Contemporary debates regarding sex work in Cuba pose a simplistic opposition between pre-revolutionary prostitution before 1959 and Special Period jineterismo in the 1990s, obfuscating the links between these periods and denying the legacy of the Cuban state’s discipline of women’s bodies. This article situates jineterismo amidst a historical context to explore the phenomena as a continuous practice of state regulation of sex work and women’s bodies in Cuba. Despite the structural changes initiated by the Revolution, I demonstrate the persistence of state forms of bodily regulation both ideologically and materially from the colonial and republic period, early revolutionary campaigns, through contemporary Cuba. I highlight how notions of morality and honor, dependent on particular invocations of race, gender, and sexuality, have fueled state regulatory projects before and after the Revolution in Cuba. Cuban women’s bodies were/are pathologized and constructed as deviant and in turn policed by the state, both materially and discursively.
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