On Jineterismo - Part II: Heteronormativity in Revolutionary Cuba
Part 2 of a series on jineterismo in Cuba, exploring the continuance of colonial and Batista-era heteronormativity, its impacts on queer and racialized Cubans today, and the 2022 Family Code.
This series explores sex work and jineterismo in socialist Cuba. Part II thinks heavily on the family, historic expulsion of non-heteronormative people from economic participation, and the “queering” of productive & reproductive labor as resistance. The series was written under the guidance of Dr. Nadine Fernandez - a mentor and Open Educational Resources icon.
In a reflection of Cuba’s dedication to democracy and liberalization of socio-familial values, the recently passed referendum ratifying the 2022 Family Code has enshrined the domestic rights of women, queer Cubans, and non-heteronormative family structures. Nicknamed “the Code of Affections,”1 its new legal provisions protect same-sex marriage and adoptions, the rights and wages of domestic care workers, access to free abortion and paid family leave, and increased protections and autonomy for children, the elderly, individuals with disabilities, and victims of gender-based violence (Pratt 2022; Código de las Familias). Notably, the final provisions also replace all mention of patria potestad (paternal authority) in the Cuban legal system with responsabilidad parental (parental responsibility); a discursive amendment redressing the foundations of executive patriarchal power (“pater familias”)2 originally bound up in the 1975 Family Code (Ibid.). The participation of nearly 6.5 million citizens - over 50% of the population - in its drafting process culminated in the new Code’s passing, pushing Cuba to the global forefront of human rights leadership (Pratt 2022). Historically, post-revolution strategies to provide positional equity to women have also been statistically successful. Castro’s “Revolution within the Revolution” lauded militant compañeras and vowed to end gender disparities by way of class unification (Saunders 2010, 11-12). The establishment of the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas and their initiative to increase women’s representation in the workforce nearly tripled the number of female workers from 1953 (the start of the Cuban revolution) to 1985, and managed to achieve even further growth to 40.6% amidst the initial economic downturn of the Special Period in 1993 (Safa 2009, 43).
In spite of these advances, Cuba’s economic instability has historically been felt most by (especially black, queer) women. By the end of the Special Period, unemployment rates for women doubled that of men, and their overall labor participation dropped nearly ten percent; Castro himself addressed women’s particular struggle in his closing speech at the 1995 Congreso de la Federación de Mujeres Cubanas:
It would be unfair, very unfair, if we did not always keep in mind that in these special circumstances that we are experiencing, in this special period, the fundamental weight of the sacrifices, the hardest part of the sacrifices, is carried by women. In other words, it has increased what already under normal conditions meant a special effort for working women when they were joined by the burden of everyday work, the tremendous weight of their traditional contributions within the family.
As Castro elucidates, the revolutionary Cuban woman is characterized not only by her contributions as a worker, but also by her subsidization of “traditional” reproductive work (presumably within a conjugal relationship).3 Tanya Saunders views this eclectic mixing of pre- and post-revolutionary values as perpetuating patriarchal capitalist structures; that, “despite the construction of women as militant, revolutionary citizens, the state did not seek to protect the rights of women as autonomous subjects who were targets of systemic violence. Instead, the state sought to protect women through protecting the social norms surrounding femininity and a socialist morality through maternity, marriage, children, and their conjugal relationships with men.” (Saunders 2010, 14).4 As such, any sociality deviating from heteronormativity is met with moral indignation - a morality that is prominently featured in the original 1975 Family Code, as well as the Cuban Penal Code. With such a hierarchy in place, those at the bottom (matrifocal households, single women, Afro-Cubans, queers) are inevitably pushed out of or excluded from the formal economy.
The history of the capitalist, patriarchal oppression of women and queer people - and their resistance to it - is responsible for the existence of the informal economy. The sex trade particularly is a site of both oppression and defiance, as heteronormative systems of reproduction and procreation are at the crux of capitalism. This paper seeks to explore Cuba’s modern heteronormative morality and raceless/genderless ideology which perpetuates remaining inequities exacerbated by a mixed market system.
