Winnipegger Alexander Andrich has no interest in the prostitutes
who surround him. They approach, ask for cigarettes, smile and try to get
close to him. But he shows no interest.
When asked about the story of Canadians seeking prostitution, the
25-year-old explodes in anger.
"Yeah, I'd like to talk about it," Andrich says. "I read that just
before I left. What a load of crap. I haven't met any Canadians doing
that."
After two weeks travelling throughout the countryside, his
affection for Cubans has deepened.
"They are great people," Andrich says. "They'll just do anything
for you. There are some people taking advantage of the girls because of
their economic situation.
"The girls are just trying to survive. We've visited people all
over the country and it's incredible, their will to survive. These people
have nothing yet they seem happy," Andrich says.
Pimps on motorcycles are trying to find men to get their hookers
into the Hotel Commodore disco this Monday night.
In a half-hearted effort to curb prostitution, the club won't
allow women to enter unless they're escorted by a male companion.
"They'll pay for themselves," offers one of the pimps. A pretty
girl hops off his bike, hoping to be escorted inside.
The $10 US cover charge will eat into the pimps' profit margin.
Any trick turned inside will be all the more expensive.
While the state may be imposing restrictions on the girls, it's
also profiting from them -- the club is state-owned. Everything is
state-owned; hotels, restaurants, bars, gas stations. Anything that can
make money and suck up the hard American currency flowing into the
country.
Inside the Commodore, girls are working on the foreign men in the
crowd, getting more aggressive as the night wears on.
The few Cuban men in the bar are either undercover club security
or members of the youth wing of the communist party.
There's no concern for the Cuban women forcing themselves on
tourists.
As she soaks up the atmosphere, Obeisy Orman Lopez says this is
only her second time at the club.
Going to the club is Lopez's idea, the highlight of an evening
that begins when she spots a couple of foreign men along the tree-lined
streets of Paseo de Marti Prado, in view of the crumbling capital building
of the Batista regime.
The U.S. propped up the Batista regime for years and when Castro
found he couldn't get elected democratically, because elections were
rigged, he became a revolutionary.
Lopez begins stalking the tourists up and down the street,
stopping when they stop, starting when they start, and then flashing a
golden smile when they turn around to look.
Like many women in her situation, the 19-year-old grade-school
teacher -- she teaches children as young as seven -- doesn't consider
herself a prostitute. She's just interested in meeting a couple of guys
from the outside world and will settle for anyone.
She accepts an offer to go to dinner, knowing she'll at least be
fed a decent meal and, at the very most, have some pocket change.
Lopez suggests a small, private diner hidden behind closed doors
and only open to those who know the owners inside. It's over the Cuban
limit of 12 seats for a private restaurant -- anything bigger must be run
by the government -- and doesn't have any of the necessary paperwork to
operate.
She eats a small portion of her dinner, asks to have the leftovers
put in a plastic bag and takes them home to ration for future days.
At her modestly furnished but clean house, Lopez's four brothers
listen to music and drink cheap Cuban rum, which foreigners can take home
for $4 a bottle.
They laugh when asked if it's okay for two foreign men to take
their teenage sisters out to a club notorious as a place where foreign men
pick up Cuban girls and bed them.
"Okay," they nod and slap each other in a way that guys do when
they know a buddy is about to get lucky with a girl.
"They don't care," says Lopez, who has only her brothers to
protect her. Lopez's parents moved out of the city to get jobs in the
countryside.
There's little work in smoke-filled Havana. Most people while away
the day standing in the doorways and windows of houses trying to get some
fresh air.
Lopez's job pays about $10 a month. A night on the town costs
about $150 for three people. Daily life is not cheap in Cuba and
the good life costs a lifetime of savings.
She's been having sex for cash since she was 16. Her first was a
Cuban, but now it's strictly foreigners with dollars.
Lopez is what locals call a "Jinetero" -- slang for the street
hustlers who work foreign men.
"It's not any man. I want someone who likes me," she says. At the
end of the day she'll do what she has to to make it to her next paycheque.
"I don't think about tomorrow. I'm just living for today."
In some ways Cuba has gone full circle from the corrupt
days of Batista.
Impoverished and indebted to foreign powers during the Batista
years, prostitution became widespread in the country.
The
prostitution problem may have exploded again, but the older people who
remember the Batista days are not longing for the pre-Castro regime.
At 52, Obdulia Ason says she remembers quite a bit from that era
and there's no doubt in her mind life is better now.
"We have medicine now," says the mother of four who suffers from
stomach cancer. "We can get an education."
Before the revolution there was nothing, says another woman.
