Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840-1920

Envisioning Cuba

by Tiffany A. Sippial

Between 1840 and 1920, Cuba abolished slavery, fought two wars of independence, and was occupied by the United States before finally becoming an independent republic. Tiffany A. Sippial argues that during this tumultuous era, Cuba's struggle to define itself as a modern nation found focus in the social and sexual anxieties surrounding prostitution and its regulation.
Sippial shows how prostitution became a prism through which Cuba's hopes and fears were refracted. Widespread debate about prostitution created a forum in which issues of public morality, urbanity, modernity, and national identity were discussed with consequences not only for the capital city of Havana but also for the entire Cuban nation.
Republican social reformers ultimately recast Cuban prostitutes--and the island as a whole--as victims of colonial exploitation who could be saved only by a government committed to progressive reforms in line with other modernizing nations of the world. By 1913, Cuba had abolished the official regulation of prostitution, embracing a public health program that targeted the entire population, not just prostitutes. Sippial thus demonstrates the central role the debate about prostitution played in defining republican ideals in independent Cuba.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Latin American History, Urban Studies

237 pages, Hardcover

First published November 11, 2013

Reviews

[Sasha (bahareads) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tiffany Sippial writes a gender history of Cuba's transition from a colony to a republic. While this book is promoted as Cuban history on the whole the focus is almost solely on Havana. The presence of 'public' women within 'honourable' neighbourhoods prompted varying levels of anxiety among public officials and local residents concerned with the potential impact of prostitution on the health and morality of the city and island as a whole. Colonial officials were forced to reimagine Havana's socio-spacial landscape by reformulating existing legislation to geographically segregate prostitutes within a designated zone.

Sippial is recasting the "oldest profession" to show true differences; and accepts that the definition of prostitution is a permeable set of international and regional female labour, not a fixed occupation. She reads along the gram to seek to understand how state agendas of control and patterns of prostitute resistance and or compliance were mutually constituted and dialogic. She connects prostitution as a system of control and lived experience to four areas: space and sexual geographies; bodies and disease, agency and resistance; and national identity and state formation.

Sippial says "both urban geography and lives of urban inhabitants are shaped by the constant tension between state efforts to define, contain, and control urban areas and people's determination to move unfettered across those imposed boundaries."Negotiations over the form and function of Cuba's regulatory mechanism shaped and were shaped by broader discourses about citizenship, state power, and Cuba as a nation. Prostitutes resisted state fixity to avoid limits and exactions.

I enjoyed this book a lot. It reminded me of another book I've read about Cuba that talks about prostitution and sexuality. Using prostitution to look at state formation is a fascinating technique. Some people in my class weren't convinced fully by the argument. Prostitution policy was produced and reproduced, reinforced and revised, debated and defended according to complex interactions between international, national, and local actors and their agendas.