When I first moved to Cuba, an ex-girlfriend said: “That sounds lovely, Ruaridh. What next, Thailand?” The Caribbean island has always come with a certain reputation – the writer A.A. Gill noted that the Cubans are the “most libidinously choreographed people in the world.”
It wasn’t the revolution that made Cuba known for sex. The sleaze goes way back, probably to 1492 and beyond (naughty Tainos), but by the 1950s, Havana’s infamous Shanghai Theater was putting on live sex shows, performed by a gentleman called “Superman” – and not because he could fly.
Such libertine ways – and the mob that controlled then – were part of the reason Fidel Castro gave for tumbling the then dictatorship. But while he swiftly put paid to the Shanghai, communism couldn’t kill the latitude Cubans give to love.
Do you know Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy? God knows enough people with no connection to the island have asked if I do, before looking baffled if I refer to any other works in the island’s canon. Gutiérrez’s proposition was that in the 1990s, nobody in Cuba had anything better to do than have sex and survive. And he meant both men and women.
This chimes with a theory, once put forward by a cigar-chomping British acquaintance, that sex here was ruined by visiting Italians who felt morally obliged to pay, giving some young Cubans ideas.
But straightforward prostitution is neither interesting nor unique to Cuba. What is fascinating are the absurd romantic messes people get themselves into here, which sweep up both foreign men and women. Cuba is the graveyard of many broken hearts.
The most obviously noticeable are the pallid men you see during the second sittings in Havana’s smarter restaurants, “entertaining” beautiful women the age of their nieces. It’s astonishing how quickly some convince themselves these girls would be there without the gifts and the dinners.
I remember seeing a man with a woman of almost alien beauty in an expat eatery, then spotting him a week later in the Casa de la Música as a reguetón act played to a heaving room. He was hosting a dinner that resembled a multicultural, multigenerational “Last Supper,” his new love’s extended family around the table, from diapered babies to an ancient great-grandmother shoving chicken legs into a take-home bag. Perhaps it ended well? Often I hear of the effervescent twenty-something woman moving to, say, a small village in rural Saxony, and wonder.
Talking of Germans, there’s a foreign influencer here, Absolutely Alissa, who has built quite a following explaining the pitfalls of life in Cuba. Her advice to women looking for love is not to fall for their salsa teacher, but instead find a tricycle magnate: someone who owns a fleet of the new electric tuk tuks that have taken over the city since the US oil blockade came into effect.
Everyone is trying to harness a beauty they refuse to believe is beyond them
I do wonder if she’s slightly missing the point (having seen both salsa teachers and trike riders). The starting point is that everyone is trying to harness a beauty they refuse to believe is beyond them, while forgetting the consequences can be brutal.
For me, nothing beats the tragedy of a Canadian who fell in love on holiday and swiftly suggested the man move with her to Calgary. They married and, once he was in the frozen north, began the process of getting him his immigration papers. They lived together in a certain harmony. Then one day, in early February, his citizenship documents arrived. She decided to surprise him on Valentine’s Day, cooking a beautiful meal, lighting candles, dimming the lights, cranking up the Al Green and leaving the documents at his setting. Returning from work, he took it all in, smiled and sat down. She poured champagne as he opened the envelope. He read them, got up, put them in his pocket and walked out without a word.
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