The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (6 page)

Sandra, like other girls who hung out where we sat on Havana's waist-high seawall (
malecón
) where it hit Paseo, wore fashionable clothes of the barely there variety: diminutive shorts with interlocking
C'
s on back pockets, glittery heels, bras that peeked from tops, halters leaving midriffs bare. She dyed her own long, straight hair blue-black and lined her lips with the same dark pencil that she used around her eyes because shops hadn't carried red in months. Her plastic nails were thick and whispery along the tips; she grabbed my forearm as we crossed the street on our way to the bathroom at a nearby gas station, dodging the cars that sped around the curve at Paseo. We went the long way to avoid the police who hung in the shadows on the intersection's traffic island, keeping an eye on the strip. “The cars here, they'll hit you. And if it's him”—Sandra flicked her chin and pulled her hand down to mime a beard, the universal gesture for Fidel Castro—“they won't stop. They'll run you over and keep on going.”

There were clubs and bars at the hotels that hulked over the crossroads—the mod Riviera, the shimmery Meliá Cohiba, the Jazz Café—but since few locals could afford drinks there, the tourists who wanted to meet real Cubanos hung out by the sea. Everyone, Cuban and foreign, loved the
malecón,
to sit facing the ocean and Miami and feel the spray on bare shins, or to turn toward the city and watch old cars roar slowly by, or, after a long night at the bars, to see the brightening sky pull itself away from the sea. On nights when there was no moon, you could nod approvingly at the fish that men in mesh tank tops caught on sheer line stretched from coils on the sidewalk. On hot days, you watched kids who leapt from the wall into high tide, their arms pinwheeling past the rocks that cragged up from the ocean.

So young men toted bongo drums and guitars, imitating the Buena Vista Social Club for a few dollars' tip. Gentlemen in frayed straw fedoras asked tourists to pick up an extra beer at the gas station kiosk. Tired-looking women in Lycra shorts sang out the names of cones of roasted peanuts,
cucuruchos de maní,
and popcorn,
rositas de maíz.
Nonchalant girls cocked hips at the foreign men who walked past. Sandra had been taught the art of artifice to serve the Cuban Revolution through its beauty parlors, but she'd given up on hair. By the time she was 21, she'd been working as a prostitute for around five years. The dates changed every time I asked her. Either way, she made about three times in one night what she'd have been paid monthly at any of the government-owned salons.

 

In November 2011, when Cuban first daughter Mariela Castro Espín was in Amsterdam in her capacity as sexologist and director of Cuba's Center for Sexual Education, she was interviewed on Radio Netherlands Worldwide. Castro, prim and deliberate in a turtleneck and tweed blazer, sat in a room with draping red curtains and feather boas and effused about Amsterdam's red-light district. “I've enjoyed seeing how they do it,” she said. “What I admire is that they've been able to dignify and value the work that they do—because yes, it is a job.” She enunciated her Spanish so translators didn't miss a word for the televised interview. Castro went on to explain how, as she put it, the principles are the same in Cuba as in Amsterdam, but the circumstances are different. She talked about how the
malecón
is a place of pride for Havanans, and she smiled broadly until she mentioned the people who sell sex there. “Some people go there to practice prostitution in a way that is bothersome for, above all, the tourist or foreigner,” and her agency is in close contact with the police to decrease the
malecón
prostitution, she said, without drawing too much attention from said tourist or foreigner.

This is what the Cuban government usually highlights when it talks about women and prostitution: Before Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959, women had represented only 13 percent of the workforce, and many were domestic servants. A large number were prostitutes, too—as a port city with a sexually liberal climate and a U.S.-backed puppet government, Havana was where
yanquis
had gone in search of louche, uninhibited nightlife from Prohibition on. In 1931, after the Volstead Act had tripled the numbers of tourists who visited the country in under 15 years, 7,400 women officially stated their professions as prostitutes. The city formerly known as “the Pearl of the Caribbean” was soon referred to as its brothel. Eradicating prostitution and increasing women's rights was one of Castro's stated goals. Forty years after the 1959 revolution, long after literacy drives had enabled the island's rural residents to read and prostitutes had been trained as seamstresses and given jobs and day care for their children, 51 percent of Cuba's scientists were women. Fifty percent of attorneys and 52 percent of medical doctors, too. Everyone was paid nearly equally—a doctor, male or female, made marginally more than a seamstress, around $20 a month in Cuban pesos.

