Political Economy of Destination Image: Manufacturing Cuba

Abstract

The overt manipulation of tourist destination image (TDI) is a commonly accepted practice among tourism destination marketing organizations, as well as, tourism business interests. While there has been significant critique of the business of tourism and tourism marketing's role in worldmaking—as recently covered in the pages of this journal and in other publications like Tourism Geographies — less scrutiny has focused on how public policy acts, through tourism, as a salient worldmaker. This article from Canally and Carmichael (in Canada) constructs a framework incorporating models from tourist destination image research and critical theory to determine how governmental public policy, both domestic and international, influence TDI formation. This framework is then used to conduct a critical discourse analysis of the three key US policy documents that formulate the US government's stance towards diplomatic relations with Cuba. The result is a political economy of TDI, which traces the influence of intergovernmental and extra-governmental power structures that manipulate the image of a potential tourist destination (Cuba), to manufacture a discourse that aligns with the ide- ologies of the political elites in the US. A conceptual model of governmental manipulation of image formation agents is proposed.