Reflecting on the origins of institutionalized oppression against women and queer people, the privatization of land during the transition from feudalism to capitalism becomes a critical turning point. In the 16th century, the hedging, fencing, or otherwise “enclosing” of previously communal lands ended subsistence economies in favor of property accumulation for the ruling class. Where productive and reproductive labor were once intertwined, households were now split by gendered responsibilities - the male breadwinner and the female domestic (Federici 2004, 69;74).5 In addition to the loss of accessible use-value the commons once provided, opportunity for collective social organizing was also stripped from the peasantry. Gathering for “group-rituals” (festivals, celebrations, wakes, feasts, sports, etc.) was restricted by the ruling class in order to exert discipline over the peasantry’s last remaining tool for collectivization: their socialized community (Federici 2004, 83). In Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004), Sylvia Federici refers to this as a “process of social enclosure, the reproduction of workers shifting from the openfield to the home, from the community to the family. From the public space…to the private” (84). In replacement, women - now cast from the formal workforce - became the primary site of reproduction, their labor considered “natural” and outside the realm of the market; “he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat,” Engels (1884) says of this new capitalist family structure, wherein women’s labor substituted land access as a communal resource that “anyone could appropriate and use at will” (Federici 2004, 97).
So too have marginalized Cubans faced social and physical enclosure, a habit carried down from European colonizers to weaken indigenous power, contemporarily fumbled to homogenize social behavior.6 Frequently cited are the establishment of UMAP (las Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción) camps and, later, rehabilitation centers for women suspected of prostitution - both with the purpose of respectively masculinizing or feminizing dissident Cubans according to revolutionary machista ideals. From 1965 to 1968, political objectors, Jehovah’s Witnesses, those who practiced Afro-Cuban religions, and homosexuals (among other groups deemed “counterrevolutionary”) were sent to UMAPs to perform physical labor and undergo reeducation in alignment with Cuba’s new socialist order (Saunders 2010, 15-16; Cabezas 2009, 184). The detainment of Afro-Cubans and homosexuals cannot be logically justified by assuming some innate insurgent characteristics; as the Los Angeles Research Group (2020) argues for queer communist integration, identities do not predetermine political affiliation. It seems unlikely that the Cuban government held such beliefs in pure form, but were rather influenced by cultural attitudes which designated heteronormative primacy as the foundation for morality, inseparable from sexual practice; “to be moral is to be asexual, (hetero)sexual, or sexual in ways that presumably carry the weight of the ‘natural’” (Saunders 2010, 15).
Racialized groups meet the charge of “unnatural” sexuality in the context of geopolitical agendas, as a tool of subordination for Western colonizers. Particularly in the Caribbean - where the Haitian Revolution served as a neighborly reminder of imperialists’ precarity of control - the push to whiten or “civilize” the population to maintain power took form in the cultural emphasis of marriage, miscegenation, and the dangers of black deviance (Stout 2014, 15-16; Saunders 2010, 19-20). Beyond the fear of rebellion, colonial thought has considered Afro-Cubans’ liberal regard of sex and sexuality a threat to the moral social code, with additional ramifications of potential population imbalance, “undermining colonial privilege” (Federici 2004, 108). Drawn at least in part from the religious practice of Santería, in which figures like the goddess Yemayá disrupt Western ideals of good/bad femininity, sex, and motherhood, the openness of Afro-Cuban sexuality elicits heteronormative attacks on black sexual aggression (Cabezas 2009, 117).
A key sexualized figure, the Cuban mulata has historically been a symbol of national racelessness (via race-mixing), and a vital asset in the pre-revolutionary tourist economy; her body black enough to maintain exotic seduction,7 but diluted to the point of posing no threat to white dominance (Saunders 2010, 20). Contemporary hospitality settings muddle post-colonial Cuban racial prejudices with their European fiscal partners’ notions of white supremacy, resulting in the relegation of racialized bodies as carriers of culturally sexualized labor (Cabezas 2009, 101). Amalia Cabezas (2009) observes the “conflation of race, sexuality, and the politics of exclusion” as a historic precedent of colonial and imperialist interests that reflect themselves in today’s hospitality job market (98).
