HAVANA. By Silvana Paternostro. The New Republic Online. Issue date: 07.10 & 17.00. Post date: 06.29.00.
A week in Havana, and no jineteras in sight. Jineteras, Spanish for "jockeys," is the nickname given the stunning local women who cater to the mostly Italian, Spanish, French, Swiss, and Canadian men who have flocked to Cuba by the hundreds of thousands in recent years. But now the
women are almost impossible to find. They've abandoned Quinta Avenida, the palm-tree-lined boulevard that crosses the fancy Miramar neighborhood. They are gone from the cobbled streets of colonial Habana Vieja, with its open-air cafes playing the traditional music that only tourists like to hear.
They've vanished from the Malecón, the seawall where they used to stand, and from the Riviera, the hotel Fidel Castro confiscated from Meyer Lansky, which housed their favorite nightclub. Incredibly, prostitution seems to have disappeared from Cuba.
"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," Castro, sounding like a hurt father, proclaimed at the Karl Marx Theater in January 1999, stepping up his war against Cuban women who accept
gifts or money from foreign men. In a speech attacking the rise of crime in general, Castro announced he was sending the jineteras home, back to the rural villages from which most of them had escaped to Havana. Any girl seen roaming the capital, dancing all night, dressed in extravagant clothes,
Castro warned, would be sent to rehabilitation. "It hurts too much that a country that has done so much to dignify women, that a foreigner can come to trick her, fill her with vices ... to corrupt her," he said. Havana, he told the National Revolutionary Police, must rid itself of the "mercantilist"
practices these women were embracing. He announced he was sending the Special Brigades out to the street and promised, "We will win this battle!"
Yet Castro's campaign against prostitution is not mainly about higher moral standards; it is mainly about state control. By earning lots of hard currency and embracing conspicuous consumption, the jineteras had come to embody the "dollar mentality" that the Cuban government perceived
as a threat. At elementary schools like the one Elián González will return to, where children still pledge "to be the pioneers of communism" and "to be like Che," jineteras were becoming role models. Cubans, Castro feared, were losing the "antibodies"
needed to resist the "capitalist virus." In the strange world that is Castro's Cuba, prostitution was coming to represent a political threat.
There was a time, not long ago, when the Cuban government felt differently about the young women it now proscribes. Strapped for hard currency after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba opened up to capitalism a little--and used its women as bait. The ministry of tourism embarked on a global
marketing campaign advertising the splendor of the country's revolutionary mulattas: it invited Playboy to photograph an issue on location and distributed posters of beaches with white sand and topless Cubanas to travel agencies worldwide. The government referred to the women as "promoters of
tourism," and, in a speech to the National Assembly in 1992, Castro said:
There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist. Those who do so 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 the country with the lowest number of AIDS
cases.... Therefore, there is truly no tourism healthier than Cuba's.
The campaign was wildly successful. In 1990, 300,000 tourists visited Cuba; last year, more than 1.7 million did. And, while it is difficult to know how many were lured by the jineteras, there's no doubt that Cuba became one of the most popular stops on the sex-vacation circuit, right up there
with Thailand. A contributor to the Internet's World Sex Guide offered this effusion about the Cuban playground: "A guy with enough hard currency can have the time of his life in what is probably the most romantic city in the world--with, in my humble opinion, the most drop-dead gorgeous,
sultry, tanned beauties in the hemisphere."
These "beauties" were never referred to as "prostitutes" or "call girls." "Prostitute" connotes victimization; "call girl" suggests high society. Jineteras fall into neither category. Nurses, dentists, nutritionists, lawyers, teachers, high
school students--they pranced around the city clad in yellow or purple or black Lycra, hoping to meet foreigners. Economically, their double lives made sense. Teachers and health workers, the pride of the revolution, earned state salaries too meager to consistently put a full meal on the dinner
table. By contrast, entertaining an extranjero brought them meals of pork or chicken, and possibly lobster and wine--not to mention clothes, shoes, perfume, hard currency, and the possibility of romance, marriage, and a life in, say, Italy or Spain. For young women without relatives in Miami or
Madrid, associating with foreign men was the only way to acquire the fancy clothing, boom boxes, and beauty products that most of the island wanted.
And they weren't acquiring these things only for themselves. "Most families were dependent on jineteras," says a diplomat. A 52-year-old woman told me that the best advice she could give her 14-year-old niece was "to start making herself pretty so that she could land a foreigner."
