Like many prostitutes who ply their trade in the darkened bars and discos near Havana’s tourist hotels, Maria says she does not go out every night. But whenever money gets tight and her 12-year-old son is hungry, she puts on a red miniskirt, puts rouge on her lips and heads for El Conejito bar, a thinly disguised rendezvous point.
“Most of the tourists come to look for girls, tobacco, you know, the things they cannot get in their country,” she said. “They say the Cuban girls are very hot.”
Maria, who is 36 and insisted that her last name not be published, said she worried about contracting AIDS and forced her clients to use condoms, every time. She is knowledgeable about the disease, having learned about it through the government’s anti-AIDS program, and she was tested twice during a stint in jail last year for prostitution. Since then, she said, she voluntarily gets tested regularly at the free health clinics.
A decade after an economic collapse forced thousands of young women and men into prostitution, Cuba has become something of an anomaly in Latin America: a destination for sex tourists where AIDS has yet to become an uncontrollable pandemic.
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SEX TOURISM AND CHILD PROSTITUTION IN CUBA
Communist Cuba is attempting to right its economic problems by permitting the sexual trade of its children for badly needed monetary resources.
....
Some reports suggest girls will sell sex acts for less than $10 and sometimes for as little as $3. Inexperienced women and girls can be persuaded and/or tricked into spending a whole night with a client for the cost of a meal, a few drinks or small gift. “Habitual sex tourists state that it costs them less to spend two weeks indulging themselves in Cuba than it does in other centers of sex tourism, such as the Philippines and Thailand. (O’Connell Davidson, p.41).
Sex tourism is often a means to satisfy very specific sexual preferences. Many men choose to travel to particular destinations because they know that it is possible to pursue their tastes more cheaply and safely. Pedophiles are an obvious example of this type of sex tourist, but more common are men who have a preference for experiencing multiple, anonymous sexual encounters with teenagers and women in their early 20s.
Sexual access to girls between the ages of 14 and 16 is not difficult to attain, and girls between the ages of 16 and 18 are very accessible. More disturbing still, such tourists are paying older Cuban women and men, often prostitutes themselves, to procure 14 and 15-year old boys and girls for them.
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Cuba has several advantages that entice tourists for sex tourism and above all for
Europeans who are the majority of tourists in Cuba. Spanish, Italian, Germany, English,
and Canadian male tourists come to Cuba to take advantage of the affordable price of
prostitutes. In 1999, sex tourists could spend about $10 for a sexual encounter and if they
wanted a sex worker’s company throughout the evening for dinner and a disco or a bar
that would be only $30-$40 (Wonders, 2001, p.563). During the date the women provide
caring attention with a friendly attitude. While the sex tourists stay in Cuba, they can
enjoy these kinds of high class privileges which they are not able to have in their home
countries due to high costs that only a limited number of top echelon high society males
can pay for. Additionally, tourists know that it is safer to buy sexual services, since
paying for sex in Cuba incurs less risk of being arrested, penalized or fined by authorities
compared to in their countries (Karsseboom, 2003).
So thats not working out so well these days.