The Other Side of Paradise

by Julia Cooke

  Sandra, like some of the other girls who hung out where we sat on malecón where it hit Paseo, wore fashionable clothes of the barely there variety: diminutive shorts with interlocking C’s on back pockets, sparkly heels, bras that peeked out from under tank tops, and halters that exposed midriffs. She dyed her own long, straight hair an inky blue-black and lined her lips with the same dark pencil that she used around her eyes because shops hadn’t carried red in months. Her plastic nails were thick and whispery along the tips; she grabbed my forearm as we crossed the street on our way to the bathroom, dodging the cars that sped around the curve at Paseo. We went the long way to avoid the police who hung in the shadows on the intersection’s traffic island, keeping an eye out for illicit activity on the strip. “The cars here, they’ll hit you. And if it’s him”—Sandra flicked her chin and pulled her hand down to mime a beard, the universal gesture for Fidel Castro—“they won’t stop. They’ll run you over and keep on going.”

  There were clubs and bars at the hotels that hulked over the crossroads—the mod Riviera, the shimmery Meliá Cohiba, the Jazz Café—but since few locals could afford drinks there, the tourists who wanted to meet Cubans hung out by the sea. Everyone, Cuban and foreign, loved the malecón, to sit facing the ocean and Miami and feel the spray on bare shins, or to turn toward the city and watch old cars roar by, or, after a long night at the bars, to see the edge of the sea begin to separate from a brightening sky. On nights when there was no moon, you could nod approvingly at the fish that men in mesh tank tops caught on almost-invisible lines that stretched from coils on the sidewalk. On hot days, you watched kids who leapt from the wall into high tide, cringing as their arms pin-wheeled past the rocks cragging up from the ocean.

  So young men toted bongo drums and guitars, imitating the Buena Vista Social Club for a few dollars’ tip. Gentlemen in frayed straw fedoras asked tourists to pick up an extra beer at the gas station kiosk. Tired-looking women in Lycra shorts sang out the names of cones of roasted peanuts, cucuruchos de maní, and popcorn, rositas de maíz. Nonchalant girls cocked hips at the foreign men who walked past. Sandra had been taught the art of artifice to serve the Cuban Revolution through its beauty parlors, but she’d given up on hair. By the time she was twenty-one, she’d been working as a prostitute for around five years. The dates changed every time I asked her. Either way, she made about three times in one night what she’d have been paid monthly at any of the government-owned salons.

  /// The statistics that Cuba’s government likes to highlight when asked about the role of women in its Communist society are these: Before 1959, women had represented only 13 percent of the workforce and many were domestic servants. A large number were prostitutes, too—as a port city with a sexually liberal climate and a U.S.-backed puppet government, Havana was where yanquis had gone in search of louche, uninhibited nightlife from Prohibition on. The 1919 Volstead Act pushed Americans south and ballooned tourism numbers from thirty-three thousand visitors to Cuba in 1914 to fifty-six thousand in 1920 and ninety thousand in 1928. U.S. Navy boats, too, were usually docked in the bay. By 1931, seventy-four hundred women officially stated their professions as prostitutes and countless more didn’t. The city formerly known as “the pearl of the Caribbean” was soon referred to as its brothel.

  When the Revolution swept through, gambling and prostitution were outlawed. Castro had insisted that tourism could continue in Havana in the absence of its more morally questionable attractions—he’d welcomed more than two thousand people to a meeting of the American Society of Travel Agents in Havana in October 1959, ten months into his tenure. But soon enough, the missile crisis launched the Cold War, the U.S. trade and travel embargo was put in place, and American trips to Havana were curbed. Forty years after the 1959 Revolution, long after prostitutes had been trained as seamstresses and given jobs and day care for their children, 51 percent of Cuba’s scientists were women. Fifty percent of attorneys and 52 percent of medical doctors, too. Everyone was paid nearly equally—a doctor, male or female, made marginally more than a seamstress, around $20 a month in Cuban pesos.

