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three New Women, New Men? Sunday, 17 December 2006 We descend into Havana, strings of clouds outside my east-facing window . A “fair” 26 degrees [79 degrees Fahrenheit] on the ground (the same as in Miami, according to my free airport copy of The Sunday Times). Two full hours to get out of Havana airport. At 4:45 I emerge exhausted and fed up, cursing my decision to come to Cuba in high tourist season. In the main lobby of the airport a young woman asks if I need a taxi and quickly finds me an SUV-style white car with driver sporting a moustache.The ride into Havana is miraculously calming. A balmy breeze blowing through the window,I immediately know I’ve packed too many warm clothes,a fact con- firmed by the young women standing in the streets dressed in short skirts and tank tops.The roads are nearly empty,but there’s the familiar collection of vehicles from different eras: old U.S. Chevies, motorcycles with side cars, mopeds with helmetless drivers and passengers, bicycles ridden by young boys doing wheelies.Endless palm trees in the semirural landscape;a group of three or four cows chomping grass outside what looks like an old factory; a small crowd of people waiting at a bus stop. We arrive at Charo’s house inVedado.She’s a middle-aged white woman, small with short wiry hair. She shows me to my room, expressing amazement that I speak Spanish with a Castilian accent, and invites me into the kitchen. There are seated two other middle-aged white women—Charo’s sisters Vanesa and Sandra, I later discover—and a younger black woman, Yohani, another paying house guest who’s just returned to Cuba with her German husband. We soon get talking about relationships between women and men in Cuba. Five women sitting together drinking coffee at a kitchen table in Havana, the four Cuban women saying over and over that Cuban men are machista. The conversation starts because Charo is recalling her time in 76 new women, new men? Spain in 1980 and how amazed she was that on Sunday afternoons in a provincial capital the men stayed home and watched football while their middle-aged,middle-class wives,in furs,sat together in cafés.The other Cuban women express surprise: no Cuban man would ever allow his wife to do that. Cuban men go out together, they say,but expect their wives to stay at home.A married woman is not expected to have her own friendships but to be friends with her husband’s friends, other couples. If a couple goes out to dance,the woman never dances with another man,because her husband would be jealous.But,they insist,Cuban women are very jealous too.Sandra tells a story of her wedding (she’s now divorced, as is Charo) in a Havana hotel in the 1970s, when a friend wanted to dance with her and had to ask the groom’s permission.They all agree that a good male friend would never ask a woman to dance in front of her husband. I express surprise that these attitudes are still common, but they insist. Hay excepciones, pero el Cubano es muy machista (There are exceptions, but Cuban men are very machista).1 This account of a kitchen conversation in Havana in late 2006, excerpted from my research diary, does not necessarily present any truths about gender and sexual relations in early twenty-first-century Cuba. It is my memory— recorded the day after the events—and reflects my impressions and interests as much as the views of the Cuban women involved. These women were, to some extent, performing for me, the only foreigner in the room. My presence as a non-Cuban allowed four women who may not have under other circumstances perceived themselves as a collective to position themselves as “Cuban women” in order to impress upon me something about another (imagined) collective entity, “Cuban men.” If I had not been there, would three middleaged , white Cuban sisters have shared stories and taken similar views as a much younger, Afro-Cuban woman? Did they share their stories with me because of an assumed common (hetero)sexual identity? This incident, although not formal or taped, shares some characteristics with an oral history interview, its context being vital to its analysis. This context is not just about sexual, class, racial, age, and national differences/ similarities.The...

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