The simultaneous thrust to heteronormatize black women while also appropriating their (prescribed) embedded sexuality has, however, created the opportunity for “develop[ing] a politics of self-reliance, grounded in survival strategies and female networks,” which Rosalyn Terborg Penn points to as core concepts of contemporary Afro-feminism (Federici 2004, 135). By participating in the informal sexual economy alongside their state sanctioned jobs - for example, camereras (hotel maids) trading or selling sex with guests - women in lower-waged positions are able to augment their income by driving a more equitable distribution of tourist wealth (Cabezas 2009, 108). Without ignoring the power disparities at the root of these state and individual relationships, black women’s resistance to the scarcity imposed by capitalist influence in Cuba’s tourist sector allows them to use their disadvantaged positionality to re-appropriate resources inaccessible to them via the mainstream (Cabezas 2009, 110-11).8
Expanding upon the conception of non-heteronormative black femininity, Helen Safa draws attention to the matrifocal family structure, which places emphasis on kinship ties over conjugal relationships (Safa 2009, 43). This alternative to the “traditional,” patriarchal domestic system has been associated in Cuba with being poor and black - a remnant of colonial-era dual marriage laws which limited legal marriages to those with equal status, protecting white endogamy and pushing black Cubans out of state recognized unions (Ibid., 48). Yet, female-headed households’ dependence on consanguineal support (as in extended family households, which are often established in congruence with matrifocality) reflects the collective distribution of reproductive labor found in pre-capitalist societies. Queer households, too - unrecognized by Cuba’s marriage and adoption laws until the 2022 passage of the new Family Code - rely upon expanded networks of kin (biological and assumed) to accumulate multiple income sources. The disappearance of reproductive labor sharing occurred not only with the privatization of land, but with the institutionalization of marriage and paternal lineage. Where, in non-heteronormative communities, freedom of union and sexuality essentialized the mother as the clearest determinate of parentage, the exclusion of women from the accumulation of property allowed men to exert ownership over (presumably) their children to ensure the handing-down of assets maintained elite familial patrilineage (Sorrell 2020). Though private property can no longer be the primary motivator for incentivizing marriage in socialist Cuba, provisions like emigration rights and state property inheritance mechanized through legal marriage reveal that the state has not fully deconceptualized conjugal unions as bearers of capitalist property protections (Safa 2009, 47-8). The establishment of the 1975 Family Code and its encouragement of marriage was in direct response to Cubans’ move towards consensual rather than conjugal unions after the Catholic Church’s influence waned, post-revolution, and women became less dependent on their husbands with the advancement of occupational and educational opportunities (Ibid., 46-7).
Ultimately, fixation on the heteronormative family excludes queer and racialized women from legitimacy in Cuban social structures, as a result of the lingering capitalist/colonial essentialization of gender and the purpose of the nuclear family - embodied in Cuban machismo. Pushed from formal and sustainable forums of work, sociality, and family, those who bear the brunt of this exclusion have created and populated the informal economy as Noelle Stout (2014) suggests, “to ‘even the score’” in a discursive integration of socialist equity (134). Their existence in sexualized underground spaces is not an accident of capitalism, though it may be the site of resistance for some. At its state sponsored origins in the late Middle Ages, brothels served the purpose of social control by combatting “male homosexuality - whose practice was thought to obscure the differences between the sexes and thus all difference and decorum - and the decline in the legitimate population which resulted from an insufficient number of marriages” (Richard Trexler 1993 qtd. in Federici 2004, 58). In these early days of capitalism, stigmatization of sexuality was wielded by the state as weapon against class solidarity - as can be seen in the decriminalization of the rape of lower-class women across Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries (Federici 2004, 47-8). Promoted as a form of “class protest,” proletariat men were encouraged to repossess what was lost to them by way of land privatization in (often the group) assault of poor women. Marked by abuse, their rejection from formal workplaces and marital opportunities led many to prostitution - providing a steady stream of labor for state brothels and effectively dividing the unionized class-consciousness of men and women in pre-capitalist feudal society (Ibid.). Though prostitution was eventually outlawed as workers would subversively take control over their procreative labor through early forms of birth control, this reversal was not necessarily a victory; its criminalization led to the mass penalization and execution of prostitutes and other non-heteronormatives who threatened the capitalist family structure, as in the witch hunts (Ibid., 94). The use of sexual violence for the purpose of capital and labor accumulation cannot be separated from structural violence, and is, as feminist scholar Catherine Lutz concludes, “not just a tool for the pursuit of a state’s political interests; rather, violence… is intertwined with the ‘widening international and intra-national gap between the rich and poor, and with the searches of old and new forms of racism’” (Catherine Lutz 2004 qtd. in Cabezas 2009, 141).
