“Because my addiction is money, and my professionalism as well.”[1]
He was 21 years old, an Afro-Cuban sex worker in Havana. He started the work when he was 13 and the Cuban economy was at its worst, two years into the “Special Period During Peacetime” but one year before the state reluctantly legalized the dollar for internal exchange in 1993. The dollar changed everything, he told me. Now, his addiction was money, dollars to be precise, and the Nike shoes they could buy. And his profession was not sex per se, but rather the dollars that sex could bring in the new tourist economy of the neighborhood of El Vedado in central Havana. Of course he could not understand the role that his work—and his body—had for the new Cuban economy nor his role in the struggles over the meaning of Cuban nationalism in an era of foreign capitalist incursion. He did not understand that the collapse of the Soviet Union had brought as well the collapse of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), the socialist states’ trading alliance, and the extremely lucrative trade relations it facilitated. He didn’t know about Fidel’s Decree Law 50 which had as early as 1982 provided the first “revolutionary legal base for normalizing and organizing the process of foreign investment,” nor about the Fourth Party Congress of 1991 that paved the way for the constitutional reform of 1992, codifying capitalism.[2]
What he did know was that in 1992 there were foreigners at the Hotel Deauville who would pay top dollar for a chance to sample the famous Cuban phallus, renowned both in gay travel networks and in literary representations of cubanidad. And he knew that the dollar had changed everything. What was in 1992 a tiny number of male sex workers who catered to the few foreign capitalist investors was by 1999 an industry of perhaps 500 young Cubans whose developing identities as Cuban men had been interrupted by a dramatic change in both economy and nationalist identity. A new class of male sex workers had been born, the “pinguero.” Now 21 years old and struggling to survive on the streets of Havana, the man quoted above incorporates in his very body the contradiction of the Cuban revolutionary regime inviting capitalism to do its work on the bodies and souls of its people. Capitalism is hungrily devouring every resource in Cuba, including its male and female bodies, commodifying them and configuring them according to the logic of the market. Both the meaning of Cuban masculinity and the gendered nationalist project are being transformed in the face of economic exigency.
“When two people are in bed, there is always something economic that complements or impels sex.”
This young man was not alone in his rather cynical belief that money is behind all sex and love in Cuba; more than once a pinguero repeated to me the formula: “Here, there is no love without money.” This is not a new development. Havana before the Revolution was little more than a casino and brothel for wealthy U.S. capitalists in search of exotic pleasures. And the use of Cuban women was ideologically in keeping with U.S. economic colonialism. As Northern capitalists invaded the island en masse, backed by the power of the dollar and the U.S. Navy, they individually penetrated the bodies of its women. Symbolically and literally, the island was repeatedly assailed by the lassez-faire capitalism of the Batista dictatorship and its northern agents. Little wonder that the Revolution viewed prostitution as a blatant representation of foreign domination. The Revolution had fashioned itself a male affair, a matter of strong, tough, long-bearded guerillas expelling the island’s invaders. The newspaper El Mundo affirmed in 1965 that “no homosexual represents the Revolution, which is a matter for men, of fists and not feathers, or courage and not trembling, of certainty and not intrigue, of creative valor and not sweet surprises.”[3] As an affair of macho men, it was the duty of the Revolution to rescue the (feminized) island and its women from what was seen as the corruption of penetration from the North, and a product of capitalist exploitation. And so one of the first projects after 1959 was the retraining of female prostitutes in Havana and Guantánamo as seamstresses. This effort was largely successful, all but eliminating prostitution by 1961.
Some sex work did continue, but it was slowed to a trickle of its former extent and took on a character consistent with the changing political and cultural economy of the island. One category which did survive the cultural upheaval of the Revolution was the nineteenth century bugarrón, a man who was active-insertive during anal intercourse. His partner was a maricón, a man feminized by his receptive role during intercourse. Bugarronismo left intact traditional gender roles: Sexual object was less important than sexual act, so that penetration of another man did not irreparably call into question a Cuban’s gender identity. That is, a bugarrón was still an hombre because he penetrated with his phallus, even though the object was another man. And the maricón was no longer a man because he was penetrated, even though he had a male body. Though in practice it is possible that all manner of sexual activity did occur and that some bugarrones did allow themselves to be penetrated, in representation the gender identity of the bugarrón was stable and protected.
