I want to talk about prostitution and jineteras in Cuba.
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. The revolutionary leaders said, "We have eradicated prostitution" with the same enthusiasm and certainty that affirmed the elimination of illiteracy or polio.

But sex didn't lose its market value.



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.

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.

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.

The new prostitutes 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 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.

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 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.



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.

PS: yes, all the pictures are real cuban women

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