Roldy was 19 years old and homeless in Havana when I spoke to him in January 2003. He had just been released from prison after serving six months for punching a policeman. Though not a fan of the current government, he nonetheless relied upon Revolutionary ideology to express his discontent. According to Roldy, injustice belongs in the time of Batista and he expects the Revolution to deliver justice, freedom and equality. “The authorities [must] treat Cubans correctly,” he told me, “and remember that the time of Batista is over. When you go to prison, they punch you in the mouth, they do a thousand things to you. But that’s what happened a long time ago. This is now, many years later, and we have to be treated well…. The authorities think that it’s like it was before [the Revolution]. But it’s not; the time of Batista is over. We have the right to be treated well, to be treated correctly, not like dogs.”
Roldy and most of his colleagues are pingueros, a kind of male sex worker that emerged after the 1993 legalization of the U.S. dollar for internal exchange. They are a type of sex worker supremely suited in several ways for a post-socialist market economy and a post-Revolutionary material ethic. As I first reported in the NACLA Report of March/April 2001, pinguero sexuality is not entirely (or even primarily) configured according to desire, but to the needs of the market. Desire itself is a product of economy as much as it is of some innate sexual identity, as we tend to imagine in the North. As such, pingueros are neither “gay,” “bisexual” nor “heterosexual”; indeed, Cuban sexuality does not imitate North American categories of sexual identity. Pinguerismo interrupts the notion that men are either gay, straight or bisexual.
Every night pingueros join the more than 500 or so youth who cruise the neighborhood of Vedado, befriending tourists in hopes of earning dollars and being invited to restaurants and nightclubs—a pattern common in the Caribbean dubbed “romance tourism” by scholars Deborah Pruitt and Suzanne LaFont. Some of these young people are jineteros— lately, more likely to be hustlers and thieves than underground tobacco sellers and tour guides—but many others are the friends and lovers of primarily male tourists. Most of these youth will combine a number of these activities, doing whatever they can to get their hands on dollars, hip-hop music, or clothing bearing a Nike swoosh, a Calvin Klein label or a U.S. flag.
The enrichment of a few at the expense of the majority is an inevitable result of the capitalistic fix of the exigencies of the Special Period, though the trend began with the aggressive post-socialist transformation of the economy in the mid-1980s, well before the onset of the Special Period and the collapse of the socialist economic bloc. Despite contrary claims by right-wing Cuban-Americans, the newly wealthy are not primarily government functionaries, nor does the wealth result from corruption. These days Cuban citizens can become well-off through any number of legal private enterprises, usually involving services to tourists or foreign capitalist technocrats.
The symbols of Cuba’s transformation are striking. There is a two-hour wait outside the cellular phone store in the wealthy neighborhood of Miramar. The dilapidated Focsa apartment building in Vedado, having formerly housed Soviet functionaries, has been gutted and restored for wealthier Cubans. The building’s store sells Coca-Cola, Frosted Flakes and even beef—an expensive luxury in a country with no beef cattle. While the majority of the population suffers enormously under the reduced libreta (ration card) allotment and while the horrible specter of homelessness has made its first post-Revolutionary reappearance on the Malecón, new televisions, stereos, cars and refurbished apartments have made a few Vedado residents quite comfortable.
But the principle status symbol is clothing, above all shoes, from the United States or Europe. In recent years, Cubans have been confronted with a new and confusing site: a flashy display of wealth by their compatriots. As youth excluded from such privileges are wont to do, many feel that they too deserve such things. Increasingly, value in Cuba is not measured by commitment to Revolutionary ideology and to the well-being of the collective project, but rather by individualism and acquisition. This is, of course, a value system fundamentally at odds with the Revolutionary insistence on fairness, equality and cooperation.
Osmani, a pinguero, explained the need to be well-dressed in the context of rapidly increasing economic stratification. “A pinguero has a better chance of having more girlfriends than anybody else. Because girls like a cute guy, one who dresses well, according to the latest fashions. They like a guy who has ‘swing,’ who can put on the ultimate styles. And the only ones who can do that are the pingueros.”
