Authentic Cuba: analysis of tourism advertising, 2002-2016

Abstract Tourism and advertising are fields of study that gain interest and space in the academic world, essentially in the scope of Applied Social Sciences. The present work seeks to analyze the Cuban tourism advertising discourse, providing possible interpretations of the contents (text/image) contained in its advertising campaigns, in order to perceive the way the country was promoted in the last decades. The corpus of analysis consisted of 50 posters of the four Cuban tourism advertising campaigns carried out between 2002 and 2016. Through research methods and procedures that included morphological and content analysis, semi-structured interviews, and documentary analysis, the research found that diversification of products and incentives offered by the destination was the main communication strategy in the period, and that cultural attractions are the anchor of the tourist advertising of the island.