Cuba and Fidel Castro

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 noth

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ia informal social and family networks (Rosendahl 27ff). Another name for that is the black market, and from the earliest days of postrevolutionary policy Cubans have been involved in black marketeering. Regime control of markets was intended to rationalize out-of-control economic inequities by fixing prices and thereby limit demand. The practical effect was to create a black market in both currency and goods (Perez-Lopez passim). For nearly ten years after the revolution, Castro tolerated petit entrepreneurial (cuentapropista) activity, but in 1968 the so-called "Revolutionary Offensive" was launched, which "entailed the complete seizure of Cuba's smallest businesses: hot-dog carts, repair-shops, vegetable stands, snack shops, and the like were driven underground or out of business" (Cruz and Villamil 110). These very services became black-market enterprises. In 1978 they were co-opted by Decree-Law 14, which mandated monthly fees of 5-80 pesos: "What the government could not control, it contained, and The Revolution sought to manage, but not support small enterprise" (Cruz and Villamil 110). The cycle repeated itself during the Special Period in a Time of Peace, which reintroduced austerity measures that in 1994 were withdrawn
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Approximate Word count = 2248
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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