In the realm of homoerotic sexual behavior insertive partners are rare and prized in Cuba as elsewhere, and so a maricón has always been willing to entice his bugarrón with a material incentive. But during the Revolution the bugarrón-maricón interaction took on a specifically socialist character: It tended away from the transactional and toward the relational. It is true that, as in the United States, there was a fairly brutal oppression of homoerotically inclined Cubans in the 1960s, but this was ended with laws of legalization and tolerance in the mid 1970s, far sooner than such activity was legal in most of the states of the North.
But even if formal oppression did continue with the Law of Dangerousness or the Law of Public Scandal, this does not mean that male-male interactions did not begin to follow the carefully-instilled logic of a socialist relational ethic. A relationship between a bugarrón and his maricón was often more than a sex-for-money exchange; it may have lasted for years and involved exchange of favors or cohabitation. This is surely due in part to the inefficiency of currency exchange in an economy in which most wealth was socialized. It is also true that a currency exchange would lay bare the sometimes material interest in the bugarrón-maricón sex act. But it could also be argued that the relational character of male sex work in Havana before dollarization was a cultural product in keeping with socialist relationality. Though it is being rapidly eroded with the onslaught of market relations in sex work, this relational tendency persists to this day. Money or, especially, clothing are accepted from tourists, but this exchange is constructed as “help” from a “friend,” not as payment from a trick.
A 21-year-old medical student described his relationship with a Spanish tourist: “He offered me material incentives. But not as payment, right? More like a gift. I accepted it because I knew that it wasn’t in the spirit of payment. He kept insisting…. He always helps my mother.” Most sex workers refuse to even discuss money, accepting whatever the tourist chooses to give them as a “gift”: “I will never ask you for anything, I will not ask for money. If your heart dictates to you that you give me something—like, for example, money—it will come from your heart, you understand? But I will never ask you for anything.” And some complain that tourists want only sex and not relationships. But under the influence of a new capitalist cultural economy, the new class of sex workers is abandoning even a pretense of relationality in their work. Some of the younger pingueros admit that “for me, being a pinguero is a business. A business in which I get what I need to dress, eat, help my family and enjoy myself. I don’t do it because I like it, I do it just for the money.”
“The pinguero killed the bugarrón.”[4]
Pinguerismo killed bugarronismo because it was far better suited for the new capitalist relations. For two reasons, the relational bugarrón was not a category that could withstand the transition to capital market relations. First, because the bugarrón- maricón relationship was not based on a currency exchange and could not function in the now dollar-based neighborhood of El Vedado. The dollar initiated the explosion in sex work not only by encouraging tourism but also by providing a medium of exchange so that the workers could gain more than a gift or a meal from their clients. This in turn allowed the beginning of a standardization of pricing and it irrevocably unmasked an increasingly material interest in the sex relation, despite the continued effort of many of the workers to construct the work as relational. Secondly, to be efficient in a market exchange, the workers had to have a category which was identifiable, marketable, and distinct. The new sex tourist workers in El Vedado needed a gender category which would both reproduce Cuban tradition but also conform to the demands of the clients for an insertive but “gay” worker—an odd configuration for a macho Cuban man.