Because dating success requires a display of things, many young habaneros try to acquire things at all costs. Since sex workers have greater access to dollars (which are still coveted despite the new official conversion tax) and gifts from tourists than most Cubans, they are able to consume more, and they display it. Unlike material success in earlier stages of the Revolution, wealth in the Special Period is to be flaunted. This again follows the logic of capitalism, which depends upon display and the invocation of competitiveness in order to compel still more consumption. Although he resents the manner in which he acquired his expensive clothing, Osmani proudly brags of his extravagant acquisitions: “Don’t you think that pingueros in Cuba dress well? Pingueros have nice clothing … these Levis cost 58 dollars. I couldn’t buy them—a Spanish guy bought them for me. These boots cost 120 dollars. A German guy bought them for me. This belt from Calvin Klein cost 38 dollars. A Swiss guy gave it to me. Pingueros dress in clothing given to us by tourists, all pingueros.”
Of course, it is not true that “all” pingueros wear expensive clothing. In fact, most pingueros and female sex workers (jineteras) say they work to feed themselves and others for whom they are responsible. Significant here is not the accuracy of Osmani’s statements, but that they reflect a new value system based on conspicuous consumption. For the youth of today’s Cuba, excess is to be celebrated despite the vague awareness, even among pingueros themselves, that wealth under capitalism necessarily means the impoverishment of others. Though not as virulent as in wealthy capitalist states, individualism, materialism and disregard for the common welfare are noticeably ascendant in Cuba.
Flashy consumption by sex workers has given the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) cause to accuse jineteras of being materialistic, even greedy, working only to satisfy their lust for fancy dresses. Some writers in the United States, particularly those who claim to be “exiles,” have countered that the new prostitution is evidence not of lax morals or materialistic women, but of the failure of the Revolution and of the complicity of its evil leaders, not least the great devil himself, Fidel. Social scientists, on the other hand, minimize materialism as an incentive and stress the economic survival components of sex work.
Neither of these explanations is sufficient. It is true that many have experienced extreme material hardship in Special Period Cuba, even to the point of malnutrition. But it is also true that many of the young men and women cite “dressing well” as a primary factor in their decision to cruise Vedado and make “friends” with tourists. Whenever I asked why they became pingueros, their response was formulaic: “to dress well, to have fun and to help my family.” The need for clothing, which, like housing, the Revolution has been unable to deliver in sufficient quantities, is almost always first on their list of needs—food coming second or third. It’s not that these youth are greedy or selfish, as the FMC claims, or that the Revolutionary government is a brutal dictatorship that starves its own people. Rather, these youth have become both victims and reproducers of the new moral economy, which assigns an extreme urgency to consumption. It is the predictable outcome of capitalism.
To the extent that both male and female sex workers have embraced the new ideology of consumption, they have placed themselves at odds with the state and Revolutionary values. According to every pinguero with whom I have spoken in recent years, police repression has worsened markedly over the past five or six years. Officers of the Specialized Police—created to protect tourists from jineteros, jineteras and the pingueros—assume that any young Cuban walking alone in a tourist neighborhood must be up to no good. They see it as their duty to harass and detain such youths (“for your protection,” a policeman tells me). My own observations confirm that the Specialized Police are far more aggressive than they were just a few years ago.
In July 2004, George W. Bush made a speech in Tampa, Florida in which he apparently tried to appease the state’s right-wing Cuban community by accusing the Cuban government of promoting child prostitution and human trafficking. Fidel quickly responded with a vehement denial, recalling the generally humanistic tendencies of the Revolution.
In an apparent effort to stamp out any possible basis for such claims in the future, the government has become increasingly aggressive in ridding the island of any indications of sex work. This involves not only the harassment of the pingueros but also a frequent spatial rearrangement of youth recreation in Vedado; young people are nightly chased from their preferred spot in front of the Yara family cinema. In this way, the men tell me, the state has defeated its own stated purpose of attracting more tourists: “Cuba has lost a lot of tourism [because of the Specialized Police]. Because a tourist says, ‘Why should I go to Cuba if I can’t be in this place or that one, if the police throw everybody out of the Malecón, and if they ask for identification from everyone…. I can’t sit here, I can’t sit there on the Malecón.’ And a lot of foreigners tell their friends [about the police harassment], so they’ve stopped coming.”
Still, there are literally dozens of Cuban sex workers for every interested tourist. This is far less of a problem for jineteras, who have a competitive advantage because of the much greater number of male tourists seeking women than those seeking men. “For women, it’s easier to make money. Girls go out every day, and there are plenty of tourists who like women. In the discos … they can ask for 100 dollars, 120, 140 dollars. And the only thing guys can ask for is 30 dollars, 40 dollars, because [gay tourists] pay very little,” explains Roldy.
