Coping with ambiguous relationships: sex, tourism, and transformation in Cuba

Abstract

Relationships between foreign tourists and members of the visited population in Cuba tend to be ridden with ambiguities with regard to their instrumental and commoditized dimensions. In the realm of sexual encounters, these ambiguities become a source of moral controversy, as they call into question notions of ‘sex tourism’ and ‘prostitution’. Focusing on how foreign men travelling to Cuba account for sexual relationships with Cuban women, this article shows how a variety of notions of tourism and of being a tourist are played out to justify people's engagements. From the establishment of continuities between sexual seduction ‘at home’ and ‘on tour’, to the normalization of sex for money exchanges, to the quest for an ‘authentic Cuban sexuality’, different modalities and moralities of travel are actualized in tourists' narratives, alternatively silencing and highlighting transformations in the places, people, and conceptions of tourism. In addressing the question of what counts as ‘transformation’, this article sheds light on the situated and purposeful ways this notion is deployed, the controversies, and struggles it generates, as well as its moral underpinnings, affordances, and limits. Ultimately, this illustrates the interests of investigating change and notions of change in tourism in a reflexive and empirically grounded manner.

Keywords:

• tourism
• sex
• ambiguity
• morality
• transformation
• Cuba

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Symposium, ‘Sacred Tourism, Secular Pilgrimage: Travel and Transformation in the 21st Century’, hosted by the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), at the Lisbon University Institute, in Lisbon, Portugal. I thank all the participants and the discussant for this event, Professor Nelson Graburn, for their comments and suggestions, and more particularly Sofia Sampaio and Cyril Isnart for their constructive remarks on the subsequent versions of my article. I am indebted to the editors of the Journal for Tourism and Cultural Change for their final review of this article. This work would not have been possible without the collaboration of the several foreign tourists and Cuban men and women I encountered during fieldwork in Cuba, and my gratitude also goes to them.

Funding

The research was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology [grant number SFRH/BPD/66483/2009].

Notes

1. For research that focuses on sex tourism and on sexual encounters in tourism more at large, from a variety of perspectives and in a wide range of destinations across the world, see in particular the works of Kruhse-Mount Burton (1995), Pruitt and LaFont (1995), Bowman (1996), Cohen (1996), de Albuquerque (1998), Dahles and Bras (1999), Kempadoo (1999), Opperman (1999), Clift and Carter (2000), Mullings (2000), Formoso (2001), Herold, Garcia and DeMoya (2001), Ryan and Hall (2001), Phillips (2002), Bauer and McKercher (2003), Jeffreys (2003), Brennan (2004), Kempadoo (2004), Frohlick (2007, 2010), Piscitelli (2007), Roux (2010), and Salomon (2009). Several authors have examined these issues in relation to the Cuban case, as testified by the publications of O'Connell Davidson (1996), Coco Fusco (1997), Tchak (1999), Sánchez Taylor (2000), Hodge (2001, 2005), Trumbull (2001), Wonders and Michalowski (2001), Clancy (2002), Tiboni (2002), Berg (2004), Cabezas (2004, 2009), Fosado (2005), Kummels (2005), Allen (2007), Stout (2007), Garcia (2010), and Roland (2011).

2. For more on jineterismo, its contentious nature, and the way it brings issues of morality, nation, race, class, and gender into play, see in particular the works of Fernandez (1999), Berg (2004), Cabezas (2004, 2009), Kummels (2005), Simoni (2008a), Alcázar (2010), and Roland (2011).

3. All the personal names appearing in this article are fictional to protect the anonymity of my research participants.

4. All the quotes from informants that appear in the article have been translated into English by the author, and are based on recollections after the conversations took place.

5. Zigon (2010) conceptualizes ethics as a ‘moment of conscious reflection’ on one's ‘embodied moral dispositions’ (p. 8), ‘a conscious acting on oneself either in isolation or with others so as to make oneself into a more morally appropriate and acceptable person not only in the eyes of others but also for oneself' (ibid.). Following moral breakdowns, people ‘work on themselves by utilizing certain ethical tactics not only to return to the unreflective and unreflexive disposition of morality, but in so doing to create a new moral dispositional self. Thus, this moment of ethics is a creative moment, for by performing ethics, new moral persons and new moral worlds are created, even if ever so slightly’ (Zigon, 2010, p. 9).

6. According to Cohen (1996), in Thailand experienced farangs (white foreigners) end up preferring ‘brief, mercenary encounters [with Thai women], in which money is paid for services rendered, free from illusions and further obligations’ (p. 301), as opposed to engaging in long-term relationships permeated by the ambiguities of love and money. Interpreting this state of affairs, Cohen maintains that ‘many old-timer farangs still fail to comprehend the ambiguity making open-ended prostitution in Thailand’ (p. 303). My analysis here moves beyond that of Cohen (1996) in that it does not reduce these experienced tourists' stances to cognitive failures to understand ‘the native point of view’ (p. 301). Instead – and in line with a more pragmatic approach to notions of culture (Simoni, 2008b, 2011) – I argue that their take on these sexual relationships cannot be dissociated from the specific purposes it achieved. In this sense, if their views failed to internalize conceptual ambiguities, it was precisely because their aim was also to move beyond such uncertainties, rather than to grasp the perspective of the ‘host socioculture’ (Cohen, 1996, p. 303).

7. We may draw again on Zigon's (2010) view of ‘morality as the embodied dispositions that allow for nonconsciously acceptable ways of living in the world’, and as a way of ‘being existentially comfortable in one's world’ (p. 5).