The purpose of this research is to examine effects on the Cuban people of the Communist regime led by Fidel Castro. The research will presume some reader knowledge of the modern political history of Cuba since Castro's assumption of political power identify the content of human experience in relation to selected features of Cuba's social and political economy under the Castro regime.
A prostitute in Cuba is known as jinetera or jinetero. Before the Castro revolution, when so much of Cuba's economy depended on tourism and when tourism's infrastructure was essentially controlled by organized crime, prostitution was endemic in hotels and casinos. In the 1950s Dr. Castro wrote a pamphlet entitled "History Will Absolve Me," in which he declared prostitution to be one of the principal social cancers of Batista's regime and the elimination of this neocolonial evil one of the principal goals of the revolution (Neuhaus 26). The social controls that were exerted after Castro's successful revolution included government-sponsored expunging of prostitution from Cuba. Prostitutes were rerouted through civil-service jobs and reeducation (Curtis 7).
During the 1990s, when Cuba began to redevelop its hospitality and tourist industry, prostitution reemerged as an observable feature of life there. It is considered part of Cuba's shadow, or "second," economy (Perez-Lopez 3ff et passim), tied to the influx of tourist-based foreign currency. Although prostitution appears to be nothing like so widespread now as it was in the 1950s, by the late 1990s, Cuba had been identified as a principal destination for so-called "sex tourism," (Curtis 7; Cruz and Villamil 104).
One key difference between the earlier and later incarnations of prostitution in Cuba is that in the modern period prostitutes do not consider jineterismo to be their main occupation but rather in the nature of a temporary or supplemental job (Cruz and Villamil 104-5). Indeed, some prostit...