I read the article when it came out. She didn't look very hard. As an exile
she struggles mightily with the overwhelming evidence that some aspects of
Cuban life have been enormously improved under Castro, which is not to say
that there isn't plenty wrong, and she tends to put the darkest possible
interpretation on what she sees. As one yound architect from an
impoverished background told me, attitudes towards the regime tend to be
related to whether one has been a winner or a loser as a reult. His wife's
family were wealthy landowners who lost a great deal. His mother was a
widowed washerwoman. They had met at a university he wouldn't have been
able to attend before the revolution, and he certainly wouldn't have been
allowed to date, let alone marry, her.

There were in the early days of the Castro regime extreme and not very
friendly efforts to end prostitution in the manner you describe, which was
seen as a particularly degrading form of capitalism. Given Cuban mores, it
was also largely for the service of tourists. Until the end of the Soviet
connection and the deprivation that has followed there were only sporadic
attempts to control prostitution, which had largely disappeared as an
economoc strategy. Since 1992, however, there has been a resurgence of
prostitution, altho very little of it is on the industrial scale of the
Batista regime and its predecessors, and there are sporadic roundups, as in
the US. But on any night of any week one will trip over prostitutes on the
malecon, at the edge of the old city, and in certain of the bars. One can
also arrange for a woman to appear at one's place of residence (hotels are
more problematic: the lobbies are full of eyes. But there's no shortage of
places to close the deal).

Far more common are the readily-available casual liaisons of indeterminate
length that she describes, involving gift-giving, restaurant meals and
dancing. The many women who engage in this have day jobs that have nothing
to do with the entertainment of foreigners, but those jobs supply few
luxuries under the present economic conditions. The relationships range
from the friendly to the profoundly passionate, rather like sexual liaisons
in Cuban society at large. To a degree, and rather haphasardly, the
government tries to discourage these liaisons for reasons of public health
and to discourage a possible drift towards prostitution, but there are also
political motives.

The ceiba is considered by santeria practicioners the most powerful of trees.

At 01:56 PM 2/21/2001 -0500, Candice Ward wrote:
>A photograph of a mature and very shapely ceiba from San Antonio de los
>Banos (Cuba) can be viewed at http://www.hopscotch.org/1-4/Wilson9.html,
>although those who would only buy _Hopscotch_ for the articles might get off
>on this one: "The Hunger Artists: Revolution and Appetite" by Diana de
>Alarmas Wilson.
>
>Intending to write about the dollies-for-dollars prostitution industry in
>Havana, Wilson had arrived too late and found the city cleared of the
>prostitutes, who'd been "disappeared" for rehab in the Cuban prison system
>(or so she was told).
>
>Candice
>
>
>
>on 2/21/01 8:12 AM, Jacques Debrot at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>> Poets are so alienated; perhaps pornography can get us excited about each
>> other.
>>
>> I am 13. I kiss you David, then I kiss you, Rosemary--a butterfly
kiss--with
>> my eyelashes. We are at the top of a ceiba tree. The sun and the moon are
>> in the sky together. Caresses . . . shy fondling. The three of us are
still
>> new to desire.
>
>