NewsMax.com. Monday, July 31, 2000
They were a key tourist attraction, raking in lots of hard currency for Fidel Castro’s cash-strapped regime, and Fidel couldn’t have been happier. But Cuba’s widely acclaimed hookers have lost favor with the communist government and now face "rehabilitation," communism’s
euphemism for a stay in brainwashing prison camps.
Where once Castro sang their praises, as he did before Cuba’s National Assembly in 1992, he now says he’s unleashing his feared Special Brigades to round up the prostitutes – known locally as jineteras (jockeys) – and drive them from the streets.
And they have. According to Silvano Paternostro, the women who were once a fixture on Havana’s toniest streets have now been driven underground.
Writing in the July 10 and 17 issues of the New Republic, Paternostro explained that the hookers' crime wasn’t prostitution – that’s not illegal in the socialist workers' paradise – but capitalist consumerism, the deadliest of communism’s deadly sins. In Castro’s
eyes, prostitution had suddenly become a political threat.
In 1992 Castro told the National Assembly that there were no women forced to sell themselves. No siree. They do it on their own, "voluntarily and without any need for it.
"We can say that they are highly educated jineteras and quite healthy, because we are in a country with the lowest number of AIDS cases. ... Therefore there is truly no tourism healthier than Cuba’s."
In other words, come and get it, Gringos – and don’t worry about getting something else while you’re at it. After all, we are a healthy society. Moreover, the jineteras were not just mere prostitutes, the government advised. They were "promoters of tourism."
And they came and got it, by the hundreds of thousands from all across Europe and even the United States. The government invited Playboy to come down and photograph an issue featuring Cuba’s unique charms, and distributed posters to travel agencies across the globe featuring lots of white
sand and lots of topless tan flesh.
"The campaign was wildly successful," Paternostro wrote. "In 1990, 300,000 tourists visited Cuba; last year more than 1.7 million did."
Largely thanks to the jineteras – described as some of the world’s most beautiful women – "Cuba became one of the most popular stops on the sex-vacation circuit, right up there with Thailand."
But there was an unexpected result of Cuba’s flirtation with the Sodom and Gomorrah routine. The hookers, flush with foreign currency, began to spend their earnings as if they were upper-class American housewives on shopping sprees at their local upscale shopping mall. They were getting
hooked on consumerism and inciting envy among their fellow Cubans, who also want a piece of the capitalist pie.
As Paternostro explained, it was not what they sell that bothered the government, but the "frivolous things they buy."
"The prostitution Castro hoped would revive the Cuban economy was having social and even ideological effects his government could not control," Paternostro wrote.
In the process of earning a lot of hard currency, the jineteras were embracing the so-called dollar mentality that the communist government sees as a serious threat to its existence.
And so Castro stopped pimping for the ladies, turned puritan, and announced that "a pair of high heels, a luxurious little shoe, a seductive perfume, a new dress cannot be the price of honor and the sustenance of a nation."
After the sermon came the threat: "It hurts too much that a country that has done so much to dignify women, that a foreigner can come and trick her, fill her with vices ... to corrupt her." So out would go the feared Special Brigades to round up the jineteras. "We will win this
battle," Castro pledged.
But as Paternostro points out, Castro really can’t afford to "win this battle." His government still needs all that lovely hard currency, and to get it he needs to attract large contingents of tourists. In suppressing one of Cuba’s foremost tourist attractions, he is also
suppressing a key source of that much-desired foreign currency.
And so the jineteras are still available. They’re no longer walking the streets in their signature yellow, purple or black Lycra, but they can still be found in Cuba’s many sleazy underworld nightclubs, still hauling in big bucks, still spending like capitalists – and spreading
capitalist fever in the socialist workers’ paradise.
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