Love,Sex,Money,and Meaning

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and subsequent collapse of Cuba’s centralized economy, pursuing relationships with foreign visitors to the island has emerged as a viable means of accessing hard currency, consumer goods, travel, and emigration—of gaining admittance to a perceived better life. In the mid of escalating state repression, a discursive struggle has materialized, assigning meanings to new sexual identities, problematizing these sexual relations, and creating new objects of disciplinary power. Far from simple semantics, defining and naming allows actors within the field of relations—government, police, journalists, mass organizations, individuals—to situate young Cubans within various binaries including good/bad, right/wrong, virtue/vice. Specific labels ranging from crass (puta or prostituta) to enigmatic (candelero or luchadora) have ebbed and flowed in popular parlance, each loaded with different raced and gendered implications and political commitments. As state governance of bodies and sexualities evolves, this ethnographic study demonstrates that many young Cubans have begun to use bodily and sexual practices as tools to circumvent poverty, resist state dictates on morality and austerity, and create new subjectivities. Language, for its part, has become a major weapon, alternately disciplinary and liberatory, in the struggle for (self-)definition.