The new sex workers had to distinguish themselves from the female sex workers, “jineteras,” now re-emerging with vigor since the legalization of the dollar. They could not simply masculinize “jinetera,” since that would suggest that they, too, are penetrated by tourists. There is indeed a group of young men in El Vedado who call themselves “jineteros,” but these are sellers of black-market cigars, tour guides, promoters of private restaurants and small-time con artists. They are a specifically nonsexual category and are adamant about that point, since if they were seen as sex workers, they might be imagined to be passive partners, like their female counterparts. Those young men who are sex workers, then, had to radically distinguish themselves not only from the con-artist jineteros (despised by Habaneros because they threaten tourism), and from the invaded bodies of the jineteras; they had to announce to the world that their work was precisely the opposite: masculine virility. So, to the slang term for “dick” (“pinga”) was added the suffix “ero,” meaning, a man whose activity, or profession, has to do with his pinga. Thus, soon after the legalization of the dollar, the word “pinguero” was born. With such a name there is absolutely no confusion as to the role that the workers have in a sexual encounter. This saves the men’s images as “hombres hombres,” or manly men, but it also is a marketing tool that announces to the sex tourists—who in Havana and elsewhere are usually in search of an insertive partner—who they are and what they are about. And the category “pinguero” is also an accommodation to the Cuban nationalist sensibility.
“Fidel knows everything.”
“Fidel” is code for the entire state apparatus, so much has the Revolution been personalized in him. This young man from Guantánamo explained to me that “Fidel” was far more interested in stopping female prostitution than male. Pingueros could walk the street “openly,” he said. This difference makes sense when sex work is viewed in the context of the nationalist project. Cuban women are used in the same way—and by the same men—who are invading the island economically. The state has been forced by economic exigency to admit capitalist incursion and relinquish some of its economic and ideological autonomy. Jineteras demonstrate this in their very bodies, and so they are an intolerable reminder of the growing power of external capital in internal affairs. This, “Fidel” cannot abide. But pingueros, at least representationally if not also practically, are quite the opposite: They represent the strength of the powerful Cuban phallus conquering the bodies of foreigners. No autonomy has been lost, and symbolically at least, no Cuban body has been defiled. In fact, in a pinguero-tourist sex act, the Cuban has invaded the tourist, “screwed” him, as it were. The renowned Cuban phallus, well-known in the gay world and about which writers such as Pau-Llosa, Stavans and Arenas have commented, is perhaps the one entirely Cuban resource that Cuba has left.[5]
Not only is the Cuban pinga powerful, capable of killing in a single thrust, as in Arenas’ account, but it is a limitless resource. A university professor in Cuba explained that in the popular imagery, women sex workers are denigrated and their bodies are seen as dirty. But men’s bodies are not ruined with frequent use. In pinguerismo, he told me: “There is an implication of power. It’s not the same with a woman. When women prostitute themselves ‘they are filthy, like a piece of rag.’ But there’s a saying that the dick is not a soap that gets used up. A lot of men say ‘If I use it a lot prostituting myself, it doesn’t get spent.’ And so all of this is an ideology around the penis, and for this reason they are called ‘pinguero.’ That is to say …the masculinity of the Cuban is not wounded. The Cuban just gives his dick, and giving the dick doesn’t mean a thing.”[6]
So there is less political and cultural censure of male sex work than of its female counterpart. The boys simply prove the power of their phalluses to each other and to themselves, while using the desire of the foreigners to relieve them of their dollars. Pingueros attract sex-tourism dollars to the state hotels and airline, and they multiply tourists’ discretionary dollars by spending them in state stores—all the while, symbolically conquering the bodies of the foreign invaders, like any good Revolutionary Cuban man.
“It has to do with Elián.”
It is little wonder then that for years the state seems to have left the pingueros alone while actively prosecuting both jineteras and “chulos” (pimps). Jineteros are also aggressively persecuted because they threaten tourism, since they are known for pulling scams on foreigners, though they also provide some legitimate services to them. Although I am assured that this is not law, police procedure is to harass and arrest any non-pinguero Cuban who is hanging around a tourist. When I demanded that an officer inform me why he was arresting my Cuban friend who had been walking with me, I was told that it was to protect me from an inevitable robbery. The pingueros, too, are harassed constantly by the police, but they are allowed to interact with foreigners in the two areas of pinguero activity, the movie theater Yara and the Malecón at the Fiat car dealership and café. Police demand their identity cards and interrogate any Cuban whose familial residence is not listed as Havana Province. (To discourage internal migration in the Special Period, it is illegal for Cubans to reside in a province other than that of their family home.) Police will use this law to detain a pinguero sometimes overnight, especially if suspected of being a jinetero. This harassment is constant, but it seems to be more a performance of individual officers’ macho power than the result of an official policy. There seems to be no real concerted effort to rid El Vedado of the pingueros, and in fact police stand and watch when their business is negotiated, so long as it remains in the strict confines of the two spaces just mentioned. The semipublic hotel chains Trype, Horizontes and Meliá do enforce a policy against Cubans entering rooms, and hotel security guards tell me this is to stop prostitution—again, “for your protection.” But this inconvenience is resolved by sex tourists’ use of private houses or “authorized rooms,” private rooms which can be let to tourists if the owners pay the state $200 per month.
