Ay mama Ines!: A decolonial feminist critique of Cuban nationalism, tourism, and sex work

Located within the fields of Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies, and incorporating years of ethnographic field research, this interdisciplinary and multi-sited study analyzes the quest for power and wealth which fueled the commodification of the island of Cuba and its population. Beginning with the voyages of Christopher Columbus, and the rise of a slave labor based colonial society. The dissertation tracks the emergence of a 'new crop' of leisure and pleasure activities emerging post-U.S. occupation in 1898, and here dissects the subsequent tourism booms and busts which altered all aspects of Cuban life until the revolution of 1959. The emergence of tourism following U.S. occupation shaped the definitions of cultural and national identity well into the twenty-first century, and simultaneously defined nationalist resistance strategies leading up to the revolution of 1959. Tourism was seen as both a symbol of oppression and imagined by the revolutionary leadership to be a necessary industry with which to fulfill the promises of the revolution. The U.S. embargo, and particularly the absence of a strong tourism economy between 1960 and 1998 hampered Cuba's ability to stand against U.S. economic and political maneuverings which threatened Cuban sovereignty, and increased the nation's dependence upon Soviet trade, aid and protection. The dissertation's analysis of Cuba's tourism economy sheds light on the larger conundrum of the ways in which Caribbean nations, like Cuba, become trapped by the need to both resist and acquiesce to the commodification of peoples, cultures, and traditions within the logic of an international tourism economy. The exploration of this conundrum, including the particularities of what has been called a Post-Soviet or Special Period return of tourism, and the increase in Cuban sex work post 1989, is central in this thesis. Within the larger project of tracking the ebbs and flows of commodification in relation to the island of Cuba the analysis turns to an assessment of just a few of the late twentieth-century Cuban cultural identities being commodified by visitors to the island. These new commodities included pingueros (gay male sex workers), and jineteras (female sex workers), the emergence of previously unseen social categories which marked a people according to the logic of the international tourism economy and the Post-Soviet restructuration set in motion by the leadership. These social categories produced new names such as jineteras (female sex workers), jineteros (male street hustlers not selling sex although willing to become the "boyfriends" of foreign women), pingueros (gay male sex workers), and palestinos (Afro-Cuban labor migrants from Oriente, the eastern provinces). As identities mutated to fit the logic of the tourism market jineteras , female sex workers (willing in most cases to service both men and women), jineteros (non sexual street hustlers) and pingueros (gay male sex workers) all distinguished themselves by establishing terms that would easily identify their role within the tourism industry and particularly their designation within the sex work industry. Here the analysis focuses on the international commodification of all things Cuban during the "Cuba craze" of the 1990s. It also gives attention to the under studied and under theorized emergence of a segment of the population referred to as palestinos, yet a third Post-Soviet social identity. The dissertation continues to track the practices of commodification and the construction of Cubaness which service global capitalism under this logic by dissecting the portrayal of Cubans facing the crisis of the Economic Special Period as either being a heroic and revolutionary population worthy of being visited, studied and sampled, or as a population of a deviants. Both "diagnoses" served the commodification of Cubaness upon which the tourism economy of the 1990s thrived. To gauge this dichotomy the writings of sex tourists, journalists, academics and other Cuba watchers enthralled with the island and its people during the 1990s, and particularly motivated by the availability of "free" sex, are critiqued. The investigation into the sociality which occurs around commodities acquired within the tourism milieu is explored via the detailed analysis of tourist souvenirs and services and experiences only made available within tourism zones in Cuba. Here the equivalent of blackface performances along with the selling of objects sold hailing the colonial past such as Mammy figurines and Mammy Banks, along with satirical representations of jineteras are theorized as most obviously problematic and racist but also as providing a vehicle through which Afrocubans and racially mixed Cubans producing these objects are able to communicate their understanding of their place within the larger international tourism economy. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...