I have seen Cuban ads and flyers showing cabaret girls and beach scenes with pretty and scantily clad women but in no way do they suggest prostitution
They were not done by the Cuban government directly but by foreign ad agencies who do the same type of ads for other destinations or by the organizing tour operators themselves. You can see similar brochures and ad campaigns for many other destinations in the Caribbean and in Southern Europe. Puritanical Americans may be surprised by this but in Europe this type of thing is quete normal and nobody thinks they are advertising for prostitution and if anyone thought that everybody would think he’s nuts.
december sounds like some Arab who leaves his country for the first time and lands in America and, seeing how the women do not cover themselves like in Arabia, concludes all American women a whores. Why else would they expose themselves like that?
Mtgman, nobody has said there is NO prostitution of any kind in Cuba but that child prostitution is definitely not condoned by the government. I think we agree on that one. Now, for the levels of child and adult prostitution that Cuba does have it is well below that of similar countries in the area. Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic are two places that come to mind which have much higher levels (not to mention the Philippines and other places in SE Asia). To accuse the Cuban government of complicity when the levels they have are lower than in similar countries is just silly.
There are plenty of poor countries where people from rich countries go for prostitution and Cuba happens to be a poor country but there is not a shred of evidence showing the government condones child prostitution.
Personally I feel the people of these countries are victims more than anything else and it is the people of the rich countries who are at fault. I cannot blame a starving woman for resorting to prostitution to stay alive and feed her family. I respect her more than I respect the guy who takes advantage of her situation.
december A. see sailors point re: Cuban’s advertising, as well as Mtgmans’ observations (IOW, CUBA itself does not seem to be sponsoring it, except in your eyes)
and of course, ignoring the absolute final truth:
Adult prostitution is not the same as child prostitution.
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*Originally posted by sailor *There are plenty of poor countries where people from rich countries go for prostitution and Cuba happens to be a poor country but there is not a shred of evidence showing the government condones child prostitution.
Personally I feel the people of these countries are victims more than anything else and it is the people of the rich countries who are at fault. I cannot blame a starving woman for resorting to prostitution to stay alive and feed her family. I respect her more than I respect the guy who takes advantage of her situation.
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I agree that the people of Cuba are victims, and that certain of the rich are at fault. In particular, billionaire Fidel Castro is at fault for running a terrible government and for taking so much wealth for his personal use.
Cuba doesn’t just “happen to be a poor country.” It was one of the more prosperous countries in Latin America 50 years ago. Castro’s government made Cuba a poor country.
I did a Net search looking for travel to Cuba. december, can you please find any web sites in which the Cuban authorities even hint they offer child prostitution? I could not find any that even hinted at adult prostitution. Sun, beaches, music, handicrafts, yes. Sex, no.
december, Please give us just a sample. A web site, a brochure. You can’t can you?
No, you were relying on a report that has an edited quote from the Ottawa Citizen. The accuracy of that quote is questionable because the site it’s on has a decidedly anti-Castro/anti-communism bent.
nice catch Jeff, now our audience, if they’re clever, noted the trademark december post wherein he quotes his adversary, seems to agree w/the point but instead makes a sharp right turn to yet another irrelevant hijack, without, of course, addressing the point (Cuba is poor, why yes, because of that dastardly guy Castro…)
(prediction, he’ll cite this one and clammor ‘how can it be irrelevant why these poor women are so destitute that they sell their bodies and their children’s bodies??’)
I can say there are plenty of Americans in Cuba. I have seen them.
I found a website which promotes tourism to Cuba from the US and along with a hundred other things (beaches, culture, etc) talks about the “nightlife” wanting to imply you can be sure you’ll get lucky there. It has a photo of a cabaret girl and
Agreed, and I’m not going to debate december’s opinion that the government is encouraging it. My post was actually meant to provide some more insight into why child prostitution is an issue in Cuba. It’s an example of another event which we can show correlation with the rise of child prostitution in Cuba but can’t prove causation.
december opines the Cuban government is supporting child prostitution and that support has given rise to the problem as it exists today. I put forth the opinion that the crackdown in Thailand caused paedophiles to look elsewhere for their fix and the baser elements in Cuba, and elsewhere, provided. Neither of these opinions is fact, as the discerning reader is no doubt aware.
Note that I said typical. With some caveats, it’s perfectly legal for the following Americans to spend money in Cuba: government officials traveling on official business, journalists and supporting broadcasting or technical personnel, persons making a once-a-year visit to close family relatives in circumstances of humanitarian need, full-time professionals whose travel transactions are directly related to professional research in their professional areas, full-time professionals whose travel transactions are directly related to attendance at professional meetings or conferences in Cuba organized by an international professional organization, and amateur or semi-professional athletes or teams traveling to Cuba. You would have seen all of this in my cite above if you had bothered to read it.
Uh, Jeff, I was making a joke. You know, about the John whose excuse for not paying is that payment would violate US law.
Anyhow, there seems to be little effort to enforce this law. Good friends of mine travelled to Cuba without US permission. They simply went to Mexico and then bought a ticket to Cuba. They certainly spent money there. Since one of the couple is a prominent psychiatrist, she wouldn’t have taken the risk if she thought there was a significant chance of being arrested.
Here’s a site which says that prostitution, including child prostitution by both girls and boys, increased rapidly, while the authorities “turned a blind eye.” However, the Update says things had turned around dramatically by 1999.
It may well be the case that the Cuban government was “turning a blind eye” to child prostitution or even “promoting” it, but they have changed their policy and it has now “all but disappeared.” I hope it has now all but disappeared.
P.S. this US government State Dept.site indicates that the Cuban crackdown on prostitution began in 1998.
You’re assuming that “very young” means “children.”
Promotion by whom? The Cuban government may have been harrasing them but this does not mean the government’s been promoting child prosititution.
BTW: yes, that State Dept. site mentions that the Cuban government has been cracking down on prostitution but I can’t find anything about them sponsoring child prostitution. Forcing children to work on farms, but not prostitution.