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

In 1910, the murder of Cuba’s most infamous pimp, Alberto Yarini, sparked a wave of debate about the continued legalization of prostitution in the newly independent republic. While some favored preserving existing regulations, others viewed them as a holdover from years of colonial exploitation and favored immediate deregulation. This contentious issue, as Sippial demonstrates in this book, was about much more than morality and public health. Rather, debates over prostitution in late colonial and early republican Cuba served as a prism through which competing ideas about modernity, decolonization, citizenship, and republican statehood were refracted.

In a narrative structured according to changes in the regulatory apparatus, Sippial chronicles the establishment of a “tolerance zone” in Havana in the 1850s (Chapter 1), followed in Chapter 2 by Spain’s push for formal regulation during Cuba’s first independence war (1868–1878), when colonial authorities were concerned about venereal disease among soldiers. In the 1890s (Chapter 3), Cuban debates about prostitution reflected wider anxieties about Cuba’s racial composition and the island’s fitness for independence. By the waning days of Spanish colonialism, and during the US occupation of Cuba from 1899 to 1902 (Chapter 4), Cuba entered a “period of intense national introspection” as social critics came to view prostitutes as victims of corrupt colonial regulators (p. 113). Sippial’s fifth and final chapter documents early republican notions of prostitution, considered by many an “anachronistic vestige of colonial corruption and immorality” that ultimately threatened Cuba’s international standing as a modern republic (p. 149). In 1913, Cuban reformers deregulated the institution, replacing it with an expanded public health campaign aimed at all Cuban citizens.

Because Sippial claims that her book is “at its heart, a gender history of Cuba’s transition from a colony to a republic,” her analysis is strongest when she unearths voices of prostitutes themselves as they struggle to negotiate the terms of their labor (p. 4). In the colonial period, for instance, prostitutes contested the geographic parameters of the tolerance zone, found multiple ways to avoid mandatory physical exams, and consistently refused to affix their likenesses to registration cards, eventually forcing the chief hygienist to abandon this latter requirement. In a particularly fascinating find, Sippial analyzes the short-lived Onion, an 1888 anarchist-run newspaper specifically addressing prostitution. Letters from “we the horizontals” celebrated prostitutes as “working-class heroines” (p. 95), while condemning government Hygiene Section regulators for haphazard corruption. Prostitutes were not simply acted upon by the state and their clients, but were agents in the making of their own labor conditions.

Sippial’s story also raises several questions worthy of further research. Chief among these is the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, race, and class both among prostitutes themselves and within wider discourses. For example, Sippial mentions that several critics condemned male homosexual sex workers, but says little about what such stigmatization meant for the function of sexuality and gender in turn-of-the-century Cuba. Additionally, Sippial explains that regulators and prostitutes often operated according to strict racial divisions in the Hygiene-run hospital, for instance, and Onion representations of who belonged in the “sisterhood of prostitutes.” Such mentions of racial exclusivity would be enhanced by analysis of how the experience of black prostitutes differed from that of whites, or whether discourses of prostitution reinforced the marginalization of black women in colonial and republican Cuba.

Ultimately, Sippial’s book is an important contribution to histories of Cuba’s transition from colony to republic. The author beautifully demonstrates that early republican discussions of prostitution touched on not only the island’s colonial past but also its neocolonial condition. Contemporary critics looked abroad to Western Europe for examples of deregulation, while criticizing the United States for having outlawed prostitution on the mainland and in Puerto Rico but leaving it intact in Cuba during the occupation. So while...