Yet when I returned in the summer of 2000 there was a noticeable increase in the level of police activity at both Yara and Fiat. Whereas in 1999 the police harassment was confined to Yara and the pingueros on the Malecón were watched but left alone, in 2000 the police sweeps moved into Fiat. And although tourists are generally untouchable, even I was approached at Yara and asked for my identification card. When I asked some of the workers why they thought the harassment had increased, I received two answers. One worker explained that it had to do with Elián and the increased media coverage which followed: “We think it may have something to do with Elián. Since November there have been double the police… because she [Cuba] wants to show the world that she’s a country without prostitution, without hunger, that everyone who lives here is equal with no social differences.” Another answer had to do with Fidel. He had been making appearances on a daily television discussion roundtable to discuss the Elián affair and U.S. aggression. The Cubavisión studio happens to be behind the Yara cinema, on Calle M between 23rd and 25th in El Vedado—within 100 yards of the pinguero cruising area. Every afternoon from about three until seven, the street in front of the studio and along 23rd past the Yara was closed to allow Fidel’s motorcade to pass. At three police would sweep the area of pingueros and keep them away until the motorcade had passed. One pinguero told me that this was so that Fidel could not see what was really going on with the “chicos de la calle.” According to him, while “Fidel”—as proxy for the state apparatus—did know what was going on at Yara, Fidel the man did not. This young man wanted to free Fidel (the man) from responsibility by believing that he had no knowledge of how bad the situation was on the street. The man who in 1999 told me “Fidel knows everything,” had quite the opposite agenda: to demonize Fidel as someone who knew about pinguerismo but allowed it to continue. It is no coincidence that this pinguero who so hated Fidel also proudly displayed a U.S. flag tattoo on his arm.
“Because what they love is money.”
Materialism, especially adoration of U.S. brand-name products, has been one consequence of capitalism in Cuba. Many of the pingueros blame either socialism or “Fidel” for their poverty, and they express their anti-“Fidel” sentiments with an adoration of U.S. fashion. Tommy Hilfiger clothing gives the illusion of the kind of prosperity which capitalism is imagined to bring. If socialism has brought poverty, capitalism must mean wealth. Tommy Hilfiger is a symbol of that coming economic prosperity which some believe will accompany the death of Fidel and of the socialist experiment. Of course, these pingueros do not understand that the wealth which Tommy Hilfiger represents—with its advertisements of young men yachting off the coast of Nantucket—is well beyond what will ever be possible for the huge majority of capitalist citizens. Even more adored than Tommy is Nike. New shoes, for young Habaneros, are rare and coveted jewels, and the wealthiest tourists don Nikes. The craving for shoes causes honest pingueros to do whatever they have to do, to steal from whomever they can, to get a pair of Nikes. The Nike obsession is beyond what we might call idolatry; one pinguero has a Nike swoosh made of pure gold embedded in his upper right incisor. Every time he smiles, he promotes the values of consumption. He has willingly sacrificed his tooth to the proclamation of the pending capital onslaught. Both his gold Nike swoosh and his commodified body proclaim the triumph of capitalism.
