Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic 1840–1920 by Tiffany A. Sippial (review)

Tiffany A. Sippial’s Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic 1840–1920 is a welcome addition to the growing literature exploring the operation of gendered norms in Cuba. Through the prism of prostitution, Sippial examines nation building, or Cuba’s transition from colony to republic. Cuba’s long colonial history means that, unlike most other Latin American nations, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century regulation of prostitution was, at least in the beginning, a colonial project, albeit one that took place with considerable negotiation between metropole and colony. Cubans of the nineteenth century, though colonial subjects, participated in an international debate about the nature and future of prostitution as they questioned colonialism and their path to sovereignty, a process that continued following independence.

Organized chronologically, the work begins with an exploration of Havana’s space in the mid-nineteenth century. Colonial officials sought to implement order in a city that had seen rapid population growth in the context of a booming economy. By pushing prostitutes, along with stigmatized racial groups, to areas beyond the visible city center, colonial authorities hoped to contain those they viewed as undesirable; the effect was to establish a legally sanctioned tolerance zone for prostitution. Yet as Sippial effectively demonstrates through her use of police reports and court cases, prostitutes managed to find ways of benefiting from tolerance policy. The destruction of Havana’s colonial city wall in 1863 to make way for urban growth ended the effectiveness of the tolerance zone, and colonial authorities searched for new ways to regulate prostitution, particularly when the Ten Years’ War (1868–78) brought imperial troops to the colony. Spanish officials’ fears that prostitution would lead to the rampant spread of venereal disease among the troops ended the era of tolerance and portended a return to regulation.

During the late nineteenth-century struggles for Cuban independence, public views of prostitution changed once again. In the last decades of the colony, as Cubans increasingly demanded independence, calls for the regulation of prostitution beyond the environs of Havana proliferated. As slavery drew closer to its 1886 abolition, prostitution came to be understood in terms of race and modernity, and Cubans viewed it as a marker of Cuba’s colonial status. Prostitutes used the growing antagonism against colonial officials to agitate for reform of the regulatory system. The defeat of Spain in 1898 seemed to signal a modern era. Yet the US intervention and subsequent establishment of a US military government (1898–1902) in Cuba meant a continuation of regulated prostitution, which had been associated with Spanish colonialism and was directly at odds with the notion of modernity.

As Cubans sought to put colonialism and slavery behind them, prostitution remained as a glaring symbol of outdated ideologies and social practices. Meanwhile, US successes in the battle against disease, particularly the military government’s eradication of yellow fever, provided a model of progressive policy. Cubans active in the new republic came to believe that deregulating prostitution was an important step on the path to creating a moral nation and that focusing on public health policy and moral reform would further the nation’s social regeneration and help strip it of the legacy and contagion of Spanish colonialism. These advocates saw prostitutes as victims of Spanish exploitation, just as the Cuban nation had been; they needed protection, not further exploitation.

Sippial’s study is based on both quantitative and discursive sources. In the process of Cuba’s long struggle for independence, many government-produced documents were destroyed, but she makes highly effective use of the remaining police, court, medical, and criminal records. As she notes, the archival traces of prostitutes’ experiences are limited to the documentation of their encounters with authority—encounters that they spent their lives trying to avoid. Sippial makes the most of this fragmentary evidence, tracing the stories of some individuals...