CUBAN TRANSITIONS

Varadero’s peninsula in northern Cuba is a heavily touristed area that boasts extensive shoreline and beautiful beaches, attracting tourists from all over the globe. The all inclusive resorts that line the beach offer tourists everything they could ever need on their vacation, creating a sort of trap, one which makes tourists and their experience and exposure to Cuba highly controlled and commodified. The image of Cuba that these all-inclusive packages want to give to tourists is highly racialized and sexist, based on decades, if not centuries, of conditioning that many tourists are exposed to prior to their trip, thus creating certain unrealistic expectations that can only be met through manipulation and regulation of the industry.

In Varadero, most hotel workers are trained at a local school in which their age, skin color, and attractiveness are factors in their training, development, and job placement. Lighter skinned Cubans are purposely put in the more interactive and ‘official’ roles such as at the front desk, whereas darker skinned workers are placed as back-kitchen help and entertainers. Dark skinned, scantily clad women perform shows in these hotels and resorts that are highly sexualized. Amalia Cabezas in her work “Between Love and Money: Sex, Tourism, and Citizenship in Cuba and the Dominican Republic” sums it up. She says:

The organization of work is, therefore, a circuitous interplay of international tourism’s rigidly formalistic prescription of inclusion and exclusion of workers based on racial and sexual occupational categories. The racial and sexual ordering reflects the consequences and legacy of colonialism as they play out on this current stage of global capitalism (998).

The creation of all-inclusive resorts as a way to control tourist and Cuban interactions has had devastating consequences for workers and for neighboring areas. Those who used to depend on tips to supplement their wages are no longer receiving them. For both men and women, but most predominantly for women, this translates to a push towards sex work. Those who are already working in resort culture have easy means by which to transition into sex work with resort guests in order to earn supplements to their incomes. This means not only sex for money but also full blown relationships for other rewards, such as gifts, trips, and the possibility of marriage and mobility. While there is a stigma against prostitution, the term jineterismo creates a more socially acceptable means by which Cuban women are able to earn a living through the sale of their time and their bodies.

This too becomes extremely racialized. Whereas lighter skinned women may be seen simply as companions to foreigners and tourists, darker skinned women are seen as harassing tourists and suffer harder police harassment and punishment for even going into heavily touristed areas. There is a double standard because light skinned women as well as most male sex workers and jineteros do not suffer the same kind of harassment as dark skinned women do. ‘Rehabilitation centers’ have even been created for these ‘morally questionable’ women in which they are confined and trained to work jobs that do not pay well, thus pushing these women back into prostitution and jineterismo after they are done in the centers. This, in turn, facilitates the continuation of the image of the mulata woman as hyper-sexualized and easily exploitable.