Then, 20 years ago, the USSR fell and Soviet subsidies disappeared, and with them more than a third of Cuba's GDP. The value of the peso plummeted, and rations of food, clothing, and other necessities that removed pressure from monthly stipends dwindled. Increasingly, women, and some men, began to trade sexual favors for, say, the fish that a neighbor caught or the bread that only a well-placed state employee got very much of. When the government pushed to increase tourism and Cuba drew closer to the global capitalist marketplace, those activities again had cash value. By 1995, around the same time that studies on gender parity in the workforce came out, the Italian travel magazine
Viaggiare
had given the island the dubious honor of being the number one global “paradise of sexual tourism.” The government, broke and desperate, did little to contradict this image. And though the economy lifted as Cuba rounded into the 21st century, and though the new decade saw police tossing the more obvious prostitutes into jail, sex was something that could be easily bought and sold in Havana.

But one key fact still sets Cuba apart today: there aren't many pimps or third-party intermediaries in the sex trade. A police state with tightly restricted access to weapons and severe penalties for drugs creates an underworld more seamy than overtly violent. And few romantic liaisons between locals and foreigners are deemed prostitution; rather, most fall under the banner of relationships with
amigos.
Any non-Cuban is eligible, and what locals want from
amigos,
foreigners like me, is neither finite nor clear, a mix of money, attention, and the possibility linked to anyone with a non-Cuban passport.

In the way that the language of a city fills in the blanks of what its people want to name, sometime between the early 1990s and today the word
jinetero/a
became the catchall to describe Cuba's hookers and hustlers, or any person who seeks foreign currency or CUC, the valuable tourist cash, rather than the pesos in which government salaries are paid, via foreigners. The word's provenance isn't clear.
Jinete
in Spanish is a horse jockey; whether this means that women hold the reins of the “horses” is unclear. Today, the masculine
jinetero
refers insultingly to a man who caters to tourists in any questionably legal, hustlerlike capacity.
Jinetera
means “a Cuban woman who trades sex for money.” I'd avoided them whenever I'd visited Havana, until I met Sandra that night with a mutual acquaintance on the
malecón.

The European and American media erupted into a mild frenzy in the weeks after Mariela Castro's remarks, given that the principles of prostitution in Cuba aren't at all like those in Amsterdam. But her comments pointed toward something that was still unsaid, something essential about the country that was both hers and Sandra's:
jineteras
are indicative of contemporary Havana's frustrations, opportunities, dreams, history, and ennui. Remittances and tourism are Cuba's top two sources of income, and the inevitable process of aging has shoved the country, with less fanfare than anticipated, into a post-Fidel era. The inheritance of the Castro revolution is hinted at every day in how Cuba interacts with an ever-encroaching world. Sandra, a small symbolic representative of communism's struggle for relevance, is both admired and reviled within her society.

Then again, that might be too much weight to put on her; she's also just a girl surviving Havana, using what's put in front of her to get by.

 

Sometimes it's hard to discern who's selling sex and who's just trying to wear as little fabric as possible in Havana's oppressive heat. The mainstays of
jinetera
fashion—miniskirts, transparent fabrics, cleavage- and shoulder-baring tops—appear on most women, including foreigners, who feel freer to be sexy in permissive Cuba than at home. At clubs, I saw foreign women with bikini-strap marks sunburned around their necks look left, right, then pull their necklines down before dancing with slim Cuban men in tight jeans and big silver belt buckles. These women lapped up the sensual aura, as if just breathing would send tiny cells of sexy through their bodies, the infusion pushing and pulling hips back and forth, transforming walks into sashays, planting dry one-liners in mouths.

Sandra had long since mastered these feminine tricks. Everything about her physical appearance was calibrated to entice: the tops that looked almost about to slip off, the hair that twisted around her neck, her long, soft, red nails. I had just five years on Sandra, but I felt large, clumsy, and dusty around her in my flats and loose dresses. I was a tattered stuffed animal next to her as we sat, the second time we met, in the back seat of a cab that took us from the
malecón
out to her house.

