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SEX TOURISM:
CASTRO'S THRIVING BUSINESS |
Photo credit:
Bill Trumbull Cuba gallery |
 "There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist. Those who do so do it on their own, voluntarily, and without any need for it. We can say that they are highly educated hookers and quite healthy, because we are in the country with the lowest number of AIDS cases... Therefore, there is truly no tourism healthier than Cuba's." -Fidel Castro, 1992 speech to the National Assembly
"Cuban women become jineteras (prostitutes) because they like sex."
-Fidel Castro, 1992 |
"Strapped for hard currency after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba opened up to capitalism a little--and used its women as bait. The ministry of tourism embarked on a global marketing campaign advertising the splendor of the country's revolutionary mulattas: it invited Playboy to photograph an issue on location and distributed posters of beaches with white sand and topless Cubanas to travel agencies worldwide.
The government referred to the women as "promoters of tourism."
-The New Republic, June 2000
"The sex, of course, is what most of the tourists come to Havana for. Have no doubts about this. They're not here to show solidarity with 40 years of continuous revolution, or to study architecture, and they certainly aren't here for the food."
-Travel Intelligence, AA Gill, 2001
"Child sex slaves can be bought in Britain for as little as 500, a Sunday Mirror investigation revealed. One evil trafficker offered to sell our reporters two girls from Cuba - one aged just 11 - to be forced into prostitution….he bragged that a single child prostitute could generate up to 1,000-a-week. "I can bring over seven girls right now from Cuba. There are four aged between 16 and 21 or 22. And another who is 26 or 27. There are two young girls - one is 11. They are farm girls, very simple and easily controlled." -The Sunday Mirror, January 6, 2002
"We interviewed a fourteen-year-old child in Cuba who had migrated from a rural village to a tourist area because she so desperately wanted to own a pair of shoes and had heard it was possible to make money by 'going with' tourists."
-Sex Tourism, Julia O'Connell Davidson, 1999
"Prostitution is a problem, with young girls engaging in prostitution to help support themselves and their families. Young girls have constituted the bulk of the prostitutes catering primarily to foreign tourists. -US Dept of State, Human Rights Report, 1999
"Why had Castro beggared his nation and put a generation of young women in the position of learning to be whores? Did the daughters of the Cuban leadership have to wiggle their butts in nightclubs? What color were those girls?"
-- Ann Marlowe, "The Price of Milk (and sex) in Cuba. Salon.com, Feb. 7, 2002
"Similar to countries like Thailand, Cuba is now considered a key stop-off on the international sex-tourism circuit. From Western European countries, Canada, Japan and Mexico charter companies offer package vacations aimed at single male travelers. Employees at Havana's biggest hotels openly wink at Cuban escorts who "accompany" foreigners to their hotel rooms."
-The Return of Sin City, Koren L. Capozza, 1999
"The explosive growth of sex tourism in Cuba in the 1990s has coincided with the island becoming a major destination for international tourists….. Tourism has recently replaced sugar as the single most important export in the economy. Much of this tourism, however, centers on travel for sex."
- Tourism: Doing the Hustle", In Focus, Winter 1998
"The flesh trade is Havana's hottest commodity…. It is no surprise after the Cuban government has worked so hard to make it such."
-Sex Tourism Arrives in Cuba, The Ottawa Citizen, March 13, 1993
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