Yup, you're right--my emphasis last night was a bit off (so was I, and it's
a while since I read the article). Her account is more balanced than most,
and her obvious emotional struggle with her admiration for some of what she
found was actually quite moving. But it's really hard for anyone to miss
seeing the prostitutes entirely, not because there are so mant but because
they tend to hang out in the dark galleries at the beginning of Calle
O'Reilly, the main drag of Old Havana and its entertainment center. Altho
it's entirely possible that as a woman she wasn't as comfortable walking
dark streets at night as I was, despite Havana's amazing safety. And of
course she wasn't being propositioned.
I should have mentioned that the casual relationships I describe occur as
easily between Cuban men and foreign women. And between Cubans and Cubans.
It's a pretty seductive place.
At 09:01 PM 2/21/2001 -0500, Candice Ward wrote:
>Well, it's impossible to say how "hard" she looked, but as a journalist
>who'd gone there to research that particular phenomenon, I'd guess she
>looked as hard as she could and then fell back on the tried-and-true default
>measure of writing _that_ story instead. You're really commenting on what
>she found, though, as different from what you found, and even if your visits
>occurred at the exact same time, what a female professional journalist could
>find of or about prostitutes anywhere would likely differ to some extent
>from what a male tourist could find--or be found by--don't you think?
>
>I also thought the article more balanced than you did, apparently, and I
>know from my Cuban friends that Wilson got quite a lot of it right. If she
>interpreted things darkly on account of her own exile status, it was far
>from the darkest interpretation I've read by one or another member of the
>exile community. Those accounts should be read skeptically, I agree, just
>the counterpart idolatrous, cult-of-Cuba accounts should be, as they're
>equally propagandistic. But Wilson's article is more complex than such
>accounts, and I was particularly interested in her empathetic response to
>the ambivalence among the Cubans she talked to and was able to identify with
>in spite of being an exile herself, which is widely believed in the US to be
>virtually free of such ambivalence. (Yeah, right--as if life were ever that
>simple!)
>
>Candice
>
>
>on 2/21/01 3:38 PM, Mark Weiss at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>> 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
>
>
>
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