The state nudges people along in their acceptance of communism.
"Barrio Revolucion," it says throughout the downtown core -- a
revolution in every neighborhood.
"Choose the party or die," says another slogan.
But Alicia Garcia Marquez generally believes the propaganda.
"My children were able to get an education for free," she says.
She's one of the lucky ones -- her daughter, a doctor, married an
Italian man while she was in Nicaragua. Marquez gets money from her
daughter when her ceramics business is slow.
She has a small stall in Old Havana and sells crafts for about $5
a piece. During the tourist season, she might make $20 a month.
"I understand why the young girls are doing what they are doing,"
Marquez says.
"In the world we have, they see other people with things and they
want them. They have needs, they want new clothes like other girls but
they are expensive."
"Levame contigo," the girls cry out in Spanish. "Take us with
you."
Most of the cars just whiz by on busy Ave. de Maceo, more commonly
known as Malecon.
The girls walk along the sidewalk of Malecon which runs along the
Gulf of Mexico.
A retaining wall keeps the waves from crashing into the street.
Sometimes the waves come over the wall, forcing the closure of the
promenade to traffic.
Despite their efforts, Cubans seemingly cannot keep the outside
world from walking through their front door.
The crippling U.S. trade embargo, in place since 1960, has forced
Cubans to look elsewhere for money. And the regime, once propped up by the
Soviet Union, has been further pummeled since the collapse of the
Communist Bloc.
Only now are foreign companies and tourists being allowed in.
Canadians have invested about $600 million in Cuba and
conduct about $460 million annually in trade with the country, says John
Kavlich, president of the U.S.-Cuban Trade and Economic Council.
If anything, the trade is helping the people by bringing more
dollars into the country, he says.
"Wholeheartedly, I agree with that without question," Kavlich says
about the embargo being partially responsible for the huge rise in
prostitution.
"These are intelligent young women who are turning to prostitution
because it affords them the opportunity for their families which might not
otherwise be available," he says. "You get a better economic situation and
you might not have as much prostitution."
Earlier this month Castro held court with the country's 12 million
people, telling them more sacrifices might be in store for them.
"Sometimes you have to cut off the arm to save the body but
communism is not like a human. We will grow the arm back," he said.
Standing outside a worn out-looking state-run bar, a one-armed
"parking attendant" tries to scam tourists into giving him a few bucks to
watch their cars.
He won't give his name, he's afraid of what the state will do to
him, but he says he manages to make about $8 per month from his so-called
job, which has the government's okay.
It's hardly enough cash to live on, so the man is trying to pawn
off his 16-year-old niece on tourists.
"You like her?" he asks in a thick accent, the implication being
she is available for the right price.
The girl and her uncle are told "no" and she walks away to look
for another man.
This is the first rule of capitalism -- survival of the fittest.
Young girls, their bodies still firm but cut so thin from malnourishment,
fit the bill nicely for tourists seeking sex for their bucks.
On the notorious Fifth Avenue -- the main thoroughfare to many of
Havana's pricey restaurants and fancier hotels -- the girls line the
street, waiting for a ride and everything else that follows.
A group of schoolgirls -- one dressed in a Mickey Mouse shirt who
looks to be about 10 years old -- are hopping into the car of an American
tourist.
The four pre-teen girls quickly get out of the car. They're not
doing anything, just having fun playing at being prostitutes.
But their time will come. This is merely their apprenticeship.
It's Friday night and dusk is settling in. A big cruise ship, Club
Med 2, has docked at the terminal and tourists are starting to pour into
the capital.
Havana is busier than it has been all week. Business on the Fifth
is picking up.
Two 16-year-old girls, one from Las Tunas and the other from
Holguin, both in the eastern part of Cuba, have started their
working day.
They approach a car and don't hesitate to get in when told two
tourists have a business proposition for them.
"How are you?" they're asked.
"Luchando," they respond.
Yulieika Velazquez Calzadilla, a light-skinned mulatto girl, is
wearing a black spandex outfit so tight it's easily apparent she has
nothing on underneath.
She has two sisters, one brother, and two worried parents back in
her home town 800 km away.
The high-school dropout hitches a ride to the city every weekend
for her part-time job.
"I have to do this," she says. "I have no other choice. I dropped
out of school."
The most embarrassing part of this is her parents know exactly
what she is up to.
"They're very angry," Calzadilla says. "Especially my father."
But at the end of every weekend they take her back and the family
splits up her hard-earned cash.
"Sometimes I make $20 a day, $50 a day, but often nothing," she
shrugs.
Her ultimate goal is to get out of the country any way she can.