Although the earning potential is greater for women, they also suffer far greater police harassment. Often, these women are at the mercy of corrupt Specialized Police officers who treat them as potential sexual partners or sources of income. Orestes speaks sympathetically of the jineteras: “They persecute them a lot. They’ll say, ‘Whenever you want to work, come here and I won’t ask you for identification, I’ll take care of you. And when you make a little money, give me something.’” Another pinguero named Bárbaro agrees: “When the police arrest a female prostitute, they have sex with her. They say, ‘I like you. I want to be with you. If you are with me, nothing bad will ever happen to you. You will not be given a summons, nor will you be thrown out of Havana.’” In interviews, jineteras confirm what these pingueros say: Specialized Police are corrupt, they harass young people in Vedado to the point of chasing away tourists, they are far more aggressive with women than with men, and these incidents of harassment and corruption are increasing.
Even as specialized police corruption and harassment increases for all sex workers, the men are still better off than the women. This is partly because pingueros recognize that their privileged position as men allows them to socialize on the street without suspicion. As I argued in my previous article, pingueros are more ideologically acceptable than jineteras, because they are nearly always the insertive partner during intercourse; they literally invade the bodies of foreigners. The bodies of jineteras, on the other hand, are symbolically and literally conquered and invaded. And for the most part pingueros are faithful Revolutionary citizens. They perform traditional and Revolutionary masculinity with little variation and fulfill their masculine obligations as eldest sons, brothers, husbands and fathers. Finally, pingueros usually do not wish to leave the island and they are critical of U.S. aggression. They are horrified, for example, that the ultra right-wing Cuban American National Foundation has urged the Bush Administration to do to Cuba what it has done to Iraq.
The tensions in contemporary Cuban culture and politics operate on a national and personal level: the state embraces capital investment, while it struggles to maintain socialist values. Fidel is a symbol of stability, whose very presence is a calming force amid a tornado of change. Pingueros, too, manifest this tension: they are both citizens and criminals, and they embrace the symbols of capitalist wealth but still embrace and reproduce the older Revolutionary ideals of fairness and equity.
Havana street youth in general, and pingueros specifically, do not find themselves in opposition to the state because they reject Revolutionary ideology or because they do not accept the responsibilities of full Cuban citizenship. And neither is their occasional, or even frequent, dabbling in homoerotic activity the source of their problems with police, since homosexuality has been legal in Cuba far longer than it has in most jurisdictions of the United States. They are not endangered by their inclination for clothing bearing a U.S. flag either; freedom of expression through clothing is not constrained in contemporary Cuba, even if it seems to exalt the Revolution’s grave enemy. It’s not the sight of the U.S. flag on the shirt of a pinguero, or their embracing of the United States, that annoys the authorities. Instead, the government’s real concern is probably that the clothing announces the ascendancy of a new value system based on unrestrained individualism and the flaunting of material prosperity. These Cuban youth seem to want to maintain certain Revolutionary values, while at the same time expressing their penchant for designer fashion. The fundamental incompatibility of these ideological undercurrents does not occur to the youth, in part because they are unaware of the full implications of consumer capitalism.
What is clear to pingueros is that some Cubans are now able to dress far better than others, and on this hierarchical axis they want to occupy a successful position. Their embrace of materialism puts them at odds with the state, which at least rhetorically still proclaims itself to be egalitarian. Despite their reproduction of other Revolutionary cultural and ideological norms, having disposable wealth and flaunting it makes them liable to social and legal persecution. Some Cubans, who are far wealthier than these youth, have new cars and cellular telephones. But this is real wealth, which protects them from legal persecution. Young people only have the symbolic wealth of Calvin Klein jeans, Tommy Hilfiger shirts and Nike shoes, making them both ideologically problematic and highly vulnerable to social and legal proscription.
The Cuban state is no longer as strong a “cultural container,” to use Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s phrase, as it once was. The introduction of capitalist reform has saved the Cuban economy, but it has also had the unfortunate consequence of transforming perceptions of need, especially among youth. As elsewhere in the capitalist world, satisfaction among youth in Havana increasingly depends on the ability to consume conspicuously. The lure of consumption is powerful, and this may well provide for the ultimate triumph of global capitalism. The children and grandchildren of the 1960-1962 emigrants living in Florida never got the military invasion for which they still so vehemently lobby, but the lure of things may well erode the values of fairness, justice and equality for which the Revolution was fought.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
G. Derrick Hodge is a political-economic anthropologist with the City University of New York (CUNY). He has been researching Havana sex workers since 1999. Research for this article was made possible by funding from CUNY’s Center for Caribbean, Latin American, and Latino Studies.
