Some years ago, as I was getting my bearings on Cuba as a place to research, I found myself at a dinner table with a number of University of Havana feminist scholars, friends of friends. They were, I thought, the kind of people I would be friends with in Canada; middle-aged female university teachers, strongly feminist, outspoken, and funny. The conversation flowed easily, until the topic of prostitution came up. Not fully aware of what I was wading into, I voiced what was, for my generation of North American feminists on the left, a pretty standard – what we used to call “sex positive” or “sex radical” – perspective. Prostitution, I opined, was simply a job; prostitutes are sex workers who deserved better working conditions rather than moralizing feminist disapproval. Or something like that. The reaction from my new friends was palpable. The friendly vibe around the table froze, they stared blankly at me, for several seconds no one spoke. “That’s not how we see it here,” one of them said sternly. These women have indeed, decades later, have become fast friends of mine; I admire them and they’ve taught me a lot. But I learned that our friendship works best when we avoid a few touchy subjects, prostitution being one of them. (Marijuana and the Damas de Blanco are others, but that’s another story.)
This story of my awkward introduction to this particular corner of Cuban sexual politics came back to me as I was reading Megan Daigle’s book. Among its many insights, Daigle’s recounting of the moralizing disapproval about jinetarismo from various state institutions, including the police, the “sex positive” CENESEX and the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC) brought me back to that dinner table circa 2004, and provides readers with an acute analysis of the complex and contradictory world of sexual politics in today’s Cuba.
Daigle establishes several research questions for herself. Why are the bodies of young, black or mixed-race women (primarily) governed differently in Cuba and “made available” for state intervention? How do traditional understandings of what she terms “sex-affective relations between Cubans and foreigners” change when the voices of young women themselves are foregrounded; as she does here, very effectively. But in some ways her most compelling question is the same one I confronted a decade ago at dinner with my new Cuban feminist colleagues: what is so objectionable about such sexual liaisons? Why is a country that is arguably sexually progressive on some issues, arguably sexually conservative on the issue of sex work?
The answers to these questions form the bulk of the chapters of the book. To explore the excessively regulated bodies of young black and mixed race women, Daigle takes an excursion through Cuban colonial history. Today’s jinetera, she argues, is simply the contemporary evocation of a familiar figure in the Cuban cultural and historical landscape: the lascivious mulatta; the counterpoint to dominant white femininity. Two more extremely readable chapters contain her promised voices and experiences of fifty jineteras (and occasionally jineteros) themselves. The other substantive chapter explores official discourse, through institutions such as CENESEX, the FMC as well as through the discourse of journalism. There is little variation among them: in contemporary Cuba prostitution is viewed officially through the lens of national morality. Sexual relations with non-Cuban men can only be understood as exploitative, and result from individual (female) weaknesses of upbringing and value systems.
Her conclusions are blunt. Contemporary jineterismo, she says, is part of a long history “where women’s value has been determined through raced markers of respectability and desirability… a recurring narrative of condemnation and rescue of sexual deviants.” Furthermore, she declares, the revolution “changed only the language of this script. Cuba’s revolution has not in itself transformed or even done much to challenge, the social production of raced women as sexual objects whose value lies in their bodies themselves.” (p. 232)
This book is well written and boldly stated, and gives plenty of scope for debate. Daigle hints at a wide divergence between forgiving, non-moralistic popular opinions about Cubans in the “sexual affective economy” and the harshness of official discourse. But further ethnographic research, among Cubans who observe but don’t participate in the sex trade, is needed to take this from assertion to something more complex. Many researchers have found that the line between official and popular discourse is fluid and extremely difficult to chart, on everything from reggaetón to food security.
So the book goes a long way towards helping me think about that memorable divergence of opinion regarding sexual commerce I had with Cuban feminist friends 15 years ago. But it doesn’t settle the issue, and leaves me with plenty of new questions. There is always a little bit of indeterminate space between my North American feminist intellectual upbringing and Cuban daily realities, and this is one of those times. The Revolution has “not done much to challenge the social production of raced women as sexual objects?” I can instantly hear the derision of the super-educated Afro Cuban women at that dinner table in 2004, even as one of them explains herself as “the exception that proves the rule.” Similarly one might question Daigle’s suggestion that the fact that none of her fifty informants disclosed a history of childhood sexual abuse is more evidence that the jinetera-as-victim trope is worn. Daigle’s descriptions of the punitive role played by police, pimps/boyfriends and the FMC are powerful reminders of the authoritarianism of daily life for young women. How do these experiences sit alongside the other aspects of life in Cuba which affect the working and living conditions of jineteras: access to health care, birth control and abortion and (comparatively) lower levels of street violence, guns and gang culture, to take a few examples.
One of Daigle’s informants asks the question of why jineterismo is perceived as so menacing to the revolution simply: “they’re not building bombs.” (p. 211). By the end of the Cuban studies course I teach my students laugh at my standard preface when I respond to their various questions: “Well, it’s complicated.” But it is. There is so much to understand about the bombshell that is sexual politics in Cuba.
Megan Daigle
From Cuba With Love: Sex and Money in the Twenty-First Century
Oakland: U of California Press
ISBN: 9780520282988
2015
276 pages