I picked up a recent issue of Times at the newsstand because there was a long article on Cuba. The piece went on and on forever, managing to say absolutely nothing while allowing the author to make some money by exploiting a theme everybody but him is interested in.
The article provided the tired old canard of a stat about Cuba’s 98% literacy rate. It always mystifies me why not a single person who joyously trots out this figure ever stops to think about its provenance. Who provided the figure? The Cuban government? The same Cuban government that is desperate to find some shred of proof that the Revolution was not a giant failure?
I remember how during the perestroika happy Western tourists started descending on the USSR.
“But why do you keep saying there are shortages of food?” they would ask with scary sincerity. “We are being offered really fantastic meals at the hotel.”
The idea that the Soviet government might not be feeding regular citizens in the same way it was catering to the tourists that it wanted to impress never occurred to them.
I’m now seeing the same thing happen in Cuba. Chirpy Westerners stay at expensive hotels, eat and drink just like they do back home, and then post gushy accounts on Facebook of how Cuba’s poverty was all nasty propaganda because there are like, totally luxurious resorts all over the island.
Clarissa's Blog 
Did the Cuban government even attempt to keep the poor citizens away from the hotels? If only Cubans are servants, and only Westerners are guests of the hotel/eating at the hotel restaurant, that’s usually a huge honking clue the hotel (and the food) is too expensive for Cubans to afford.
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Whenever I’d go to a Cuban resort with my sister and my brother-in-law, he would spend all day ordering food and smuggling it to the workers of the hotel. The workers spend all day seeing the guests eat and it’s hard. But the guests are usually oblivious.
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