Eco-tourism: Strategy for sustainable development? A case study of Las Terrazas, Cuba

The mandate for sustainability with respect to tourism attempts to address interrelationships between tourism, the environment, economic development and the interests of local hosts. Eco-tourism, in particular, promises to conserve the environment and to improve the well-being of local people. To date, the majority of case studies that assess the sustainability of eco-tourism focus more narrowly on the economic feasibility of a site, whereby sustainability is treated as the manipulation of economic indicators. In contrast, this thesis uses an ethnographic approach to examine the ways Las Terrazas, Cuba---an eco-tourism destination---experiments with sustainable development in the context of tourism. This anthropological approach highlights local ethno-historic and cultural components and suggests that sustainable tourism, as a strategy for development, is better assessed through a concern with issues of empowerment, representation, and a people's cultural understanding of their natural resources and how these, in turn, bear on the management thereof.