And that means latching on to a tourist who'll marry her.
You can come and go from Cuba at your pleasure if you hold
citizenship somewhere else. Defection is a one-way ticket out of the
country, but with few chances to ever see your family.
"I don't think anything is going to change when Castro is gone so
I want to leave," Calzadilla says.
Her friend, Yamilet Geuvara Garrido, is just as pessimistic about
Cuba's future.
Like many Cuban girls, the dark-skinned beauty comes to
prostitution with a healthy attitude toward sex and none of the hangups
that are traditional in North America.
Perhaps it was 40 years of communist rule that shunned religion,
but during a recent visit by John Paul II the Cubans cheered wildly for
the Pope until he lectured them on the evils of abortion and
contraceptives.
Abortions are readily available at hospitals, paid for by the
state, and condoms -- albeit cheap Chinese brands that look dangerously
thin -- can be had for less than 10c in the local pharmacies which are
open at all hours of night.
"You're very, very beautiful," says Garrido to a tourist, offering
a few unprintable words about her sexual prowess.
She's the more aggressive of the two friends. She wants sex and
figures the money will come later.
"Please put my picture on the Internet," she begs, hoping a man
from the outside world will somehow see her picture, come to Cuba
and save her from her Cuban life.
In the strictly Cuban bars, it's a strange sight to see foreigners
enter. Disco Galicia is packed with the locals dancing to unbearably loud
disco music while flickering lights try to create an early '80s
atmosphere.
Teens pack the bar. Cubans seems to have no legal age limit for
drinking, but a bartender says it's 16. It doesn't really matter anyway --
he's not checking identification.
Not that the drinking age is an issue. With beer priced at $1,
cheap compared with most of the tourist bars, none of the kids have enough
cash to get drunk.
Even though this is a strictly Cuban bar, tourists with hard
currency are greeted with open arms.
Rosy Del Castillo, a perfect 16-year-old mulatto girl with a
slender body, curled hair and a charming smile, is eager to meet a
foreigner and dance.
She walks away from her boyfriend to dance with one and then
explains: "It's okay."
The schoolgirl laughs about her boyfriend's hurt feelings and
wants to find out if any of the foreigners are interested in her for
anything.
"She wants to know if you like her," says another Cuban,
translating into English.
Herbiberti Mejias -- his friends call him Herbert -- says the girl
is available.
"You can have her if you want," he urges.
The 35-year-old man says the young girl is not a prostitute but
she's available for the taking. He's embarrassed to admit it.
A university graduate, Herbert has honed his English skills
working the streets of Havana by trying to do the odd favor for visiting
tourists.
Prostitution is now part of Cuban life, he says, and there is very
little he can do about it.
"I have a 14-year-old daughter," he says. "I moved her out of the
city to live with her aunt. I don't want her here."
Approaching every foreigner he hears speaking English, Herbert
says he wants to be ready for any change that comes.
The high-school teacher begs for any magazines a tourist can give
him.
"I want to be ready when something happens," Herbert says. "For me
it's information and information is power."
It's precisely for that reason Cubans have almost no access to the
foreign press. And while tourists may get CNN in their hotel rooms, it's
two state-run channels for the rest of Havana.
As for the Internet, forget it. The government monitors
everything, keeping track of websites visited by anyone fortunate enough
to have a modem.
"Please send me some magazines when you get back to Canada,"
Herbert pleads again.
On the squeaky clean streets of Veradero prostitution has met its
match.
The resort town, extremely popular with Canadians, was under siege
two years ago so Cuban police came in and swept away the hookers.
Cuban girls are routinely asked for identification and the sight
of a local girl talking to a tourist is cause for an arrest.
Odalys Rodriquez is taking her chances anyway.
The 21-year-old is sitting on a bench and smiles at passing
tourists. Here, you must approach the women -- they will not approach you.
"We're walking the streets but we do so very carefully because of
the police," says Rodriquez, dressed far more conservatively than the
girls of Havana.
Her friend, Jaquelin Fuentes Lescaille, is wearing a halter top
and sitting next to Rodriquez on the bench. That's a risk in itself.
Just being in the beach resort area is enough to get the girl sent
back to her home town near Santiago de Cuba.
"If I'm captured a second time I can go to jail for a year,"
Lescaille says.
The authorities aren't fooling around in Veradero anymore.
A guarded toll bridge must be passed before cars can make their
way through, and police are especially suspicious of Cubans who come to
the resort.
Somehow, the girls squeak through and Dilnerys Jimenez is one of
them.
