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

Until now, historians have not examined the history of prostitution in Cuba during its colonial and national history before 1955. Specialists have been far more preoccupied by Cuban prostitution since the 1980s. Sippial’s work is thus a welcome and excellent contribution to various fields, including Caribbean studies, gender studies, and the history of Cuba during the U.S. interventionist years before the 1955 Cuban Revolution. Sippial also generally succeeds in her attempt to place this story within the framework of urban studies and prostitution control in a modernizing postcolonial nation. She argues that Cuba framed the debate about prostitution in terms of “national identity in the face of changing political alliances and shifting population”; governmental control became a way to cope with “contemporary political, social and sexual anxieties” (4). For their part, prostitutes complained of the state’s intrusion into their private and public lives.

In many ways, this story seems familiar. Eileen Findlay’s Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920 (Durham, 1999), Laura Briggs’ Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, 2002), and Lara Putnam’s The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–1960 (Chapel Hill, 2001) all analyzed prostitution at similar moments across the Caribbean, while other scholars have delved into the relationship of prostitution to empire in different parts of the world. However, Sippial adds the expansion of Havana beyond its nineteenth-century walls during the Spanish and U.S. occupations, thereby framing prostitution control in a unique colonial/imperial discourse that is more favorable to prostitutes during the Spanish occupation than afterward. Ironically, because the U.S. forces were more interested in eradicating yellow fever than in curtailing sexually transmitted diseases, they lost an opportunity to promote a public-health program that had begun under the Spanish. Moreover, contrary to the racist view that most prostitutes were Afro-Cubans, Sippial argues that the contemporary record noted that far more working girls migrated to Cuba from elsewhere in the Caribbean or from Europe than from the freed slave population.

Basing her research on Cuban archives and popular tracts of the times, Sippial weaves a story that holds together well in terms of the local and international context. What is missing, however, is coverage of working women that transcends the various temporal eras and that gives the influence exerted by the Catholic Church its proper due. Furthermore, her decision to end the book in 1920 leaves a lacuna in this historical process, particularly regarding the U.S. businesses in Havana that invested in rum, sugar, tobacco, and casinos. Rosalie Schwartz’ study of tourism in Cuba, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln, 1999) shows how such research can be accomplished, but one more chapter in this book would have made this study definitive.