Prostitution in Havana

chapter 16 Prostitution in Havana Amalia L. Cabezas The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries For more than 200 years, from 1566–1790 Havana, Cuba was central to the Span- ish flota, or fleet system, a convoy designed to avoid and repel attacks by other European pirates and privateers. By 1592, the Spanish crown granted Havana the title of “city” due to its large population. Its strategic importance as a ship- ping port and its location facilitated the conquest of new lands throughout the Americas. As historian Alejandro de la Fuente explains, “With the organiza- tion of the great viceroyalties of Mexico and, later, Peru, the crown’s emphasis shifted from Cuba’s settlements on the southern coast to the Cuban northwest, particularly the Bay of Havana.”1 Ships returning treasure and goods from the ports of Veracruz, Portobelo, and Cartagena congregated at Havana harbour in order to return together to Spain. For several weeks, sometimes months, Havana was a city filled with sailors, soldiers, merchants, adventurers, and travellers passing the time until the ships were ready to sail back to Spain. Scholar Antonio Benítez-Rojo notes, “In 1594 the people of Havana had to provide lodging, food, drink, and entertainment with song and dance for seven months to the 5,000 people who visited […] many of whom had sufficient means for the enjoyment of the pleasures that the city then offered.”2 The city of Havana is located approximately 170 kilometres from Key West, Florida at the junction of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Its clos- est neighbours are the United States, Mexico, Jamaica and Haiti. Since its inception, Havana was a city with a multinational character, a feature that continued to distinguish the capital into the twentieth century. As the city grew, it became increasingly populated by large numbers of young single men traveling from France, Italy, Portugal, and Germany, as well as Jews and Moors escaping the clutches of religious persecution.3 These voyages also brought 1 Alejandro de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill, 2008), p. 4. 2 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, “Creolization in Havana: The Oldest Form of Globalization”, in Frank- lin W. Knight and Teresita Martínez-Verge (eds), Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Soci- eties in a Global Context (Chapel Hill, 2005), pp. 75–96, 78. 3 de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, p. 94. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi �0.��63/9789004346�53_0�7 Amalia L. Cabezas - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:17:04PM via free access <UN> Prostitution in Havana 415 what were known as mujeres de mal vivir, or women of ill repute, who were escaping the clutches of the Inquisition in Spain, women who were widowed or left behind by husbands traveling to the Americas, and impoverished women without dowries.4 Unaccompanied and unmarried women residing in Havana provided sexual and domestic services to sailors, soldiers, merchants, and adventurers. The governing institutions of the island profited from women’s labour. In 1584 the Cuban Governor wrote a letter to the King of Spain reproaching Havana’s military officer for “housing” several women. Later, in 1657, the clergy were accused of having disputes over prostitutes.5 These historical references suggest that the sale of sexual services was an activity that entangled the military and eccle- siastic power structures of the Spanish colony. Havana became dominated by a “service” economy that was characterized by music-making, gambling, and prostitution. Thus, idle travellers “fostered robbery and speculation, as well as the growth of social vices.”6 The procure- ment of sexual services was a vital part of the formation of the city and of conquest and colonialism. The sexual-service economy was important to the growth of Havana as a port city and as a crossroads for trade. Because the ma- jority of women during the sixteenth century were illiterate, part of the wider pattern of limited or prohibited education and employment outside the home for women and girls, they often found a livelihood working in taverns and lodging houses offering domestic and sexual services to the soldiers and merchants who migrated to or were transient travellers in the city by the bay.7 Those who provided sexual services were often times destitute and enslaved. During the sixteenth century, besides working in taverns and boarding houses, women who sold sexual services were connected to the service economy in the delivery of domestic services. Enslaved women brought to Cuba from Africa were able to operate taverns out of their homes, hire themselves out for household work, and, given the high demand, provide sex. Some of these slaves were employed on small farms in the areas surrounding the city, and they also worked as itinerant street vendors, coming into contact with transient travellers such as sailors and using sexual commerce to supplement their earnings and, in some cases, to save and eventually buy their manumission. Freed women slaves working in the city also used sexual services as a way to survive and to complement their wages in other sectors of the economy. 