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Over the past fifty years, the Cuban social subject has been constantly bombarded with male-dominated, highly militarized discourse.
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The government has articulated a nationalist rhetoric anchored in such a discourse as a means of social control and policy implementation. Since the early s, the country was also immersed in a transnational effort to build socialism, led by the USRR, and the Eastern European Socialist bloc. At the same time, this subject embraced a model of traditional masculinity and political ideology based on the revolutionary theory and the construction of Soviet-style Socialism, a goal that came to play a central role in Cuban revolutionary rhetoric.
In many ways, the New Man ultimately emerged as a national stereotype as it came to embody a series of highly simplistic representations and values, mandatory touchstone for identifying or representing the social conglomerate. As the distance between the logic of state capitalist policies adopted by the government and the socialist values of the Communist political framework grew in the s, the process generated other values among citizens more in tune with consumerism and individual expectations than with the continuing political rhetoric of leaders.
By virtue of its ideological control, the Cuban political system historically undermined the legitimacy of the family as the fundamental reserve for the inculcation of social values, replacing it with the educational system and forms of socialization primarily provided by the state. With the crisis, the paternalistic role of the Cuban State, which had long provided security and basic living conditions, began to collapse.
From that moment on, the growing social inequality triggered by the effects of a dollarized economy, began to affect the code of values. My mother suspects but says nothing, apparently because she is ashamed. For some pingueros , the discourse of la lucha serves as an instrument for homoerotic de-identification and the negotiation of masculinity, but frequently as a means for avoiding the category of sex worker.
There was no consensus among my informants as to the terms used to describe their practices. Some felt uncomfortable with the category of sex worker, because they perceive la lucha as a temporary condition and they alternate the selling of sexual services with participation in other trades and economic activities. Such is the case of Roberto:. This is a job like any other: I have no idea how to plant anything or what to do with a brick; I do what I know how to do in order to get somewhere in life and I am not hurting anyone.
In the end, everyone should be able to do what they want to do with their bodies and no-one is giving me any free lunch. In my home town, there are barely any jobs for young people; the only options I have are to work in agriculture, construction or to become a policeman and I would rather be dead [than become a cop]; I prefer to continue doing what I do. Residents of Havana, for example, have consistently received larger and more varied rations of basic foods through the official state rationing system than residents of the countryside.
Similar restrictions continue to inhibit such activities today.
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Most Cubans therefore reject pinguerismo as primarily a solution to fulfilling basic needs and see it as the product or cause of dysfunctional families. Traditional perceptions regarding sex work are also marked by a series of prejudices that ignore the analysis of variables like migration, labour market, informal economy, class, race and citizenship.
Within revolutionary discourse, the practices and dynamics of transactional sex challenge and defy the ethics and project of socialism. Official discourse views pingueros reservedly, as do many homosexuals who construct them in similar ways, often perceiving them as lazy youngsters. In addition, homosexuals often construe pingueros as devoid of a genuine homoerotic configuration and a clear definition of their sexual identity Sierra Madero, ; Stout Thus, pingueros are always under suspicion, not only because of their ambiguous, flexible gender identity, but also because they represent a challenge to the stability of the categories of labour, desire, pleasure and identity that have traditionally operated within Cuban culture.
Despite their dubious social identity in the eyes of most Cubans as well as state officials, pingueros remain a central part of debates on sex tourism and prostitution, as well as nation and nationalism. In his polemic text: And the category pinguero is also an accommodation to Cuban nationalist sensibilities. Hodge, Cuban nationalism, he points out, refuses to accept the penetration of the female body by foreigners, despite the degree to which female sex work has become an observable aspect of everyday reality for many Cubans.
That explains why jineteras are more persecuted and controlled by authorities than pingueros. Consequently, pingueros embody the anti-imperialist, decolonizing power of the Cuban phallus, symbolically conquering the bodies of the foreigners and defending Cuba from its would-be invaders, like any good revolutionary Cuban man.
Thus, in acts of pinguerismo , the Cuban body, constructed as a male subject, is not wounded Hodge, Indeed, revolutionary nationalism has established a relationship between the discourse of sexuality and certain notions of sovereignty and imperial colonization. Following the analogy between the sexed human body and the national corpus, colonization has been theorized as an act of penetration Sierra Madero, based on the traditional model of understanding homoeroticism 7 and sexuality as a whole. Thus conceived in feminine terms, the Cuban nation remains a vulnerable space susceptible to penetration by the foreign Other.
In the first years after the fall of the Batista regime in , the Revolution that came to power relied on an idea long ingrained in the popular imaginary of both Cubans and Americans: To that end, strategies were designed to eliminate them. Therefore, pingueros represent a fissure of the national body that contrasts with the images of heroes and new men that have been exported for so long by the revolutionary nationalism.
Pingueros do not conform to a homogeneous unity; there are different types of experiences and gradations that notably influence their modes of interacting with foreigners. They all want to penetrate me, even queens. Even though pingueros allowed themselves to be penetrated, they say they are active and always try to hide the fact that they are passive because if they accept it, they would be admitting that they are homosexuals. This young man confessed me that the colour of his skin is a precious asset in the trade of la lucha: One of them told me to my face that he wanted to have the experience of penetrating a Cuban blackman.
Actually, the processes of social endogamy that happen in many countries prevents many individuals from developing relationships with people outside their class circle. However, in the context of tourism, these subjects may change their attitudes. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. 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.
Otherwise, it seems too easy and they lose interest.
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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.