MEANS OF DESIRE'S PRODUCTION: MALE SEX LABOR IN CUBA¹

1. I thank the coeditors of this special edition, Karla Slocum and Deborah Thomas, as well as Identities editors and readers, for their helpful comments on this essay and their collegiality.

Abstract

Tourism has provided myriad spaces in which black Cuban subjects participate in self-making, yet within a field still constrained by historical structures of sexual and racial interpellation. This essay focuses on the local social cultural context of male sex labor in Havana, Cuba, from 1998 to 2003. It explores the subjective intentions of young Cuban men during the Special Period in Times of Peace and current Transition on the island, relative to the gaze of tourists and social cultural and economic change in Cuba.

Key Words:

• Cuba
• sex work
• sexualities
• tourism
• race

Notes

1. I thank the coeditors of this special edition, Karla Slocum and Deborah Thomas, as well as Identities editors and readers, for their helpful comments on this essay and their collegiality.

2. ¡Venceremos?: Erotics and Politics of Black Self-Making in Cuba's Special Period. Currently under revision.

3. The “world's oldest profession” did not disappear but had been limited to small sex‐for-commodity exchanges with Soviet and Eastern European functionaries visiting the island (Fernandez 1999) prior to the Special Period. By 2001, when I completed my formal ethnographic research, intermittent crackdowns and harassment, especially of Black men and young women, had dramatically reduced the obviousness of the sex trade in Havana streets.

4. I use the nomenclature Black to refer to those on the island who identify racially and culturally as Black and/or Afro-Cuban. The latter term, with its ties to the folklorization and commoditization of African descended culture and persons, sans a sense of couscious racial politics that the use of black underscores, is currently contentious.

5. G. Derrick Hodge's NACLA article is the first academic article to appear in English exclusively on male sex laborers in Cuba. Although Hodge's intentions are understandable—to expose what he problematically calls the “colonization of the Cuban male body” by the ever-expanding capitalist market—his contribution is weakened by what seems to be a particular brand of North American Left ardor that ultimately must be tempered by immersion into the complex social milieux of local subjects.

6. I use these terms as shorthand to reduce clumsiness. Please read structurally (homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual) … behaviorally (homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual) … because I do not want to reify any of these terms as solid or permanent. In some cases I have indicated homosex or heterosex.

7. Articulating presumed heterosexual men's putative “romancing” of heterosexual women, to “hustling” of gay men by men, to female “prostitution,” constitutes a critique not only of heterosexist and misogynist foundations of discourses on sex work and “prostitution” but also of the presumptive impulse that seek to sanitize the messiness of individual action at the interstices of structure and personal agency and desire.

8. Literally, this means “jockey.” Jinetera is the common name for female sex workers who are seen to “ride” their Yumas.

9. In my larger project, I discuss some of the differences between male and female sex labor. One of the dimensions is the ways that offers of emigration are made or expected. Emigration is neither the primary goal nor is it expected by most pingueros.

10. Although I would argue for more consideration of the personal agency of female sex laborers, I have not systematically studied female sex laborers. My observations and analyses are limited to men.

11. The street is, after all, “outside,” to point to a popular English-speaking Caribbean term for the practice of men having dalliances or families outside of their marriages or primary relationship.

12. The fact that this Socialist principal is enfeebled by women's double and triple duty is currently being tackled by the FMC (Cuban Women's Federation).

13. My emphasis on this clichéd phrase is meant to underscore the fact that he so well reflected notions of masculine attractiveness—squared jaw, full features, wide shoulders and 6′2′′.

14. This group of Cuban “exiles” is politically and demographically distinct from newer immigrants, including Marielitos from the boatlifts of the 1980s who are more diverse in color and race and come from working classes.

15. My first visit, weeks earlier, was to a smaller fiesta in Cerro accompanied by the godson of this friend, during which I was treated as a family friend rather than a Yuma.

16. In other sites in the region, they stimulate global and Northern business interests, which often control and/or supply the local tourist industry or Ministry. In Cuba, some hotels are state controlled and others are “mixed enterprises,” with, for example, Spanish hoteliers.

Orishas 2000. [Musical Recording] “A Lo Cubano” Universal Latino Records.