4 Mayra Beers, “Murder in San Isidro: Crime and Culture during the Second Cuban Republic”, Cuban Studies, 34 (2003), pp. 97–129, 104. 5 Beers, “Murder in San Isidro”, p. 104. 6 Benítez-Rojo, “Creolization in Havana”, p. 78. 7 de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, p. 205. Amalia L. Cabezas - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:17:04PM via free access <UN> 416 Cabezas For slave-owning entrepreneurs, Havana offered the perfect setting for cater- ing to the sexual desires of large numbers of men from the metropolis, young single men who arrived in Cuba either as immigrants or as itinerant travellers. These early procurers exploited slave women and took advantage of the short- age of white women to cater to the men staying in Havana. In 1658, Havana’s governor Juan de Salamanca sought to “require the owners of black women and mulattos to keep them within their houses and not give them permis- sion to live outside nor to go to the mills and corrals […] because these slaves thus earn for their owners wages much greater than those that are [otherwise] earned.”8 Even after emancipation, many of the women continued to perform these same activities, as there were no other segments of the wage economy where they could earn a living. Selling sex to the military garrisons and transient travellers, such as sailors, was an important aspect of African women’s survival and processes of manumission in Havana. Slave-owning families of Havana greatly benefited from being able to hire out their women slaves as prostitutes but other groups also profited from hu- man trafficking and sexual slavery. It was common, for instance, for soldiers and clergy to purchase one or two female slaves so they could rent them out to other men and thereby increase their revenues.9 The vibrant mercantile economy reproduced the gender-based, economic, and racial division of labour in the Iberian Peninsula, where women of subor- dinated status were over-represented in sexual markets. Thus, mulattas, slaves, and free women of colour worked in saloons, lodging houses, and households offering domestic and sexual services to soldiers, sailors, and the large itinerant population in the port city. As historian Alejandro de la Fuente states, “Some of Havana’s most humble residents, frequently black women, made a living cooking for them [men in the garrisons], laundering their clothing, and selling sexual services.”10 More or less from the inception of the city of Havana, sexual commerce was an income-generating activity for women and a source of social reproduction that maintained the power structures of the military and the colonial mercantilist economy. Even while being economically vital to the city and colonialism, women who sold sexual services were stigmatized. Although government decrees did not prohibit the sex trade, women of the elite classes were socially secluded in their homes. Therefore, early on a dichotomy and distinction between pri- vate and public, and good and bad women, existed and was enabled by the development of racial systems of categorization. During the seventeenth 8 Dick Cluster and Rafael Hernández, The History of Havana (New York, 2006), p. 13. 9 Ibid. 10 de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, p. 78. Amalia L. Cabezas - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:17:04PM via free access <UN> Prostitution in Havana 417 century, policies enacted regulatory measures to control women’s sexuality, mobility, and behaviour, imposing standards of comportment that defined vir- tual womanhood according to patriarchal parameters. For centuries to come these strictures continued to influence the perception and treatment of mujeres públicas, or public women. Hospitals and prisons were some of the earliest institutions established to contain and punish wayward or public women. Unruly and disorderly women, including prostitutes, were originally housed in the city’s first hospital, San Francisco de Paula. Founded in 1664, it served both medical and penal func- tions. The mix of races in the hospital and the mingling of women from various backgrounds was cause for consternation, however, resulting in the establish- ment of a housing-penal institution called the Casa de Recogidas to confine and correct the behaviour of women considered to be rebellious.11 Inaugurated in 1746 with a focus only on wayward women, the institution was initially built as a home for poor and destitute young women.12 With the stated intent of protecting women’s virginity and segregating them by race and class, it housed women who did not obey social norms and who were marginal in the social order.

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