  But then the Special Period happened, and the rations of food, clothing, and other necessities that removed pressure from those monthly stipends dwindled. Women—and some men—increasingly began to trade sexual favors for, say, the fish that a neighbor caught or the bread that only a well-placed state employee got very much of. When the government pushed to increase tourism and Cuba drew closer to the global capitalist marketplace, those activities again had cash value. By 1995, around the same time that studies on gender parity in the workforce came out, the Italian travel magazine Viaggiare had given the island the dubious honor of being the number one global “paradise of sexual tourism.” The government, broke and desperate, did little to contradict this image. And though the economy lifted as Cuba rounded into the twenty-first century, and though the new decade saw police tossing the more obvious prostitutes into jail, sex was something that could be easily bought and sold in Havana.

  And yet one key fact still sets Cuba apart: There aren’t many pimps or third-party intermediaries in the sex trade. A police state with tightly restricted access to weapons and severe penalties for drugs creates an underworld more seamy than overtly violent. And few romantic liaisons between locals and foreigners are deemed prostitution. Rather, most fall under the banner of relationships with amigos. Any non-Cuban is eligible, and what locals want from amigos is neither finite nor clear, a mix of money, attention, and the sense of possibility linked to anyone with a non-Cuban passport. Some of these men get their women out of the country. More frequently, they are maintained for a while before being dropped when the men find newer, younger girls or grow tired of Cuba, its heat, and its drama.

  In the way that the language of a city fills in the blanks of what its people want to name, sometime between the early nineties and today the word jinetero/a became the catch-all to describe Cuba’s hookers and hustlers, people who seek foreign currency or CUC, the valuable tourist cash, rather than the pesos in which government salaries are paid, via foreigners. The word’s provenance isn’t clear. Jinete in Spanish is a horse jockey; whether this means that women hold the reins of the “horses” is unclear. Today, the masculine jinetero refers insultingly to a man who caters to tourists in any questionably legal, hustler-like capacity. Jinetera means “a Cuban woman who trades sex for money.”

  I had avoided jineteros and jineteras since I’d first come to Cuba. But I couldn’t write about women in Havana without talking to a jinetera, said Juan, whom I’d met the year before and who loved documenting his city’s underbelly, and I agreed.

  “You may have to pay her,” he told me the day after he’d introduced me to Sandra. I sat with him and his girlfriend, Alejandra, on the terrace of the maze-like Vedado house they shared with Juan’s mother, stepfather, and three other families, talking about jineteras. Their baby daughter slept in Juan’s lap and Alejandra’s son from a previous relationship drew at the kitchen table.

  I cringed, and he shrugged.

  “I mean, you are using time of hers in which she’d potentially be paid by someone else if you weren’t there.”

  “Especially when you see her at night,” said Alejandra.

  “She seemed fine with just talking to me,” I said. “I won’t pay her for her time, but I guess I can buy her pizza, beers, pay for taxis, and hope that’s enough.”

  Juan looked skeptical, but Alejandra nodded. “That’ll probably work. After all, you’re foreign,” she said, cocking her head as she looked at me. I felt suddenly uncomfortable. “There’s opportunity, of a sort, associated with just your presence.”

  /// Sometimes it’s hard to discern who’s selling sex and who’s just trying to wear as little fabric as possible in Havana’s oppressive heat. The mainstays of jinetera fashion—miniskirts, transparent fabrics, cleavage- and shoulder-baring tops—appear on most women, including foreigners, who feel freer to be sexy in permissive Cuba than at home. At clubs, I
saw foreign women with bikini strap marks sunburned around their necks look left and right and then pull their necklines down before dancing with slim Cuban men in tight jeans and big belt buckles. These women lapped up the sensual aura by the minute, as if just breathing would send tiny cells of sexy through their bodies, the infusion pushing and pulling hips back and forth, transforming walks into sashays, planting dry one-liners in mouths.

  Sandra had long since mastered these feminine tricks. Everything about her physical appearance was calibrated to entice: the tops that looked almost about to show too much skin, the hair that twisted around her neck, her long, soft, red nails. I had just five years on Sandra, but I felt large, clumsy, and dusty around her in my flats and loose dresses. I was a tattered stuffed animal next to her Barbie doll as we sat, the second time we met, in the back seat of a state-owned cab that took us from the malecón out to her house.