I do not have the audacity to propose a solution to Cuba’s remaining gender inequities, when a large part of their source comes from the mixed-market necessitated by global sanctions in the U.S.’s war against Cuban sovereignty. However, socialist globalization could (and should) be possible with less harm to marginalized populations if state ideology dismantled residual colonial capitalist values of the heteronormative family. By not challenging its origins, the Cuban government’s emphasis on the “correct” form of sociality has perpetuated the long tradition of simultaneously pushing women and queer people from legitimate avenues of cultural and social involvement, and punishing them for the spaces they create in replacement. “We can thus connect the banning of prostitution and the expulsion of women from the organized workplace with the creation of the housewife and the reconstruction of the family as the locus for the production of labor-power” - an idea that smacks in the face of socialist worker autonomy and control of the means of production (Federici 2004, 95). Despite state subjugation and an absence of discourse with which to frame acts of resistance in response to post-revolution conditions, Cuban women and queers taking part in the underground sex trade do, in fact, represent these socialist ideals - embodying Gayatri Spivak’s “notion of strategic essentialism to argue for a political tactic that gives voice to marginalized groups in a process that is not fixed or permanent but ‘bonded temporarily at a specific historical moment’” (Cabezas 2009, 185). We may well witness a shifting of this historic moment with the implementation of the 2022 Family Code, as Cuba begins the “queering” process of love and globalization (Constable 2009, 58).
The linguistic irony of the nickname “Code of Affections” presents a - though likely unintentional - rebuttal to Marx’s assumption that the family unit should be free from commodity exchange and/or the necessity for state intervention, and that procreation and reproductive labor “should be ‘a fact of nature’ rather than a social, historically determined activity, invested by diverse interests and power relations” (Federici 2004, 101). Marx’s view holds an idealized and undoubtedly paternalistic conception of familial production based on “social character” and spontaneity (Marx 1867, 5). In alternate interpretations, contemporary scholars have theorized about an intimacy between relational dynamics and the state. Feminist sociologists like Viviana Zelizer expand upon Maussian ideas of reciprocity within capital exchange - arguing for the recognition of the autonomy, security, and altruism that may accompany monetary exchange, as well as its opportunity as a stage for resistance (Stout 2014, 153; Cabezas 2009, 11; 118). Applying Zelizer’s constructive exchange-value approach to Michael Herzfeld’s concept of “cultural intimacy” - that is, societally cultivated relationships between citizens and the state, or indirectly, through the reflection of those relationships in social life - we can see that state intervention does not unequivocally produce exploitation, but has the ability to foster compassionate exchanges of cultural transference (Herzfeld qtd. in Stout 2014, 15;178).