A second consequence of the introduction of capitalism to the island has been what we might call the commodification of desire: Pingueros’ ability to experience and explore their desires has been interrupted by their need to conform these desires to opportunities to make money, that is, to the needs of the market. A number of pingueros explained to me that they are unable to have sex—even with a young man or woman to whom they are physically attracted—unless there is a financial element. The “Father of the Pingueros” told me: “I like sex with young guys, but as much as I like it or want to fuck, if you don’t pay me, I won’t go with him, you understand? So if you don’t pay me, I would rather jerk off with a magazine alone at home, because having sex for money is my profession…. I would like to, but I can’t have sex without money…. My heart won’t let me.” Similar sentiments were expressed by others. One pinguero even recently paid a woman to have sex with him, even though he was 18 years old and very attractive; he could have had sex easily for free with a Cuban woman, but preferred to pay a jinetera $10. Not only the bodies but even the desire of the pingueros has been configured to turn them into sex machines, functionaries of a sex tourist industry, and indirectly, of the foreign capitalists whose investments in hotels are reaping rapidly expropriated and exported profits.
This commodification reaches not only the bodies and desires of the pingueros, but also their sexual and gender identities, and this is a third consequence of capitalist incursion. For sex workers, identity functions like a packaging label on a product: It informs potential consumers of what they can expect if they purchase that product. Sexual identity in the past in Cuba has been fairly flexible, in that youthful experimentation—especially if in the active role—has been permissible without a Cuban man having to call himself “maricón.” But a flexible identity, allowing a man to engage in some homoerotic behavior without having to change his gender self-representation, does not well serve the marketing of sex workers, who need to be easily identifiable to consumers. This is one of the functions which the label “pinguero” serves. Already widely disseminated among privileged white capitalist males who can afford to travel, the category pinguero allows the workers to be marketed externally, letting the traveler know what to ask for, where to get it, and what to expect. Though Cuban men are not accustomed to having to declare themselves members of a category other than “hombre,” despite adolescent homoerotic experimentation, the needs of the market insist that they concretize themselves as sex workers for male tourists. So capitalism, through the logic of market relations, has claimed these young men from a world of (relatively) nebulous and permissive sexual experimentation and forced them into a concrete category which announces to themselves, to each other and to their clients that their sexual being and their bodies are inextricably linked to their economic function. “Pinguero” is not primarily a category of sexual preference: it is first and foremost an economic category. The transformation of sex, body and desire into a marketable product is precisely what I mean by “commodification of desire,” and the construction of an economic category—the pinguero—to contain that product is what I mean by “commodification of identity.”
“Pinguero” is a category that arises from these Cubans’ own self-understanding, but it also serves well those tourists seeking a sexual encounter only. Many of them want a holiday romance, or even a long-term relationship with a Cuban man, and so they want, and will ask for, a “gay” Cuban. And because this is what the customers ask for, the workers sometimes change their labels to accommodate. I have heard more than one pinguero talking to a tourist, and when asked “Eres gay?” the Cuban answered in the affirmative. But the Cuban did not mean the same thing by “gay” as did the tourist; for the latter, often from Europe or Canada, “gay” is a concrete category of sexual identity and preference. But Cubans are accustomed to defining themselves sexually in terms of what they do, not what they are (i.e., bugarrón or maricón). “Gay” for a Cuban man is not an identity category but a behavioral one, incorporating any man who will have sex with another man, regardless of whether it is “por gusto” or “por la necesidad.”
But under the pressure of the market, even this is changing. A change in the understanding of the foreign category “gay,” from a kind of sexual behavior to a kind of gendered being, will demonstrate this tendency in capitalism. My older informants, those who came to sexual maturity before the Special Period, spoke of masculine sexual identity in terms of behavior. Consider: “A man who goes with a man is gay.” According to this respondent a man is gay not because he is gay, but because he does gay, that is, “goes with a man.” It is important to note that this young man was 23 years old at the time of the interview, so he would have been approximately 14 at the initiation of the Special Period and 17 when the dollar was legalized; his sexual identity would have already been largely settled by the time capitalist reforms began to commodify his body. But younger Cuban men, whose puberty had come after the onset of the Special Period, tended more to speak of pinguerismo and gay as ontological categories; language of doing gives way to language of being. When I asked if gay Cubans were still considered hombres, he stated: “Yes, we’re hombres, but in our hearts we are gay.” Here, gay is not about sexual behavior, as for the older man, but about a core of being. This young man was only 18 at the time of the interview, hence he would have been nine at the initiation of the Special Period and 12 when the dollar was legalized. His sexual identity formation occurred fully within the context of capitalist incursion and sex tourism, and it is therefore no accident that he believes that there is a part of him which is gay in his being, in his heart.
