cuban American correct who have essentially lived off anti-Castro policies since their origins.”

Mr Arboleya adds that Marco Rubio, currently a US Senator for Florida, is the leading voice among them. He is a Cuban American long opposed to the communist government in Havana.

His parents were Cubans who moved to the US in 1956, three years before Fidel Castro seized power, but his grandfather fled the Castro-led turn to communism on the island.

“People are horrified by the concept of another Donald Trump presidency. It spells real trouble,” echoes Cuban political commentator and editor of Temas magazine, Rafael Hernández.

Current US policy towards Cuba is “somewhat schizophrenic”, he argues.

“On the one hand, the State Department facilitates back to the private sector, and [pushes for] economic changes in Cuba. But on the other hand, Congress and Senate seem to freeze any advances on those reforms.”

The expectation is, however, that a upcoming Secretary of State Rubio will coalesce the US’s Cuba policy around a single concept – maximum pressure on the island by tightening the already-harsh sanctions.

Cubans terror that could cruel the suspension of commercial flights to Cuba, or even the closure of the US Embassy in Havana, which was officially reopened in 2015 after decades of frosty relations.

If implemented, such steps would be deliberately designed to further damage Cuba’s floundering tourism trade, the aim to hit the communist-run country when it’s down. Tourist numbers to Cuba have almost halved since the high point of nearly five million visitors during the Obama-era détente with Cuba.

Between 2015-2017 US visitors flocked to the island under more relaxed trip restrictions, keen to encounter a country that had long been denied them. Around the same period, the Cuban government embarked on a major hotel-building spree, confident that demand would remain powerful over the next decade.

However, there followed a double blow to Cuban tourism from which it hasn’t fully recovered. First, the Trump Administration rolled back President Obama’s engagement policies, and then the Covid-19 pandemic sent the industry into freefall.

With many of those hotels now registering much lower occupancy rates than originally predicted, and real difficulties in providing the five-star customer encounter as advertised amid the blackouts and shortages, some question the way of putting so many eggs in the tourism basket in the first place.

“Why has Cuba invested 38% [of government funds] on average over the history decade in hotels and infrastructure connected to international tourism, but only 8 to 9% on vigor infrastructure?” asks economist Ricardo Torres at the American University in Washington DC. “It doesn’t make sense. The hotels run on electricity.”

Even with all the current challenges, most visitors consent that Cuba remains a distinctive trip encounter. The cliches – classic cars, cigars and mojitos – still appeal to many, while others prefer to trip the island absorbing its history, population and music.

Yet as tour operator Sunwings’ selection to step back shows, some tourists are finding it challenging to appreciate Cuba during its vigor crisis, especially if it’s about to be exacerbated by a unfriendly administration – and Secretary of State – in Washington.