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Tourism, she adds, is the commodification of the experience that allows people to fulfil their fantasies and set free bodily pleasures Cabezas, At one time, I thought I was a big macho man and rejected anything that smacked of homosexuals, but I realized that in order to survive, I had to befriend transvestites, gays, lesbians because Yumas 10 go looking for us in their ambiente.
So no matter how much I discriminated against them, I had to evolve in order to survive. The above comment demonstrates that if we constrain pingueros to an economic category, we risk overlooking a series of negotiations and discussions about gender and sexuality that are vital to understanding these subjects and their subjectivities. Therefore, an extremely complex and diverse group is represented beforehand as a homogenous and predictable unity. However, some of the narratives I collected during my fieldwork and more profound reading of the same context yield a contrary view.
Alejandro, another of my informants, told me that:. Jineteras have more possibilities to survive than we do. They are better paid and are more accepted because they are heterosexual women, although once in a while they do it with other women for money. We are always going to be seen as delinquents, as men who, despite having the opportunity to earn a decent living doing honest work, prefer to bend over and take it in the ass.
No one knows what we have to go through just to make a single peso. Interactions with police determine many of the daily activities such as which walking routes pingueros may take and other forms of routine decision-making. These kinds of pressures and constant strategizing influence not only everyday behaviour but also how they negotiate their masculinity with clients. Many opt to stay longer periods of time with a single client in order to protect themselves from police raids and further harassment as well as maximize earnings. In this kind of work one must have his papers in order, and one cannot spend a lot of time in the same place.
I go back to my hometown right after I spend time with a foreigner. With no cash on hand and no job, he wanted to make money so he could invest it in a bicycle workshop in his native town. While there is no explicit law regulating the activity of pingueros , authorities use other legal methods—as they do with jineteras —to keep a firm grip on areas with a high degree of tourist traffic.
Yamel explains:. Police are very corrupt but they are also pretty shrewd. They work in combination with clerks from places like the ice-cream parlour Bim bom and they tell us to leave their money with them so they can collect it later. They are constantly harassing us. By acting like tough enforcers, they can come to an agreement with us and increase regular access to bribes. In a highly bureaucratic system such as that of Cuba, public functionaries are poorly remunerated; as a result, corruption and inefficiency run rampant.
Many pingueros interviewed for this article, especially those from the provinces, emphasized this point. In part, these conditions are responsible for the existence of an informal market for the sale of a temporary residency status in the capital, renewable on a regular basis every three months for 30 CUC.
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Ahmed explains: In order to return, I bought myself a three-month temporary residency and every time I renew it, I have to pay 30 CUC. A number of popular metaphors capture the interactions of pingueros and foreigners. In this context, pingueros use the act of being penetrated to justify asking for more money or obtaining better dividends. I always say that I am active and when I let them penetrate me I just make something up…that it is my first time and that I do it as a token of affection.
I pretend to be nervous and reject them at first because afterwards I can get them to eat from the palm of my hand.
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Otherwise, it seems too easy and they lose interest. The idea is to mellow them out so that they feel generous and pay more. I make them think they are special, that it was my first time. In the end, they think they are in control. In this testimony there are several elements that deserve attention.
This statement supports the testimony of some of my interviewees including Alejandro:.
A tourist who rents a beach house, a car, and takes you to discos can be more generous. Otherwise, you only get paid for the service. I feel that when they pay, we become more of an object to them and the treatment is different.
But it depends on the Yuma because there are some who simply want to rip you off, giving you nickels and dimes or old rags that you cannot even sell in a moment of crisis. I hardly ever ask for money, I just ask if they can help me through a rough time. We make plans and I share my life story, my hardships and needs. I pay attention to whether he wears brand-name clothes, what kind of car he drives, the places he takes me to eat and dance.
The same dynamics have been documented by other researches in the Dominican Republic among the sanky pankys 15 , the equivalent of Cuban pingueros. According to Amalia Cabezas this is because a direct commercial transaction will call off other possibilities like marriage, trips abroad, and gifts and will identify the subjects as male prostitutes, something that they try to avoid Cabezas; On the other hand, it must be taken into account what clients expect from these subjects in terms of affection and seduction.
However, romance is not always an effective strategy, particularly for those who come from the provinces. For them, their arrival in the capital is a difficult moment as Mario explains:.
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When I got here I only had 60 pesos in my pocket. I travelled on the back of a truck like an animal. When I arrived, I was covered with grime. That night I made thirty bucks and I breathed again but I had to save a lot. I did not eat much. On days that I ate lunch, I would skip dinner. I wanted to save as much as possible so as not to be against the wall. I have lost 15 pounds already, I look like a corpse. There are pingueros and pingueros.
There are the cheap ones who do anybody, even for three bucks, but those are mostly the Palestinians 16 who have never seen 30 bucks in their lives.
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They have no respect for themselves and are affecting us because then Yumas want to spend a luxury night and pay a misery. But I understand them because some of them arrived in Havana without a penny and needed to make quick money. It happened to me too. I set my own fee upfront because I respect myself. They [foreigners] come looking for affection, caresses—they love to be kissed—and that has a price. By pretending to be [sincerely] affectionate, they are just trying to pay less. They promise you the moon and then they dump you.
Time is money. He is happy with some consumer goods that he considers valuable:. Sometimes I bargain over some clothes in addition to charging some cash. I sell it to them as if I operated an exclusive boutique.
This model of success inspired by high levels of consumerism and access to goods and services that are not readily available to the majority of the population awakens in many youngsters the desire to imitate others who, because of their involvement in these activities, boast their exceptional buying power. Alejandro explains:. I arrived in Havana in at the age of I had studied Italian language because I wanted to work in tourism. Like any other young person, I wanted to go out, have fun. I had friends who were jineteros and they had money and motorcycles, and good clothing, and beautiful women and I wanted to be like them and to have what they had.
While pingueros take active part in the economy of pleasure linked to tourism, they also sell clothes and electronics like cell phones that tourists give them in their home towns when they are short of cash. Likewise in Havana, there is a underground economy that provides bed and board to those coming from the provinces with little money. Alejandro lives in this popular neighbourhood, characterized by a high concentration of people and crammed housing. He described his daily routine to me:. I wake up as soon as my neighbours in the tenement house next door start blasting their music around 10am.
The owner is a toothless old woman who rents rooms to pingueros. People say she used to be a madam in a brothel before the Revolution and that afterwards they tried to rehabilitate her.