"Do you want a kiss?" she asks in Spanish. Jimenez says her aunt
will kill her if she finds out what she's up to, but the 18-year-old wants
some cash.
"I see a lot of Italians come here and Germans but I haven't met
any Canadians," she says.
At the Melia Veradero, one of the swankier hotels on the beach, a
small number of Canadians -- mostly couples -- are checked in.
"Very few Canadians come by themselves here," explains Luis
Carmenate, who drives a horse-drawn buggy that is parked in front of the
hotel.
"In these hotels they are always couples," Carmenate says. "The
Canadians are good tourists."
"But it used to be bad before they cleaned up the city.
"The women would be on the streets approaching all the tourists
all the time."
Now Harry and Mary Nichiporik, an Edmonton couple, walk down the
street unimpeded.
"From our point of view it's safe here," Harry says. "We haven't
been hassled at all."
But that's because Cuban authorities are able to isolate the
Veradaro strip, conveniently located on a peninsula about 220 km east of
the capital.
In bustling Havana, with its 2.5 million people, the authorities
face an impossible task. Police look the other way as prostitutes approach
foreigners, only getting involved if the situation becomes violent.
American Senators may want to point the finger at Canadians for
"raping" Cuban girls -- a term one of Sen. Jesse Helms' aides used to
describe tourists buying sex -- but the U.S. may have to start looking at
its own population.
Technically not allowed by U.S. law to buy anything here, U.S.
tourists are still flocking to Cuba.
At the Marina Hemingway, docked boats proudly display the American
flag. The secure enclave --- a security force guards the entrance and
roaming police are there to round up any interlopers who sneak through --
has everything the visiting U.S. tourist could want.
Boaters dock their boats, get a visa stamp and enjoy all the
pleasures that abound, including the prostitutes who roam outside the
gates.
Despite the tough embargo, the U.S. government permits its
citizens to step ashore. Still, the stores of the marina are lined with
Che Guevara T-shirts, lighters and anything else with the revolutionary
leader's picture on it. Cuban rum and contraband cigars that are worth so
much to the Americans are plentiful.
"Americans are coming, not a lot of them, but they are coming,"
says a prominent U.S. lobbyist trying to fight the Helms-Burton Act.
He blames a strong lobby group of Cuban Americans for the fact the
embargo is still in place. The rest of the country, including the
multinational companies who have him on retainer, would like to renew
trade talks.
In the interim, Americans must take a circuitous route to get to
Cuba.
It's not hard -- they just have to fly there via another country
and make sure they don't tell American Customs agents where they have
been.
When night falls in the historic old city of Havana -- a marvel of
Spanish colonial architecture not seen anywhere else in the Western
hemisphere, yet crumbling under Communist rule -- the crowd begins to form
at the Monsterrate Bar.
It's a typical tourist trap. Cuban girls crowd around the doorway
waiting for somebody to escort them and buy them the drinks they can't
afford.
Tonight, it's three bulky Germans laughing uproariously, their
arms wrapped around their newest Cuban friends, buying the girls plenty to
drink.
They need not bother. These are not girls that need to be plied
with booze; they're there for the taking, with the bill a minor detail to
be sorted out afterward.
"It's my fifth time," says George Pallas, a Miami, Fla., native
with a deep affection for the dark brown beauties of Cuba.
He has married two of them, but they've long since ditched him.
It's a popular practice for Cuban girls to marry foreigners, gain
a new citizenship, and then return to being Cuban.
Pallas' potbelly, covered by a Los Angeles Raiders sweatshirt on a
cold Havana night, is more than enough to let the local girls know a
foreigner is on the prowl.
Of course, the fact he's got a gold chain around his neck and
bellows loudly in English are solid confirmation of his status on the
island.
"Where you from?" he asks, then dishes out some sage advice to a
first-time tourist from Canada.
"What are you payin' for a girl," he inquires. Without waiting for
an answer, he offers up what he considers the standard rate.
"It's $10," he says proudly, "and you can do anything you want to
them."
He goes on with his lecture on the ways of Havana.
Forget about hotels, Pallas advises. "You can get an apartment for
$35 a night -- two bedrooms and a television and it's nice."
The added bonus is there's no sneaking around.
The Cubans try to discourage foreigners from bringing girls up to
their hotel rooms. For a few bucks though, they'll look the other way,
even if they're embarrassed to see their daughters being sold.
In Castro's state, there's very little wealth, even among the
wealthy.
Wages range from $8 to $20 per month for highly-skilled
professionals such as doctors and lawyers.
Unfortunately, while wages remain low, prices have kept pace with
the world outside and forced girls to turn to prostitution and all the
risks that come with it.
