Re: SEXPLOITATION? What is at stake in Cuba?

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mine posted:

>According to the UN Council on Trade and
>Development (UNCTAD), "tourism is the only large sector of international
>trade in services where poor countries have consistently posted a
>surplus."15
<snip>
>The explosive growth of sex tourism in Cuba in the 1990s has coincided
>with the island becoming a major destination for international tourists.
>The Cuban government began to emphasize foreign tourism as a development
>tool in the 1980s, in part as a response to a stagnant economy. The
>number of hotel rooms on the island doubled between 1980 and 1988 and by
>1987 tourism had become the third most important source of foreign
>exchange.42 The fall of the Soviet Union and and Eastern Europe
>contributed to turning economic stagnation into economic crisis. More
>than 80 percent of Cuba's trade had been
>concentrated with the communist bloc and in addition the U.S. government
>estimated that Soviet aid to Cuba had reached over $4 billion a year by
>1989.43 By 1992 that aid had disappeared and between 1989 and 1992 oil
>imports dropped 86 percent and food imports fell by 42 percent. Aside
>from the fall of the Eastern bloc, falling world prices for Cuban
>products also contributed to the economic downturn. For instance, one
>metric ton (MT) of sugar, Cuba's main export, bought 3.2 MTs of crude
>oil, Cuba's main import, between 1984 and 1987. By 1992 that same MT of
>sugar bought just 1.2 MTs of oil.44 The crisis has been described as the
>worst blow any Latin American country has suffered in the twentieth
>century (including the Great Depression) as the overall economy shrunk
>by over one-third between 1989 and 1993.45 Finally, U.S. economic policy
>toward has changed little since the 1960s. The U.S. embargo continues to
>prohibit trade and investment with the island, and
>U.S. citizens are prohibited from spending money on the island without
>the granting of a special government waiver. The exact economic impact
>of the embargo is difficult to measure, but few experts expect the Cuban
>economy to flourish as long as it remains in effect.

The root cause is the world economy of capitalism, in which "tourism
is the only large sector of international trade in services where
poor countries have consistently posted a surplus."  Criminalizing
prostitution under capitalism is counter-productive, if the objective
is to help women (criminalization of prostitution, like that of
recreational drug use, has only helped organized crime & victimized
women by treating prostitutes as criminals, _even_ when prostitutes
become victims of crimes like rape & violence, sometimes _at the
hands of cops_).

The socialist government of Cuba had a partially right idea, in that it made:
>an effort to
>address the social conditions that made prostitution an attractive
>option for women...by offering housing, education and alternative employment
>opportunities.

Even under the difficult conditions of the "special period,"

>Most women and girls are
>prostituting themselves independently and have no contractual
>obligations to a third party.

So, Cuban women who prostitute now are autonomous -- not exploited by
a third party or cops -- unlike many sex workers in the world.  Also,
the Cuban conditions give a lie to the spurious ideas that the root
cause of prostitution is childhood sexual abuse and that women do not
become sex workers unless they are coerced or kidnapped into doing so
by criminals & held under sexual slavery (bourgeois feminists like
these spurious ideas, because in their minds women are merely
*objects* ("these people," as Farley, et al. put it) of *pity mingled
with contempt*, not *subjects* of labor & history who are surviving
under circumstances not of their own making).  The root cause is
plain & simple: *economic need.*

Yoshie