Cruise from Miami leaves for Cuba

Time has an article and videos about traveling to Cuba:

The first American cruise ship in nearly forty years crossed the Florida Straits from Miami, Florida and docked in Havana, Cuba on Monday, restarting commercial travel on waters that served as a stage for a half-century of Cold War hostility.
Carnival Cruise Line’s Adonia became the first American cruise ship in Havana since President Jimmy Carter eliminated virtually all restrictions of American travel to Cuba in the late 1970s. Travel limits were restored after Carter left office and American cruises to Cuba only become possible again after President Barack Obama and President Raul Castro declared detente on 17 December 2014.
Hundreds of workers and passersby gathered to watch, some cheering, as the gleaming white seven-hundred-passenger ship pulled into the dock, the first step toward a future in which thousands of ships a year could cross the Florida Straits, long closed to most American-Cuban traffic due to tensions that once brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
The straits were blocked by the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis, though tens of thousands of Cubans have fled across them to Florida on homemade rafts, with untold thousands dying in the process. The number of Cubans trying to cross the Straits is at its highest point in eight years and cruises and merchant ships regularly rescue rafters from the Straits.
The Adonia is one of Carnival’s smaller ships, roughly half the size of some larger European vessels that already dock in Havana, but American cruises are expected to bring Cuba tens of millions of dollars in badly needed foreign hard currency if traffic increases as expected. More than a dozen lines have announced plans to run US-Cuba cruises and, if all actually begin operations, Cuba could earn more than eighty million dollars a year, according to a recent report by the US-Cuba Trade and Economic Council.
Most of the money goes directly to the Cuban government, council head John Kavulich said. He estimated that the cruise companies pay the government five hundred thousand dollars per cruise, while passengers spend about a hundred dollars per person in each city they visit.
Carnival says the Adonia will cruise twice a month from Miami to Havana, where it will start an eighteen-hundred-dollar-per-person seven-day circuit of Cuba, with stops in the cities of Cienfuegos and Santiago de Cuba. The trips include on-board workshops on Cuban history and culture, and tours of the cities that make them qualify as “people-to-people” educational travel, avoiding a ban on pure tourism that remains part of US law.
Optional activities for the Adonia’s passengers include a walking tour of Old Havana’s colonial plazas and a $219 per person trip to the Tropicana cabaret in a classic car.
Before the 1959 revolution, cruise ships regularly traveled from the US to Cuba, with elegant Caribbean cruises departing from New York City and $42 overnight weekend jaunts leaving twice a week from Miami, said Michael L. Grace, an amateur cruise ship historian. The New York City cruises featured dressy dinners, movies, dancing, and betting on “horse races”, in which stewards dragged wooden horses around a ballroom track according to rolls of dice that determined how many feet each could move per turn. The United Fruit company operated once-a-week cruise service out of New Orleans, too, he said. “Cuba was a very big destination for Americans, just enormous,” he said. Cruises dwindled in the years leading up to the Revolution and ended entirely after Castro overthrew the US-backed government. After Carter dropped limits on travel to Cuba, four hundred passengers, including musical legend Dizzy Gillespie, sailed from New Orleans to Cuba on a 1977 Jazz Cruise aboard the MS Daphne. Like the Adonia, it sailed despite dockside protests by Cuban exiles, and continued protests and bomb threats forced Carras Cruises to cancel additional sailings, Grace said. The following year, however, Daphne made several cruises from New Orleans to Cuba and other destinations in the Caribbean.
Cuba cut back on all cruise tourism in 2005, ending a joint venture with Italian terminal management company Silares Terminales del Caribe, and Fidel Castro blasted cruise ships during a four hour speech on state television: “Floating hotels come, floating restaurants, floating theaters, floating diversions visit countries to leave their trash, their empty cans and papers for a few miserable cents,” he said.
Today, however, the Cuban government sees cruises as an easy source of revenue that can bring thousands more American travelers without placing additional demand on the country’s maxed-out food supplies and overbooked hotels.
Before detente, Americans made surreptitious yacht trips to Cuba during Caribbean vacations, and the number of Americans coming by boat has climbed since 2014, including passengers on cruise ships registered in third countries and sailing from other ports in the Caribbean. Traffic remains low, however, for a major tourist attraction only ninety miles from Florida.
Aiming to change that as part of a policy of diplomatic and economic normalization, Obama approved American cruises to Cuba in 2015. The Doral, Florida-based Carnival Cruise Line announced during Obama’s historic trip to Cuba in March of 2016 that it would begin cruises to Cuba starting on 1 May 2016.
Unexpected trouble arose after Cuban-Americans in Miami began complaining that Cuban rules barred them from traveling to the country of their birth by ship. As Carnival considered delaying the first sailing, Cuba announced on 22 April 2016 that it was changing the rule to allow Cubans and Cuban-Americans to travel on cruise ships, merchant vessels and, sometime in the future, yachts and other private boats.
Norwegian Cruise Line says it is in negotiations with Cuban authorities and hopes to begin cruises from the US to Cuba this year.
Cruise traffic is key to the Cuban government’s reengineering of the industrial Port of Havana as a tourist attraction. After decades of treating the more than five-hundred-year-old bay as a receptacle for industrial waste, the government is moving container traffic to the Port of Mariel west of the city, tearing out abandoned buildings, and slowly renovating decrepit warehouses as breweries and museums connected by waterfront promenades. Cruise ship docking will be limited by the port’s single cruise terminal, which can handle only two ships at a time.

Rico says he hopes to take that cruise with his fiancée one of these days... (And we've already picked out, via AirBnB, where we're going to stay.)