This is why “the pinguero killed the bugarrón.” Capitalism cannot tolerate ambiguity, not least in identity, and particularly when a certain identity carries with it the potential for profit from exploitation of resources. In the case of pinguerismo in Havana, the resource to be exploited is the male body, and it must be concretized as a commodity before it is of use in the attraction of sex tourists.
“To try everything.”
Whether or not “Fidel knows everything,” the Cuban state is not to “blame” for pinguerismo. Indeed, for some young men it provides a constructive function, allowing them to experiment in homoerotic activity and giving them a sense of community with other workers. One young man came to Yara “to get a change of life, to try everything. Before, I didn’t know about the gay world. I want to know the world. I didn’t come because of financial need. I haven’t earned the money that I wanted, but I have had lots of experiences, good ones as well as bad ones, with friendships in the gay world.” It is true, of course, that for many of the young men the sex with older and unattractive men is a demeaning and even nauseating experience: “I wouldn’t wish this life on anybody. Because selling your body is one of the worst things in the world, but it’s what gets the most money here in Cuba.” “It’s horrible. I’m here because of financial need…. I feel scared and ashamed. I always feel ashamed.” But most of the 50 sex workers I interviewed were far more ambiguous in their attitudes about their work, feeling a mixture of shame and desire and disgust, excitement and fulfillment. And most also feel a gratitude to the tourists who hire them, for without sex tourists these generally homeless men would likely not eat that day and not have a room in which to sleep.
This is not to valorize sex work; rather it is simply to say that sex tourism per se is not the problem of the pingueros in Havana. The problem first and foremost is poverty, the result, in small part, of the regime’s own poor economic decisions over the years, and in large part, of global capitalism and its various transnational apparatuses. Hence the transition to capitalism is not the answer to sex work or to the poverty that is its major impetus. In fact, it is clear that the initiation of capitalist market relations has served only to commodify the bodies of the pingueros, to turn relationships into transactions, to introduce a poverty and a materialism heretofore absent from the cultural landscape, and to force formerly more flexible sexual and gender identities toward rigid and more easily marketable categories. As capital relations become even more standard in El Vedado and elsewhere on the island, and as the culture of capitalism and materialism more pervasively insinuate themselves into the minds and bodies of Cubans, we can expect an increasingly rigid reconfiguration of gender according to the logic of the market. And this is not likely to lead to more freedom of gender expression, for either men or women, than has been present earlier in the history of the Revolution.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
G. Derrick Hodge is a doctoral student in Anthropology at the City University of New York and a medical anthropologist at the Harvard Medical School’s Department of Social Medicine. Research for this article was made possible by funding from Mr. and Mrs. Cecil Mink, Jerl Surratt, Joann Wilson, and the CUNY/Caribbean Exchange Program of the City University of New York.
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes unattributed in the text are from male Cuban sex workers interviewed between July 1999 and July 2000 in Havana.
2. Ernesto Meléndez Bachs, “Presentation of a Law on Foreign Investment,” delivered to the National Assembly of People’s Power, September 4, 1995.
3. Samuel Feijoó, “Revolución y vicios,” El Mundo, April 15, 1965, p. 5, cited in Lois M. Smith and Alfred Padula, Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba (New York: Oxford, 1996), pp. 172-173.
4. A university professor in Cuba, interviewed November 1999.
5. Ilán Stavans, “The Latin Phallus,” and Ricardo Pau-Llosa, “Romancing the Exiliado,” both in Ray Gonzales, (ed.), Muy Macho: Latino Men Confront Their Manhood (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1996); Reynoldo Arenas, The Assault (New York: Penguin USA, 1995).
6. A university professor in Cuba, interviewed November 1999.
