Colonization of the Cuban body: Nationalism, economy, and masculinity of male sex work in Havana

Survival of the extreme economic austerity of the Special Period---both national and personal---has required a dramatic bending of social, cultural, and political norms established during the first forty years of the Revolution. The turn to capitalism and tourism has a produced new groups of street hustlers and sex workers who call themselves pingueros. The pingueros and their bodies are sites at which converge four potentially contradictory processes: traditional Cuban masculinity, revolutionary nationalism, the exigencies of material survival, and the global capitalist imperative to consume. Personal desire is interactive with the collective processes of economy, politics, culture, and nation-building; the pingueros' desires (both sexual and material) are being configured according to the needs of the new capitalist market, but the youth are also faithful repositories of both Cuban masculinity and revolutionary citizenship. Though the state criminalizes the pingueros, they are nonetheless faithful reproducers of revolutionary ideology in terms of gender norms and expectations of economic justice. But since the youth revere designer clothing and look to consumer capitalism as their salvation from poverty, they are global capitalist consumers as much as they are revolutionary citizens. This dual location---as both reproducers of (socialist) revolutionary values and as criminalized youth who enthusiastically proclaim the triumph of capitalism---is a window into the social and cultural effects of both capitalism and (post)socialism. Ultimately, Cuba is being recolonized through the aggressive introduction of a new imperative to consume. The introduction of capitalism has saved the Cuban economy, but it has also had the consequence of transforming perceptions of need among the youth. This implantation of capitalist cultural forms is at end more powerful and longer-lasting than any particular regime. The Revolutionary government still enjoys considerable legitimacy, but the lure of consumption is powerful, and this may well become the ultimate triumph of a global capitalism over the Revolution. The children and grandchildren of the 1960--62 emigrants never got the military invasion for which they still so vehemently lobby, but the lure of things may well erode the values of fairness, justice, and equality for which the Revolution fought.