Because jineteras were helping the people around them, few Cubans deemed their behavior shameful. In fact, the verb jinetear means to engage in an activity no more sinister than going to the movies or the beach. A study done by the University of Havana concluded that it was impossible to know how
many jineteras there were, because most worked "intermittently."
But, as the jineteras grew more popular with Cuban society, they grew less popular with the Cuban government. Their ethic of consumption, entrepreneurship, and autonomy was infecting large swaths of the population. The prostitution Castro hoped would revive the Cuban economy was having social
and even ideological effects his government could not control. And so last year the government did an about-face. It labeled these "quite healthy" testaments to Cuban womanhood peligrosas, or "dangerous." The ubiquitous Special Brigades of the Revolutionary National Police began
stopping them, accusing these former "promoters of tourism" of agredio al extranjero--"harassing foreigners." The war against the jineteras was on. But, as I would soon discover, it is a war the Cuban government cannot afford to lose and cannot afford to win.
On the corner of a dark street a few blocks from the Malecón, just steps from four- and five-star hotels, I see a nightclub called Las Vegas. Two young women walk up, dressed almost identically in matching tight black minidresses and very high heels. A pair of Special Brigade officers
approach them. From a distance, I see the women adjust their dresses, open their handbags, stand firm on their luxurious heels, and hand over their carnets, identification cards--which had better say they are from Havana.
The police return the documents. The doorman unhooks the dusty velvet rope. The two pay the $5 cover charge and walk into the club. I follow them into a dark, smoky room with a red vinyl bar illuminated by Christmas lights, a pool table, and a cheap cabaret show. Here are all the jineteras I had
not seen on the street: a mulatta in leopard-print pants, a petite blonde in a long burgundy dress, a beautiful woman in a brown velvet pants suit, a young woman with a shaved head and legs like Tina Turner's. The flirting is multilingual. The women speak broken Italian with the Italians, broken
French with the French; they try English with the Canadians, the Australians, and the few Americans. Scott, a 28-year-old from Long Island, is kissing 18-year-old Larissa, whom he met five minutes before, and she has her hands on his pant buttons. She wanted $40 at first, but, because he was cute
and from New York, she told him she would do it for "whatever." His friend Rob has already given $20, as a gift, to beautiful Yaritza of the languid eyes--because she told him she has a two-year-old to feed.
This is the Havana that so threatens the government--an underworld obsessed with capitalism and independence in a society that demands socialism or death. And yet, even now, Cuba relies on the jineteras. Nightclubs are, after all, state-owned and state-run, and tourism brings in $1.4 billion
each year. Castro doesn't want capitalism, but he needs money. He wants the jineteras to dance with the foreigners to create revenue for the revolution but not for themselves. The government doesn't mind what they sell but hates the frivolous things they want to buy. Cuba is experiencing the kind of
raw capitalist turbulence you see in Russia, but here it is taking place in the shadow of a still-Communist state. And, because Castro himself seems unable to deal with these contradictions, places like the Las Vegas continue to operate, making money for the revolution and eroding it at the same
time. "Here everything is illegal," a 33-year-old artist told me. "But everything is done."
I go over to the two girls I saw on the street and ask what the police wanted. "Same thing they always want," says the skinnier of the two, rolling her eyes. Yanet, who is from Sancti Speritus, a province 200 miles east of Havana, tells me that she tricks the Special Brigade by saying
she lives with her father in Centro Habana (which is true) and that she has come to Havana to enroll in school, studying hygiene and epidemiology (which is also true, though misleading, since she does not attend classes).
Yanet and Yanari tell me more than what they tell the police. They came to Havana together three years ago "to do exactly this," as Yanet puts it. Yanet had finished her first year in college, studying biology in her native hamlet. When she realized that, after five years of schooling,
she would get a job worth $10 a month, she convinced Yanari, whom she knew from high school, to take the train to Havana with her. They arrived during the golden days, when jineteras went unharassed, and were soon living in luxury--by Cuban standards, anyway. They rented a room for $3 a day and had
plenty of money to buy clothes and do their hair. Yanet even bought a big television and a videocassette recorder.
Then came the crackdown. Yanet, who turned 20 in March, now has two pending fines and two cartas de advertencia, letters of warning. She has already been sent back to Sancti Speritus once. Right after Castro's "famous speech," she was dancing at El Johnny, her favorite hangout, wearing
a brand-new red Lycra unitard open all the way down below her navel, when she was whisked outside by a female plainclothes cop who took her to the precinct. "She had already stopped me once," says Yanet, but the Colombian client with whom she was spending the week had said, to protect her,
that she was his fiancée. "He was, of course, married in Colombia," she adds.
