Sorry, I can't say. I had a drink at the Nacional once and a coffee at the
Habana Libre, but aside from using the bathrooms (Cuban socialism=anybody
can use the lobby bathroom in any hotel at any time) those were the only
times I was in hotels. But not likely to be escort service.
The Cuban government these days appears to exercise control by being
unpredictable. A behavior may seem to be 100% tolerated and a month later
there are some arrests. Keeps everybody on their toes.
But prostitution as such is compared to most tourist destinations pretty
low-grade, and it seems to consist of independent entrepreneurs for the
most part.
Mark
At 01:04 AM 2/22/2001 -0500, Candice Ward wrote:
>Thanks. Given what you say about the periodic roundups, along with Wilson's
>having been told about the current prison-rehab program by both a cab driver
>and a govt. official, she could simply have had the bad luck to hit town in
>the wake of one. And maybe it wasn't such bad luck if it made her look
>beyond a cultural phenomenon as conspicuous as you indicate this one is.
>
>Do you know anything about the "animationists" she describes as the new
>breed of tourist-hotel "entertainment" workers? I'd never heard of them, and
>the term itself sounds like something spawned by an online translation
>generator. I couldn't tell from the article what sorts of entertainment
>these animationists actually provide--escort service? stand-up comedy? beach
>blanket bingo?
>
>Candice
>
>
>on 2/21/01 10:43 PM, Mark Weiss at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>> 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.
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