ABSTRACT
Workers in Cuba’s large sex industry often appeal to tourists who do not consider themselves ‘johns’ or sex-tourists, granting them sexual access while befriending them, serving as guides and interpreters, or offering them cheaper accommo dations, often in their own home or apartment. In an economy in which foreign currency and goods are invaluable black-market items, a tourist might ‘treat’ his or her partner to meals and drinks in the tourist-only hotels. Tourists might offer sex workers some of the simple goods that many visitors smuggle into the country, knowing that bartering with these items is more effective than buying things on the isolated dollar tourist economy to which they are confined. Like the independent sex workers in Cuba, referred to not as putas (prosti tutes or whores), but as jineteras (jockeys) (see jtnetera), for the way in which they are perceived to be ‘riding’ tourists, in many prostitution scenarios money may never change hands and the tourist might fancy him or herself involved in an exotic holiday romance, as portrayed, for
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example in Carlos Marcovich’s film iQuien diablos es Julieta? (Who the Hell is Juliet?) (1996).
