14ymedio, Havana, December 30, 2023 — With a cigar in his mouth, playing baseball and distributing gifts to the children in front of the Havana Capitolio, a chubby Santa Claus promotes Cuba as a destination for Havanatur this December. The images, created with Artificial Intelligence, have unleashed a swell of criticism from the most extremist sectors, which accuse the tourist agency of succumbing “to colonizing seduction.”
The Cuban diplomat José Carlos Rodríguez Ruiz was one of those who reacted angrily to the campaign that the State company disseminated on its Facebook account, which it took down shortly after due to criticism. The former ambassador of the Island to Italy classified Santa Claus as part of the “colonizing icons and something alien to Cuban culture.”
Rodríguez’s text, which was also published by the official newspaper Tribuna de La Habana, said that “in the face of those who easily succumb to colonizing seduction, there is only one way, which is the same as our history to keep us independent and sovereign: to be alert and confront them.” The diplomat questions whether “they will have taken away the irresponsible people who thought it up, created it and published it. We don’t know. Havanatur didn’t even issue a note apologizing. They should have.”
Rodríguez’s criticisms have been joined by those of fellow diplomat Orestes Hernández Hernández, who called to use, instead of the figure of the old man with a white beard dressed in red, characters from Cuban literature such as the puppet Pelusín del Monte, created by the writer Dora Alonso in 1956. For her part, the official journalist Ana Teresa Badia classified the tourism agency’s campaign as a “violation of all communication logic.”
A few hours after the first questions were published, the advertising disap
