The Best American Travel Writing 2014 by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page B

real Cubanos hung out by the sea. Everyone, Cuban and foreign, loved the
malecón,
to sit facing the ocean and Miami and feel the spray on bare shins, or to turn toward the city and watch old cars roar slowly by, or, after a long night at the bars, to see the brightening sky pull itself away from the sea. On nights when there was no moon, you could nod approvingly at the fish that men in mesh tank tops caught on sheer line stretched from coils on the sidewalk. On hot days, you watched kids who leapt from the wall into high tide, their arms pinwheeling past the rocks that cragged up from the ocean.
    So young men toted bongo drums and guitars, imitating the Buena Vista Social Club for a few dollars’ tip. Gentlemen in frayed straw fedoras asked tourists to pick up an extra beer at the gas station kiosk. Tired-looking women in Lycra shorts sang out the names of cones of roasted peanuts,
cucuruchos de maní,
and popcorn,
rositas de maíz.
Nonchalant girls cocked hips at the foreign men who walked past. Sandra had been taught the art of artifice to serve the Cuban Revolution through its beauty parlors, but she’d given up on hair. By the time she was 21, she’d been working as a prostitute for around five years. The dates changed every time I asked her. Either way, she made about three times in one night what she’d have been paid monthly at any of the government-owned salons.
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    In November 2011, when Cuban first daughter Mariela Castro Espín was in Amsterdam in her capacity as sexologist and director of Cuba’s Center for Sexual Education, she was interviewed on Radio Netherlands Worldwide. Castro, prim and deliberate in a turtleneck and tweed blazer, sat in a room with draping red curtains and feather boas and effused about Amsterdam’s red-light district. “I’ve enjoyed seeing how they do it,” she said. “What I admire is that they’ve been able to dignify and value the work that they do—because yes, it is a job.” She enunciated her Spanish so translators didn’t miss a word for the televised interview. Castro went on to explain how, as she put it, the principles are the same in Cuba as in Amsterdam, but the circumstances are different. She talked about how the
malecón
is a place of pride for Havanans, and she smiled broadly until she mentioned the people who sell sex there. “Some people go there to practice prostitution in a way that is bothersome for, above all, the tourist or foreigner,” and her agency is in close contact with the police to decrease the
malecón
prostitution, she said, without drawing too much attention from said tourist or foreigner.
    This is what the Cuban government usually highlights when it talks about women and prostitution: Before Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959, women had represented only 13 percent of the workforce, and many were domestic servants. A large number were prostitutes, too—as a port city with a sexually liberal climate and a U.S.-backed puppet government, Havana was where
yanquis
had gone in search of louche, uninhibited nightlife from Prohibition on. In 1931, after the Volstead Act had tripled the numbers of tourists who visited the country in under 15 years, 7,400 women officially stated their professions as prostitutes. The city formerly known as “the Pearl of the Caribbean” was soon referred to as its brothel. Eradicating prostitution and increasing women’s rights was one of Castro’s stated goals. Forty years after the 1959 revolution, long after literacy drives had enabled the island’s rural residents to read and prostitutes had been trained as seamstresses and given jobs and day care for their children, 51 percent of Cuba’s scientists were women. Fifty percent of attorneys and 52 percent of medical doctors, too. Everyone was paid nearly equally—a doctor, male or female, made marginally more than a seamstress, around $20 a month in Cuban