Feminists, Queers and Critics: Debating the Cuban Sex Trade

Abstract

Cuban scholars and women's advocates have criticised the widespread emergence of sex tourism in post-Soviet Cuba and attributed prostitution to a crisis in socialist values. In response, feminist scholars in the United States and Europe have argued that Cuban analysts promote government agendas and demonise sex workers. Drawing on nineteen months of field research in Havana, I challenge this conclusion to demonstrate how queer Cubans condemn sex tourism while denouncing an unconditional allegiance to Cuban nationalism. By introducing gay Cuban critiques into the debate, I highlight the interventionist undertones of feminist scholarship on the Cuban sex trade.

Approaching Difference, Inequality, and Intimacy in Tourism: A View from Cuba

“…As shown by Daigle (2015), representatives of the National Centre of Sexual Education (CENESEX) and the CESJ (see above) saw Cuban women engaging in commoditized sex with tourists as "morally responsible for their own objectification" (2015:156). We rejoin here another frequently quoted (and often misinterpreted; see Stout 2008) remark of Fidel Castro, in which he reacted, in 1992, to the growing international condemnation of "sex tourism" in Cuba, and which highlights the difference between pre-revolutionary prostitution (driven by starvation) and current jineterismo:…”

“…A significant parallel can be traced here with the Cuban authorities' stance on tourism and their take on the phenomenon of tourism hustling, prostitution, and jineterismo-or one of their stances, that is, as these were also diverse, changeable, and not always consistent (see Berg 2004;Daigle 2015;Garcia 2010;Stout 2008). The critique of tourism-led prostitution made by Marcelo and his friends resonates in this case with the remarks of Fidel Castro in a 1999 speech, when the then-president blamed tourism and foreign men for "tricking, exploiting, corrupting, and filling [Cuban women] with vice," seen by him as victims in need of rehabilitation (Castro Ruz 1999, my translation from the Spanish original; see also Paternoso 2000 and Garcia 2010).…”

“…The tourists' skepticism toward the possibility of establishing a "genuine," longterm relationship with the locals, and the related assumption that Cubans would only deploy "true" intimacy with fellow nationals, resonates with a widespread approach to jineterismo by Cuban authorities and institutions (Daigle 2015;Stout 2008). We can think of the view, presented in the previous section, that "a true relationships cannot exist between a Cuban man and a foreign woman" (Daigle 2015:179).…”

‘It's the sugar, the honey that you have’: learning to be natural through rumba in Cuba

“…Dance, like the body in Grosz's work (1994, 23), oscillates undecidedly between binary pairs such as instinctive and learned, free and controlled, thinking and feeling, inside and outside, social and material. While corporeal 'mixing' occurs in less predictable and homogenizing forms than ideologies of 'mixing' suggest (see Wade 2005), the idea of the mulata as one who naturally lacks bodily boundaries -and so is simultaneously powerful and vulnerable -reappears in Cuban music, poetry and politics (see Fernandez 1999;Paternostro 2000;Cabezas 2004;Fairley 2006;Stout 2008). .…”

One way or another: Erotic subjectivity in Cuba

“…At the same time that the Special Period damaged the economy, it also forced an increase in informal individual production and trade and, concomitantly, new or renewed avenues of intellectual, ideological, artistic, erotic, and stylistic practice. Emerging ethnographic works on the Special Period have interrogated numerous economic, social, and political changes during this period, such as sex tourism (Allen 2007; Cabezas 1998; Fosado 2004; Stout 2008), media and art (Fernandes 2006; Hernandez‐Reguant 2009), and medicine (Brotherton 2005). During the Special Period, Cubans—especially blacks and queers, 5 who had been shut out of other avenues of economic and wider social participation—were opened up to greater varieties of representational practices and cultural expression because of a conjuncture of a greater array of choices, changes in the capacity of the impaired state to repress those expressions, and powerful global forces exerting their own hegemonies on local ones—making the position and potential “politics of deviance” (Cohen 2004) of black (and) queer subjects especially problematic and promising.…”