This time, however, the Colombian wasn't there. And so Yanet spent the night at the precinct while the police gathered up enough jineteras to fill a van. The next day, it was off to Villa Delicia, one of the so-called rehabilitation camps, where she stayed for ten days, waking up early and
working at a different place every day. She cleaned bathrooms, picked up trash, and plucked dead chickens--all in her red unitard. Yet the worst moment, she says, was when she saw her mother, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and a pediatrician about to go on a mission to Guinea. The
authorities had summoned her to pick up her daughter from the station. "They do that to humiliate you," Yanet says indignantly. She stayed in Sancti Spíritus a few months, fell in love, and ventured back to the capital with her new boyfriend.
I want to know more about him, but a thin Spaniard in his early thirties calls her away. She jots down her number on a napkin, tells me I can call her anytime, and walks toward him. I move to the bar, where I encounter a Russian computer engineer who lives in Israel and is here on holiday. I ask
him, as he tries to disentangle himself from the advances of a young beauty, if this reminds him of his old country. "No way," he says, pointing to the illegal gambling at the pool table. "This is not communism. This is promiscuous communism. There are no hard-liners here."
But there are still some hard-liners left. Inside the halls of the Federation of Cuban Women (or FMC, its Spanish acronym), which prides itself on having rehabilitated 100,000 of the prostitutes from Batista's days, I ask two of its officials how they feel about the resurgence of
prostitution--and whether there is any real difference between Batista's prostitutes and Castro's. "There is a big difference between the prostitutes of those days and the prostitutes now," snaps Alicia González, as we sip coffee amid pink walls and blue velvet couches probably left
behind by the owners of the mansion that now houses the organization. "They are different in their quality. Before, they had no schooling; they had health problems. These young women are healthy and educated. Before, they did it to feed their children. Here, there are economic problems, but
they are not of the same magnitude. Here, their children go to school, go to the doctor. They are not going to starve to death. Look even at what they are called, jineteras, because it is she who dominates the animal," says González almost with pride. Thanks to the revolution, these are
empowered prostitutes.
The problem, in other words, is not what the jineteras are doing--prostitution is still not a crime--but what they want to do with what they are doing. What infuriates González is that "these are women who think differently from the values of the revolution." The jineteras value
entrepreneurship and competitiveness--bad things--not the "exercise of solidarity and the progressive integration of society" that the FMC would like them to embrace. "These women are doing it because they don't want to ride the bus, they want shoes of many colors, and they want to
use the sanitary napkins they sell at the dollar stores," González explains--as if it were astonishing that a young woman would prefer not to ride in a crammed trailer, own just one pair of shoes, or use torn rags during menstruation. "It is hard to change people's mentality.
Regardless of how hard we have tried for forty years to instill the mentality of the New Man, it is very hard to change people's minds. They don't want to sacrifice."
For the revolution, "sacrifice" is a key buzzword. When they swore at school "to be like Che," it meant to live like he did--to enjoy working for society, not for profit. When Che got married, he gave up his honeymoon, because revolutionaries must show austerity in their
personal lives. He forced his wife to refuse a pair of Italian leather shoes she was offered as a gift, and he donated his watch to the island's gold reserves. As recounted in Jon Lee Anderson's Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, shortly after being named president of the National Bank, Che met with
the architect commissioned to build a new headquarters, a 32-story American-style skyscraper. Che, with a straight face, demanded that the number of bathrooms be halved and prohibited the installation of elevators. If he could walk up stairs, with his asthma, why couldn't everyone else? The
architect told Che that revolutionaries have the same physiological needs as everyone else. "Not the New Man," responded Che. "He can sacrifice."
The women of the FMC see the jineteras' rejection of sacrifice as an ethical lapse. But it is actually the yearning, distorted by a distorting system, for a freer life--a yearning made possible by the very things, health and education, that the revolution gave them. The jineteras' wants sound
very much like the wants of any young woman in Madrid, Miami, Mexico, or Moscow--money, yes, but also the right to make her own choices. The hard-liners call the new consumption immoral and apolitical, but they fear it because they know it is not apolitical at all--it is a revolt against a state
that tries to dictate their lives.
