Prostitution in Cuba

["Jurriaan Bendien" <j.bendien@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Armand for your comment.

You wrote:

They have an special police, the "Tourist police"
massively deployed in areas where tourists frequent to
detect, prevent and dissuade - and eventually arrest -
those who are in infraction of the law on these
matters.  No matter where tourists are, they will be
approach by these cops if they are in turn approached
by the hustlers.

But this only strengthens my argument, because now you say that
American tourists come to Cuba do do a bit of whoring, to participate
in the sex industry there. This makes the whole argument of Powell
more weird. There was supposed to be free trade in the world, but in
fact Cuba is hindered in developing its economy by economic sanctions,
however, there is "free trade" in the area of whoring and Americans
are participating in this.

Of course I do not argue that the Cuban government should engage in
any old foreign trade, on any conditions, but the lifting of economic
sanctions creates a potential for a better development of the Cuban
economy, with the benefit that it becomes possible to reduce the need
for prostitution. This is "utopian" only in that the argument is
dependent on a series of additional conditions regarding the operation
of the Cuban political economy. Nor do I suggest that moral
degenerates should be re-admitted to Cuba willy-nilly, obviously an
improvement of observable behaviour is required for this.
I still have to do more study in this area. Unfortunately a lot of
research goes into specification of problem areas, but does not
address the question of how you can make a better economy once you are
able to use the tools of political intervention to do it.

Due to a complex of circumstances, many of which I find regrettable
and caused me to engage in sexual protest, I have had some experience
of the prostitution scene in Amsterdam, analytically useful to
understand the forms it can take. I am not against all prostitution,
but I am against a lot of it, because, after all, we need to look at
the quality of life here. I had a discussion with Robin about it.
However there are some errors I think in what I wrote, although I
believe the thrust of it was correct, among others, I suggested that
basically sex is a selfregulating activity, since sexual satiation
reduces the need for sex, so no need to panic. This may be true in a
majority of cases, however, it is possible for instance that the
reckless pursuit of frenetic sexual activity changes the psyche, so
that desire becomes wired up wrongly, and leads to human degeneration,
rather than to real self-mastery and real emancipation, which is one
of the socialist goals.  However, the specifics of human degeneration
through sexual excess must be rigorously defined, that is only which a
welltrained sexologist could do, that is out of my field of expertise,
I do not have sufficient experience and knowledge.

Chris also makes very good points, because, Chile is a paradigm of
Milton Friedman-inspired capitalist market fundamentalism, so then why
is it that prostitution in Chile is more rife than in the "evil"
economy of Cuba run by the "nasty" Fidel Castro ? I think that at the
very least, if we are going to talk about good and evil, we should be
rigorously objective about what is good and what is evil, and not get
into this thing where we say that good activities are evil activities,
and evil activities are good activities. There are objective standards
and measures here, because we can observe the quality of human
development and human life that results, according to a range of
indicators, which workingclass people with any brains are very
sensitive to.

But the proponents of the "axis of evil" and "rogue state" theories
etc. do not do this, rather they want to vent simplistic banalities
which are an abuse of language. These banalities are only appealing to
simple people in America and elsewhere, but appealing to the lowest
common intellectual denominator is not the kind of thing that leads to
social progress. Good communication requires, that something cannot
just mean anything, except as a playful joke or something. Sometimes
you have to demonstrate how banale a banality really, is through a
banale activity, to make a critical point about it, but a cultural
"dumbing down" is not conducive to anything much, other than a
stalling operation, where we avoid or shut out problems we cannot seem
to solve, but this culminates usually only in a "flight to the front",
in other words, the problems we seek to dodge, end up confronting us
even more.

The best utilisation of simple people's conceptions is rather
different than pandering to intellectual vulgarity: a simple person,
or a child, is able through naivety and innocence able to make
comments and criticism which get to the heart of the matter, precisely
because their minds are not cluttered by all sorts of theory and
ideology which prevents us from seeing things for what they really
are. Hence the saying, "the truth comes out of the mouths of babes".
Sometimes I have noticed people on lists reflecting on things that
their children had said or noticed, which were worth learning from. So
naivety can play a role in good cognition. But this is a point lost on
the banalisers and vulgarisers. Their real objective is to spread
vulgar ideologies to justify a policy which has a hidden intention.
And we should have nothing to do with that.

Regards

J.