As I will later argue, the remnants of colonial, capitalist social theory in Cuba’s post-Batista legal system has and continues to produce the effects it did in pre-revolution contexts: dividing and weakening the working class on the basis of capitalist reproductive policy. Heteronormative for the purpose of preserving private property and accumulating a workforce, these values and policy models (such as “pater familias,” and legal advantages for conjugal relationships) were borrowed by Cuba’s colonizers from early Roman capitalists to subordinate women’s reproductive autonomy, deeply engraining them in the socio-political superstructure (Pratt 2022; Federici 2004, 97).
I use the terms “reproductive work” and “reproduction” in this essay distinctly from “domestic work” and “procreation” to represent the range of work necessary to sustain life that may occur beyond the domicile or physical body.
The one objection I have to Saunders’ statement is their essentialization of “socialist morality,” which I believe to be historically reductive. Perhaps a more accurate term would be “Marxian morality,” making reference to the idealist nostalgia Marx holds of a “more altruistic or authentic precapitalist past” which considers “the domestic sphere as a proper shelter from the harsh and impersonal world of [the] market” (Constable 2009, 54). In reality, there is an established socialist history of integrating domestic responsibilities with the state and breaking from heteronormative conjugal hierarchies, providing freedom to the individual from unpaid domestic labor for social and cultural enrichment and work opportunities. For example, Russian revolutionary and People’s Commissar for Welfare Alexandra Kollontai famously fought for a state sponsored child care and housework market, which she theorized would also lead to the end of informal economies like the sex trade:
The family is withering away not because it is being forcibly destroyed by the state, but because the family is ceasing to be a necessity. The state does not need the family, because the domestic economy is no longer profitable…The members of the family do not need the family either, because the task of bringing up the children which was formerly theirs is passing more and more into the hands of the collective…No more domestic bondage for women. No more inequality within the family. No need for women to fear being left without support and with children to bring up. The woman in communist society no longer depends upon her husband but on her work…Instead of the conjugal slavery of the past, communist society offers women and men a free union which is strong in the comradeship which inspired it. Once the conditions of labour have been transformed and the material security of the working women has increased… prostitution will disappear. This evil, which is a stain on humanity and the scourge of hungry working women, has its roots in commodity production and the institution of private property (“Communism and the Family” 1920).
While I can assume Saunders uses the term in reference to the Cuban Código Penal, where un estado peligroso laws criminalize (often queer and black) behaviors that go against “norms of socialist morality,” it seems the issue they should be taking with the Cuban government’s strategy for women’s equity is a patriarchally rooted one, rather than a broadly “socialist” one (Stout 2014, 138).
It is worth noting that this gendered divide did not spontaneously or “naturally” come into being, but was the result of a combination of economic and social factors. The emergence of the cottage industry (an ancestor of the informal economy) during the 16th century allowed cheap-labor seeking merchant capitalists to outsource production from costly urban artisans to rural pieceworkers. These pieceworkers were often women, whose mobility to urban areas was limited due to pregnancies, child care, and the threat of male violence on their journey (Federici 2004, 72-73). In response, artisans expelled women from their work-forces as an anticompetitive measure, and cultural attitudes shifted towards contempt for women who worked outside of the home (Ibid., 95-96).
The awkwardness with which the Cuban government has employed the enclosure of certain demographics, only later to rescind and acknowledge the cruelty of such action (see Castro’s 2010 apology for the UMAP camps in La Jornada, for example) is indicative that the division of the working class in order to usurp power is less a motive than the baggage of patriarchal colonial tendencies.
Aline Helg asserts that the presence of blackness and, therefore, “hyper-sexuality,” in the mulata “freed white men from the guilt of rape or sexual oppression” (Helg 1995 qtd. in Saunders 2010, 19).
This type of defiance comes from a long line of subordinated Caribbean women operating independently from the ruling class. Eighteenth century enslaved women, for example, managed to monopolize island markets by (illegally) selling crops grown on provision plots, allotted to them by planters to cut reproductive labor costs. White female (often former indentured servants) patronage to these markets contributed to a matricentric economic network that shifted power and - in some historians’ eyes - preempted emancipation before the official end of slavery in the Caribbean (Federici 2004, 133).
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