GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
GLOBAL
DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
Copyright © 1999 International Development Options
All Rights Reserved
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Volume One Winter 1998-Spring 1999 Numbers 3-4.
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THE DEVALUATION OF CUBAN WOMEN’S WORK: JINETERISMO DURING THE SPECIAL PERIOD
Elisa Facio
Department of Ethnic Studies
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado 80309
Published online: December 15, 2016
ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the emergence of jineterismo with the growth of the tourist industry and contrasts these developments in the 1990s to the forms of prostitution that existed in Cuba during the 1950s. The historical background reveals the terrible contradictions for the revolutionary socialist state and the feminist women who organized the elimination of prostitution by providing viable economic and educational alternatives for women from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Finally, the arguments raised here imply a certain optimism for turning one of the worst of all imagined developments into a practice with some redeeming value, by stating explicitly that the new form of sex work has provided at least some children of jineteras some badly needed food, clothing and medicine that can be bought almost exclusively at Cuba's "dollar stores."