The state-run pharmacies in Cuba just might be the best
deal in town.
The cupboards are bare, medicine is available in short supply, but
everything is dirt cheap.
One byproduct of the revolution is health care for everyone, but
it has its price.
"We run out of a lot of things," says Daisy Martinez, a pharmacist
at the Drogueria Johnson.
The drugstore stays open through the night, men and women come and
go, picking up condoms all evening.
"We don't have any today," she says about another shortage in
condoms.
Thirty-five years old and earning about $10 US a month during the
three years she's held the job, the woman has no scorn for the girls who
come in.
"Everybody is entitled to do what they want with their own body,"
Martinez says. "Everybody has to settle their life in their own way. If
they didn't, they would have to settle for less."
On her mind is what her 17-year-old daughter is up to tonight.
"I'm working hard to stop her from that type of life," she says.
"But it's hard, she sees friends doing it and what can I tell her?"
Look high and low in Havana and you might hit upon a Canadian
among the thick crowds of Italians, Spanish and German immigrants, but the
numbers are probably indicative of Canada's place in the world.
Outside the Spanish Embassy, in the heart of the old city with the
ocean serving as a backdrop, crowds of Cuban girls hoping to latch on to a
tourist start to form in the early morning, only to disappear when the
embassies close in the afternoon.
At the Canadian Embassy -- it just might be the only place in
tobacco-friendly Havana where you can't smoke -- the view to the sidewalk
is clear of any Cubans.
Local hookers know Canadians aren't interested in sex, so they
don't bother plaguing the embassy.
A Canadian spotted in the flea-market of Old Havana says he
couldn't believe the claims the Americans made in the media this month
about the Canadian appetite for prostitutes.
"It made me so mad," says Ray, a 26-year-old college graduate from
Vancouver.
He won't give his surname because he has a growing "tobacco issue"
-- his code word for the income-producing habit of bringing cigars across
the border.
This is his 10th time in Cuba so he knows the lay of the
land and he's not keen on raping it.
He does admit to having "met" a girl in Santiago de Cuba
who he developed a relationship with -- sex being a key component of that
relationship.
Of course, there's a subtle difference in Cuba when it
comes to what Cuban girls want out of their relationships with foreigners.
Ray says he knows that, but it's a question of not taking
advantage of his position.
"I was sitting on the beach in Santa Marina and this big fat
Italian guy kept calling over young girls and taking them back to his
room," he says with disgust.
The difference is, Ray says, he's got a relationship. He tries to
bring his "girlfriend" goods like antibiotics, soap and other necessities
that are difficult to buy in Cuba.
Still, he knows at the end of the day, she's looking for what all
Cuban girls want.
"I'm sure she's thinking maybe I'll marry her," he says.
The chances of that are slim.
The crumbling buildings, pot-holed streets, aging Russian and
Batista-era Chevys, do not faze the population.
They even like to make morbid jokes about their lot in life.
But it's levity that gets Cubans through the day.
In his 21 years as the director of one of Cuba's medical
clinics, John Wilford has had a chance to see up close the effects of
communism on women in his country.
"We had prostitution here in the 1950s before the earthquake," he
says, in reference to revolution.
Now that it's back he's not surprised.
"The salaries here are ridiculous," says the doctor, the
great-grandson of American immigrants. "I make 460 Pesos a month, about
$21, and that's a very high salary."
One of the working girls who shows up at his clinic can pick that
up in a day.
"This prostitution is relatively new for us," he says. "It had
practically gone to zero after the revolution, but then the tourists came
and it started to grow and grow."
At least some of the sexually transmitted diseases endemic to
prostitution haven't followed suit. Ironically, communism is responsible
for that success, which was achieved at a heavy price.
When AIDS hit Cuba, the government's response was to take
victims off the street and lock them up in sanatoriums.
The government also has a policy of subsidized health care, which
includes free abortions and cheap condoms.
From the relative comfort of his home, a clean and well-decorated
one-floor house with several rooms, Wilford won't offer any condemnation
of the girls.
"They're looking for foreigners, anybody who can help them get out
of the country to somewhere else like Italy, Spain -- or Canada," Wilford
says. "They want what we all want, to leave Cuba."
At least Wilford can still laugh about life.
He tells a story of some Cuban doctors working in Mozambique who
asked the government there for political asylum.
"The Mozambique government didn't know what to do. They didn't
have any legislation for this. Nobody had ever asked for political asylum
in Mozambique before," says Wilford, chuckling at the plight of his
countrymen.
These days, it seems, any place in the world is better than
Cuba.