by Jesús Zúñiga, Independent Journalists' Cooperative
June, Havana - I want to talk about prostitution in Cuba but I'm lacking experience. I've never prostituted myself. I've never paid for sex. I belong to a generation of Cubans who couldn't acquire enough power to awaken greed in the courtesans of true socialism and who now are lacking enough dollars to pay the new prostitutes of decadent socialism.
For a long time they made us believe that we belonged to the generation that Frederick Engels predicted in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and when we asked how sexual relations would be regulated "after the imminent fall of capitalist production", they responded, "That will be seen when a new generation has emerged, a generation of men who never found themselves in a situation where they had to purchase or use any other social forces to obtain a woman, and a generation of women who never had to give themselves to a man for reasons other than true love". We heard that phrase repeated many times along with the encouragement to be proud of belonging to the stock of new men.
It's certainly true that by 1965 there was not a single brothel on the island nor a single woman selling herself on the street. These kinds of places had been closed and the women placed in respectable jobs. The revolutionary leaders said, "We have eradicated prostitution" with the same enthusiasm and certainty that affirmed the elimination of illiteracy or polio.
The new morality of the revolution not only swept away the ethical legitimization of prostitution, it put an end to the overvaluing of women's virginity, it legitimized the validity of pre-marital relations and it accepted, in tune with the phenomenal 60's, a sweepstakes of free, revolutionary love which flourished in the great mobilizations for voluntary work or the entrenchments to defend the homeland. As the ideological culmination of that tendency, in 1975 the first Congress of the Cuban Communist Party decreed that the "moral" thing to do was to study, to work, and to defend the revolution, and that it was time to forget about moral considerations regarding sex.
But sex didn't lose its market value. During the years in which money was unimportant and only political influence was relevant, an impressive number of political, diplomatic, military and administrative leaders exchanged their old wives, their old companions in the struggle, for new, young and beautiful ones. It was a massive phenomena.
The young women of the new generation didn't have access to the latest clothes, french perfumes, nor their own house or a car. The best men to catch were those who, because they enjoyed the prerogatives of power, could provide them with what they needed, and even indulge their whims. Could that be called prostitution?
These were very interesting men, in their forties and fifties, who because of their historic deeds, their level of employment or their personal relationships has ascended, in a historically chauvinist society, to positions of authority where they could obtain almost everything. For their part, the women weren't just any old thing either. Aside from being young and beautiful, they had studied in the revolution's schools. Many, along with the lust for material things, had some kind of idealistic dream to achieve. They were the courtesans of the true socialism.
This phenomena reached from the mid-60's to the mid-80's. That's when the foreigners began to arrive: tourists from capitalist countries who were thirsty for tropical sun, looking for mulattas, salsa music, cigars and rum. At first they offered merchandise in exchange for sex: t-shirts, perfume, jeans. Later came the dollarization of the Cuban economy and they began to pay in cash.
At the same time that this was happening, members of the bureaucratic apparatus were losing their power to acquire material goods. The 90's signified the disappearance of the soviet subsidy which, among other things, made it easy for the government to acquire lavish goods for its leaders.
But don't let things get confused. The women who look for tourists are not the refined young women who took the place of the ministers and comandantes' wives. Rather they are something easy, cheap, immediate and quick. The new generation of prostitutes varies between 15 and 25 years old, although some can be found who are 13 or 31.
A scientific mind could divide them up according to their aspirations. At the lowest level are those who for twenty dollars will do anything for a night. And I mean a night and not two hours because, as a general rule, they have nowhere to sleep comfortably and they prefer to wake up next to their client rather than go across the city on foot to the little room they live in.
In the middle are the ones who have a good time for the two weeks that the vacationer is in Cuba, taking the role of lady companions. They eat well, they travel around, and they receive gifts.
At the top are the ones who are betting on the big prize: to be invited to travel abroad and, why not?, to marry and live forever outside of Cuba.
To be fair with the women, I must say that there are also men at the various levels of prostitution. The classic binomial, "the woman sells herself and the man pays" has been extended to a new behavior: "the tour guide pays and the Cuban man grabs". In the popular jargon they are known as "pingueros" [roughly equivalent to the English "cocksuckers"].
The official recognition of this new phase of prostitution in the country is recent. After receiving the permission or the order to write on the topic, a few official reporters have submitted articles and interviews in which the new prostitutes or, as they are known in the popular jargon, "self-employed workers in the field of attending to men", are presented not as driven by hunger such as occurs under capitalism, but rather that they are inspired by a certain attraction to wealth, a rare virus of consuming goods, far from the spiritual values that the revolution has instilled in the new generations.
This detail deserves to be clarified with some precision. Hunger is also a cultural problem. Hunger isn't just getting to the level of starvation of some shipwrecked person abandoned to a sterile rock. Hunger is also not being able to chose one's food, not being able to season it to taste, not having a balanced diet. And, in addition, human necessities are not just digestive. A person needs to be able to clean oneself up, to get dressed, to surround oneself with useful things. To renounce being a consumer doesn't mean turning oneself into a hermit. To try to purchase a fan when one lives in a place with no windows is not a acting like a consumer. It seems simply obscene to continue with examples.
Some want to view prostitution as a job that someone performs "on another person", similar to that done by a masseuse, a manicurist, or a psychotherapist. In that case, to persecute those who practice the profession only serves to deprive them of the right to a just wage for their labor. But to acknowledge this activity as a legitimate means of earning a living is unacceptable for a humanistic ethic, whether Christian or communist.
Prostitution is nothing new in Cuba. In times as remote as the 18th century, a Spanish captain was dispatched to the island to close down a string of brothels managed by the local cleric. In a society created around the Catholic, Latin tradition of separating men from women in public, the brothels were one of the few places where casual encounters could be carried on openly, especially encounters between young white men and mullatas and black women. Finally, the world of the brothel served as a source for a great part of the Cuban popular culture, as well as for a new mythology about the mullatas' sexuality.
During the 40's of this century, tourism emerged as one of the island's greatest industries. The takeover of the hotels and casinos by the mafia ensured that prostitution would play a prominent role in Havana's night life, and Cuba began to be known as nothing more than just a brothel. Fidel Castro came to power promising to change all of that. One of the first acts of the revolutionary government was to re-educate hundreds of prostitutes and to offer them work as maids, chauffeurs and waitresses.
Many supporters of the revolution believed that women would have a better life under socialism. Now, along with the exiled opposition, they view the resurgence of prostitution as a sign that socialism has failed women. The truth is that the prostitutes have always been a part of the post- revolutionary landscape.
Before the present wave of foreign clients, Cuba went through a phase called la "titimania" in which older men, usually high-ranking members of the military or the government, kept young lovers as "trophies". What has changed since then is the Cuban economy. The government teeters on the edge of ruin due to the loss of the soviet subsidy and the failure of the revolutionary project