  Sandra had recently moved from La Corea, one of Havana’s few slum-like neighborhoods, into a nicer but smaller dwelling in San Miguel del Padrón. Her home was in a six-by-eight-block patch between a fetid stream and the main road that linked downtown Havana with the outer boroughs like San Francisco de Paula, where Ernest Hemingway lived. San Miguel was a place of contrasts: A street began with a few freshly painted houses near the road to San Francisco and faded into cinderblock shacks with stretched-out oil barrels for fences closer to the stream. Egg cartons, plastic bags, the rusted skeletons of metal chairs, and fruit rinds bobbed in the water.

  The shiny taxi slowed as we pulled onto her street, dodging potholes. A couple on the corner stared at us and Sandra waved. A few feet away, an old man in overalls, a burlap sack of oranges slung over his right shoulder, stood at attention and saluted. Sandra dissolved into giggles, slapping the vinyl seat. “What a loco, loco loquito,” she gasped. “¿Viste?” She jumped out as soon as we pulled up on her block and leaned against the car’s trunk, picking at her nails as I paid the fare.

  Years ago, Sandra’s mother had kicked her out of the house. She now lived with her grandmother, Aboo, and her half-brother, Gallego, in a two-room apartment in what had once been a yard at the center of a block, down an alley and behind a single-story home with neoclassical columns and a street-side patio. Aboo didn’t approve of Sandra staying out for days on end, but Sandra’s father was in Florida and her mother had a new husband, a nice house in suburban La Lisa, and a set of twin toddlers. And the money Sandra brought home supported their household.

  For every woman supported by foreign men, I’d heard it estimated that three more Cuban citizens got by on the money, whether directly or not. Sandra, Aboo, and Gallego, at least. The government didn’t do much aside from tossing a too-blatant hooker into Villa Delicia, the nickname for the women’s jail. Sandra had spent four days there when she was nineteen and had eaten so little she’d come out “this thin,” she told me, holding up her pinkie. If men stopped coming to the island, tempted no longer by images of scantily clad mulattas on white sand beaches and bodies pressed together in crowded bars, hotel rooms would languish unvisited, and taxis would have fewer fares and restaurants more empty tables. The area’s policemen, Sandra said, were eminently bribable, for the right price.

  Just inside Sandra’s door, a small table and two matching chairs were piled high with folded clothes. The room also held a wooden armoire, a stereo, and a refrigerator near a small kitchenette. A photo of a man with a guitar named Juan Manuel, signed to China la más bella, hung on the wall beside images of Sandra in a tiered pink dress for her quinceañera and a collage of family and friends, the toddlers in La Lisa, and the neighborhood girls. The back room held two twin beds and a closet. Sandra poked around for a box of photos. When she found it, we returned to the central patio, where two more of the table set’s chairs gathered rust at the joints, to sit under the laundry lines that the three families who lived in the middle of the block used on alternating days. She set the box on the ground and sorted through pictures. I pulled out a pack of cheap, unfiltered Criollo cigarettes, which I favored for their clean tobacco and sweet aftertaste. Sandra wrinkled her nose but took one anyway, and used it to point out the Spanish guy who’d asked her to marry him two years ago. He’d walked in on her a few weeks later with someone else. She still had the ring.

  Sandra had sex for the first time when she was eleven (the average age in Cuba is around thirteen) with a man whose name she’d tattooed across the small of her back, Mumúa, above an image of two doves entwined with scrolls. He was thirty-two then, and even now he was “crazy for me,” she said as she lit another cigarette, though he was in jail for selling stolen motorcycle parts. What had begun as nights out slid quickly into prostitution—government salaries paled next to the $50 that Sandra could make for a night with a man, nearly always foreign, nearly always Spanish, Cuban American, or Italian. So she quit, never finished her certificate course at beauty school.