She'd met me downtown because she said I wouldn't find her place on my own. Sandra had recently moved from La Corea, one of Havana's few slumlike outlying neighborhoods, into a closer but smaller dwelling in San Miguel del Padrón. Her home was in a cluster of blocks between a fetid stream and the main road that linked downtown Havana with outer boroughs like San Francisco de Paula, where Ernest Hemingway lived. San Miguel was a place of contrasts: a street began with a few freshly painted houses near the road to San Francisco and faded into cinderblock shacks with stretched-out oil barrels for fences closer to the stream. Egg cartons, plastic bags, the rusted skeletons of metal chairs, and fruit rinds bobbed in the water.

The shiny taxi slowed as we pulled onto her street, dodging potholes. A couple on the corner stared at us, and Sandra waved. A few feet away, an old man in overalls, a burlap sack of oranges slung over his right shoulder, stood to attention and saluted. Sandra dissolved into giggles, slapping the vinyl seat. “What a
loco, loco loquito,
” she gasped.
“Viste?”
She jumped out as soon as we pulled up to her building and leaned against the car's trunk, picking at her nails as I paid the fare.

Years ago, Sandra's mother had kicked her out of the house. She now lived with her grandmother, Aboo, and her half-brother, Gallego, in a two-room apartment in what had once been a yard at the center of a block, down an alley and behind a single-story home with neoclassical columns and a street-side patio. Aboo didn't approve of Sandra staying out for days on end, but Sandra's father was in Florida and her mother had a new husband, a nice house in suburban La Lisa, and a set of twin toddlers. And the money Sandra brought home supported the household.

For every woman supported by foreign men, I'd heard it estimated that three more Cuban citizens got by on the money, whether directly or not. Sandra, Aboo, and Gallego, at least. The government didn't do much beyond tossing a too-blatant hooker into Villa Delicia, the nickname for the women's jail. Sandra had spent four days there when she was 19 and had eaten so little she'd come out “like this,” she told me, holding up her pinkie. If men stopped coming to the island, tempted no longer by images of scantily clad mulattas on white-sand beaches and bodies pressed together in crowded bars, hotel rooms would languish unvisited, taxis would have fewer fares, and restaurants more empty tables. So policemen, Sandra said, were eminently bribable, for the right price.

Just inside Sandra's door, a small table and two matching chairs were piled high with folded clothes. The room also held a wooden armoire, a stereo, and a refrigerator near a small kitchenette. Sandra poked around for a box of photos. When she found it, we returned to the central patio, where we sat under the laundry lines that the three families who lived in the middle of the block used on alternating days. Sandra set the box on the ground and sorted through pictures. I pulled out a pack of cheap, unfiltered Criollo cigarettes, which I favored for their clean tobacco and sweet aftertaste. Sandra wrinkled her nose but took one anyway, and used it to point out the Spanish guy who'd asked her to marry him two years ago. He'd walked in on her a few weeks later with someone else. She still had the ring.

Sandra was 11 when she had sex for the first time (the average in Cuba is around 13), with a man whose name she'd tattooed across the small of her back,
MUMÚA
, above an image of two doves entwined with scrolls. He was 32 then, and even now he was “crazy for me,” she said, waving her cigarette, though he was in jail for selling stolen motorcycle parts. What had begun as nights out slid quickly into prostitution; government salaries paled next to the $50 she could make on a night with a man, nearly always foreign, nearly always Spanish, Cuban American, or Italian. So she quit, never finished her certificate course.

The gate at the street end of the alley jingled as Gallego walked in. After introductions, I picked up my bag to leave. Sandra asked me where I was going. “To meet some friends downtown,” I said. There weren't many decent restaurants in Havana then, and I had no kitchen in my rented room, so a generous cast of friends, Cubans and expats, regularly invited me around to eat during my three-week reporting trips. Sandra gave me a once-over and pushed me toward the floor-length mirror in her living room. If I'd just do my hair
like this,
she told me as she reached into my curls and flipped them into a messy, voluminous updo, I'd look way sexier. A red wash to make the dull brown more interesting would do me good. And my shorts could be shorter, too. I should also line my lips—you know, show off contours, make them inviting. I handed her bobby pins for my hair but liked my shorts the way they were, midthigh. She looked skeptical, the pins between her lips as she styled and then hands on her hips once she'd finished. It did look better.