Whorehouse of the Caribbean

Castro promised to clean up Cuba, but the new poverty has driven many to sell what they can, including their bodies.

By Jonathan Lerner

Jan 4, 2001 | A female prostitute in Havana is rather descriptively known as a jinetera, or jockey. A male hustler there is not a jinetero, but a pinguero, which translates as something like penis professional or dick worker.

Officially, there are jobs for all in socialist Cuba. But the average monthly wage is equivalent to $8. To survive, plenty of people are on the make. So depending on his preference, the tourist to Cuba has no trouble at all finding someone to ride his little race horse or perform professional action on his dick.

Besides kicking out the Yanquis and redressing the island's extremes of wealth and poverty (the wealth is all gone now, and everybody is poor) Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution set out to purify the people's behavior. Cuba would no longer be the "whorehouse of the Caribbean." Female prostitutes were offered training as drivers and secretaries; those who demurred got holidays in prison. Homosexual men were spared the retraining programs and sent directly to jail -- or to forced labor in the sugar cane fields.

To Reinaldo Arenas, the outrageously queer Cuban novelist whose memoir "Before Night Falls" has just been made into a film directed by Julian Schnabel, this official homophobia had a paradoxical effect. "There was never more fucking going on than in those years, the decade of the sixties," he wrote (as he was dying of AIDS in New York, in 1990), "which was precisely when all the new laws against homosexuals came into being, when the persecution started and concentration camps were opened, when the sexual act became taboo while the 'new man' was being proclaimed and masculinity exalted." And according to Arenas, it wasn't only faggots who sought the solace of male flesh. "Many of the soldiers who marched, rifle in hand and with martial expressions, came to our rooms after the parades to cuddle up naked, and show their real selves, sometimes revealing a tenderness and true enjoyment such as I have not been able to find again anywhere ... There was, moreover, no prostitution. It was pleasure for pleasure's sake."

Cuba's official repression of homosexuals has ended, although other forms of repression remain; you cannot, for example, purchase Reinaldo Arenas' books there. Officially, prostitution has been eliminated, but the wrecked economy forces many people to sell their bodies. Effeminate men are no longer denounced and sent away, but there is still no permission for anything vaguely resembling the public gay institutions Americans take for granted.

That does not keep Havana's gays from gathering openly, at places like the broad sidewalk in front of the Yarra Cinema. On weekend evenings, snappily dressed, hot-to-trot gay boys in the hundreds congregate outside the Yarra. They are joined there by all sorts of others drawn to the fissure of cultural free space that these men, in their brazenness, crack open; other people whom, in the very loosest sense, and in the context of a police state, we might also call rebels and queers. There are bored teenage girls and boys, in from the dreary high-rise Stalinist suburbs, showing off their platform shoes and piercings; willowy model wannabes in teensy ensembles of day-glo Lycra; motorcycle outlaws who only lack the bikes. The sidewalk outside the Yarra is where you go for word of mouth on the evening's floating party or transitory drag show, or perhaps to make a connection for marijuana or cocaine. You can also go there -- or to any of the city's other gay hangouts -- to pick up a pinguero.

Next Page: I met a fetching hustler one afternoon ...

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