  The gate at the street end of the alley jingled as Gallego walked in and, after introductions, I picked up my bag to leave. Sandra asked me where I was going. “To meet some friends downtown,” I said. There weren’t many decent restaurants in Havana then and a generous and growing cast of acquaintances and friends, Cubans and a few expatriates, regularly invited me around to eat. She gave me a once-over and pushed me toward the floor-length mirror in her living room. If I’d just do my hair like this, she told me as she reached into my curls and flipped them into a messy, voluminous updo, I’d look way sexier. A red wash to make the dull brown more interesting would do me good. And my shorts could be shorter, too. I should also line my lips. You know, show off contours. I handed her bobby pins for my hair but liked my shorts the way they were, mid-thigh. She looked skeptical, the pins between her lips as she styled and then hands on her hips once she’d finished. It did look better.

  The next time I saw Sandra was a quick visit on the malecón again. Just before I left, she told me she’d come up with a plan: When I went back to Mexico, I should get my company to write her a carta de invitación. “They can say I’ll be working for them,” she said. “What kind of company do you work at? A newspaper or something, right? They wouldn’t even have to offer me a job, just do the carta; I can take care of myself once I get there. And then I’ll just stay.”

  I didn’t really work for anyone, at least not like that, I explained, and some of the magazines I wrote for were actually based in Europe. She looked at me coyly. “Whatever,” she said. I paused and then smiled a little and said that I could hardly get them to do favors for me, much less for an amiga in Cuba. Sandra shrugged and began to gossip about a neighbor of hers that I’d met the day I’d visited her house. She’d come to borrow Sandra’s fake plastic spectacles because the amigo who was here for a week liked “the smart look”—funny, right?

  There was no change in her demeanor, as if the desire to go to Mexico had left her as soon as her shoulders had moved.

  /// The big turquoise hotel where Sandra hung out, the Habana Riviera, was originally commissioned by gangster Meyer Lansky’s front men to be his mob’s Havana gambling hub, an extravagant high-rise with sophistication unrivaled in the Caribbean—Manhattan on the Florida Straits. Architect Philip Johnson did initial designs until he realized he’d be working for the mafia and passed on the job. The building opened in December 1957 with Ginger Rogers and her musical revue in the hotel’s Copa Cabaret and immediately became a destination for the American jet set and the Cubans they favored. But in the end, Lansky’s henchmen and Hollywood hangers-on enjoyed only three years of the broad views of ocean and skyline from the 352 rooms before Castro nationalized the hotel and casino in 1960.

  Today, the walls of many of the Riviera’s rooms buckle from unaddressed humidity. Only half of them have seen the necessary renovations after fifty years of use; most floors are only partly habitable and some are closed altogether. Viewed from the huge saltwater pool, to which $10 buys anyone a day pass, the broken curtain rods dangling diagonally across half of the windows above give the
hotel the look of a crosseyed old man. What beds there are have been made up with linens in sizes that don’t fit the mattresses, and cockroaches skitter around the hallways or lie belly-up in corners. But in the lobby, the imagination sketches outlines of the three-piece suits and stiff silk skirts of the past, ghost-like, conjured by the décor. Low-slung, coral velvet couches and surfboard-shaped coffee tables with opalescent mosaic and gold inlay, all well-preserved, invite a time-travel fantasy. The broad leaves of tropical trees in planters loll over gleaming furniture and magenta rugs, and the north-facing windows look directly over the malecón and out to the sea.

  Lobbies were places where one could forget the hotels and houses that were crumbling for lack of maintenance, ignore the damp bubbles at the corners of the walls. But hotels and other tourist haunts—restaurants, cabarets—were where the jineteras stood out for their incongruity with their surroundings. They sat in red lace tops in the plush pink cushions of rattan loungers at the Hotel Nacional, drinking mojitos and studying the menu as amigos checked email on smartphones; they ate in pairs at the in-home restaurants, ordering rice and beans and plantain tostones while the men across the candles scarfed down chicken; and, in the car rental agency, they did the talking while the men stood back and studied the map of Cuba on the wall with a different cartoon for each state.