I invite Yanet, the jinetera I met at the Las Vegas, and her boyfriend to meet me for a drink at the Cohiba Meliá, the glitzy five-star hotel that Cubans love to visit and government officials prefer they don't. Yanet, sitting on a gray sofa in the spacious lobby, looks elegant in a
silvery-blue suit. To meet me here, she got dressed up in a jacket, pants, and black high heels; she carries a bag with a thin gold-link chain. Her dark curls are tied back in a dancer's chignon, making her almond-shaped ebony eyes and full mouth so pronounced that it is hard to miss their beauty
and their youth. Sitting very close to her is a young man in a starched white oxford shirt. Their knees are touching, and he holds her hand. They stand up politely to greet me. She kisses me on the cheek and introduces me to him.
"Mi novio," she says.
"Alexei," he says, extending his hand.
"A Russian name?" I say, thinking aloud more than meaning to say it. I'm always intrigued to meet twentysomethings named Lenin Rodríguez, Vladimir Gómez, Natasha Perez. He throws his head back a bit. "Si, because of the Sovieticos," he says, letting out a
somewhat embarrassed laugh. "My parents, they are super-revolutionaries."
Yanet and Alexei both have that look of defiance mixed with trepidation that comes from being at a "tourist spot," a place designated by their government as off-limits. They know a security guard would ask them to leave if I were not there, although it is hard to see this clean-cut,
wellmannered couple in the same way the government sees them. They look more like college sophomores than outlaws.
They have known each other all their lives, but their relationship kindled only after Yanet's arrest, when she returned from her first stint in Havana. Like Yanet, Alexei felt frustrated. After high school, he had wanted a career with the armed forces. When he saw a blueprint of Soviet
artillery, however, he left. "I wanted a career for today's world," he tells me. But the opportunities for that are slim in Sancti Spíritus: He picked fruit and vegetables for the state and painted bicycles at the state-owned shop. He had just quit, angry that he had to ruin his
clothes to make the equivalent of $5 a month, when Yanet entered his life, and they decided to venture to Havana together. For Yanet it was less risky to go with a man; for him it was an opportunity to leave. "For us to have a future," he explains, "we have to come to the city and do
things that are normal anywhere else but here make you into a criminal." He earns money by selling fake jewelry to friends and neighbors. For each ring he sells, he makes $2. But, like Yanet, he can also be arrested.
They live in her grandmother's home, a one-bedroom apartment in Centro Habana, with her grandmother, her father, and a cousin. But with her dollars Yanet is building a barbacoa, Cuban for an improvised and illegal loft bed, above the kitchen. I ask her if her father, a black doctor in his early
forties who is grateful to the revolution, knows where she gets the dollars to buy the paint, the cement, the two soft pillows, the small tape player, the CDs, and the three pairs of shoes she owns. She shrugs and tells me that they don't really get along, that they fight--often about politics.
Yanet mocks her father's revolutionary fervor by asking him about his Lada, the Soviet-made car that the government "allowed" him to buy but that he had to give back when he left to volunteer in Angola. Yanet was eight when he returned; he still talks about getting his car back. "So,
when he talks about the revolution, I just ask him: `And when are they giving you the car?' There are three hundred doctors who volunteered in Angola waiting for their Ladas back."
When Yanet and Alexei are ready to leave, we stand outside the hotel, facing the Malecón. The night is cold and breezy. The Atlantic Ocean that recalls for Cubans so many painful stories of tragedy and separation is deeply agitated. Yanet looks toward the horizon and says, "I hope
there's no one out there tonight." She means rafters.
"Will you want to live elsewhere?" I ask.
"Sure," says Yanet, as she pulls her jacket tight against the wind from the ocean and the spray from the waves that crash against the Malecón. "But not that way." She points out to the sea. "I would like to go to Madrid. Or to Italy. Not Germany--I don't think I'd
like it there. Not Switzerland, either--sounds too cold. And definitely not Miami."
But what she would really like, she says, is a place here--a home where she and Alexei can live. She plays with her ring, a cluster of rhinestones the size of pinheads, the kind that Alexei sells. "If I don't kill and I don't steal, why can't I? All I want is a house of my own to keep clean
and pretty, and have a TV and a few nice things. Why is this so wrong?" It's not a dream of sacrifice, but it may be a dream of revolution nonetheless. She nestles up to Alexei, away from the Malecón's rain. He shelters her with his arm.
SILVANA PATERNOSTRO is a fellow at the New America Foundation.
(Copyright 2000, The New Republic) |