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 TOURISM AND
INFORMAL ENCOUNTERS
IN CUBA
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 New Directions in Anthropology
General Editor: Jacqueline Waldren, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford
Volume 1 Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Volume 21 Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in
Mass Tourism a ‘Model’ Bulgarian Village
Edited by Jeremy Boissevain Deema Kaneff
Volume 2 A Sentimental Economy: Commodity and Volume 22 An Earth-Colored Sea: “Race,” Culture and
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Carles Salazar Speaking World
Volume 3 Insiders and Outsiders: Paradise and Reality Miguel Vale De Almeida
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Volume 9 Recalling the Belgian Congo: Conversations Volume 28 Inclusionary Rhetoric/Exclusionary Practices:
and Introspection Left-wing Politics and Migrants in Italy
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Volume 10 Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions, and Volume 29 The Nomads of Mykonos: Performing
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Eyal Ben-Ari Pola Bousiou
Volume 11 The Great Immigration: Russian Jews in Israel Volume 30 Transnational Families, Migration, and
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Volume 12 Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System and Barcelona
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Volume 13 Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Volume 31 Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing Imaginaries
Back to the Future in Tourism and Beyond
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Volume 14 Simulated Dreams: Israeli Youth and Volume 32 Tourism, Magic and Modernity: Cultivating
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Virtual Zionism the Human Garden

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Volume 15 Defiance and Compliance: Negotiating Volume 33 Diasporic Generations: Memory, Politics,
Gender in Low-Income Cairo and Nation among Cubans in Spain
Heba Aziz Morsi El-Kholy Mette Louise Berg
Volume 16 Troubles with Turtles: Cultural Volume 34 Great Expectations: Imagination,
Understandings of the Environment on a Greek Island Anticipation and Enchantment in Tourism
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Volume 17 Rebordering the Mediterranean: Boundaries Volume 35 Learning from the Children: Childhood,
and Citizenship in Southern Europe Culture and Identity in a Changing World
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Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley Volume 36 Americans in Tuscany: Charity, Compassion,
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Volume 20 Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Tijo Salverda
Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus Volume 38 Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba
Paul Sant Cassia Valerio Simoni

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Tourism and
Informal Encounters
in Cuba

Valerio Simoni
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

berghahn
NEW YORK • OXFORD
www.berghahnbooks.com

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 First published in 2016 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2016 Valerio Simoni

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of
criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without
written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Simoni, Valerio.
   Tourism and informal encounters in Cuba / Valerio Simoni.
     p. cm. — (New directions in anthropology ; volume 38)
   Includes bibliographical references and index.
   ISBN 978-1-78238-948-4 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-949-1 (ebook)
1. Tourism--Cuba. 2. Tourism--Social aspects--Cuba. I. Title.
   G155.C9S58 2015
   338.4’7917291--dc23
2015012545
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper

ISBN: 978-1-78238-948-4 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-1-78238-949-1 (ebook)

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 To Lin
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Contents
n

List of Illustrations viii

Foreword by Nelson Graburn ix
Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction. Relating through Tourism 1

Part One. Achieving Encounters

Chapter 1. Tourism in Cuba 33

Chapter 2. Shaping Expectations 50
Chapter 3. Gaining Access 66
Chapter 4. Getting in Touch 87

Part Two. Shaping Relations

Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Chapter 5. Market Exchange and Hospitality 107

Chapter 6. Friendliness and Friendship 126
Chapter 7. Partying and Seducing 149
Chapter 8. Seduction and Commoditized Sex 165

Conclusion. Treasuring Fragile Relations 193

Endnotes 215
References 239
Index 257

vii

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Illustrations
n

Figure 0.1. Plaza de la Catedral, Havana 17

Figure 0.2. Plaza de San Francisco, Havana 18
Figure 0.3. View from the Capitolio Nacional, Havana 19
Figure 0.4. The Malecón, Havana 19
Figure 0.5. Santa Maria Beach, Playas del Este 20
Figure 0.6. Santa Maria Beach on a Summer Weekend, Playas del Este 21
Figure 0.7. Tourists and Cubans at Santa Maria Beach, Playas del Este 21
Figure 0.8. Viñales and Its Surroundings, Viñales 22
Figure 5.1. Partagás Cigar Factory, Havana 110
Figure 5.2. Cigars in the Partagás Factory Shop, Havana 111
Figure 5.3. Partagás Factory Shop, Havana 112
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 5.4. The Valley of Viñales, Viñales 116

Figure 5.5. Tobacco Field, Viñales 117
Figure 5.6. Secadero, Viñales 117
Figure 5.7. Farmer Rolling a Cigar, Viñales 118
Figure 5.8. Bundles of ‘Natural’ Cigars, Viñales 119

viii

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Foreword
n

This work is a methodological tour de force in the ethnography of tourism,

carried out over a total of thirteen months between 2005 and 2014. As I
pointed out some time ago (Graburn 2002), the ethnographic study of tour-
ism faces challenges common to many other contemporary ethnographic
fields: challenges of mobility and temporariness, altered states of conscious-
ness, personal privacy in closed-door societies and political asymmetries, all
of which are found in today’s tourism in Cuba. In addition I noted the sensi-
tive matters of racial, national and class identities that favoured anthropolo-
gists who shared these characteristics with their informant subjects. In Cuba,
as Valerio Simoni makes clear, there are vast racial and ethnic gaps both
within Cuba and between Cubans and the majority of tourists who, in this
work, come predominantly from Europe. Yet here, Simoni has transcended
most of these barriers by working with both men and women, and European
visitors and multiracial Cuban hosts.
Within Cuban tourism, Simoni does not attempt to cover all types of
international tourism. Indeed, as he shows us, his work complements, rather
than duplicating, the considerable research already conducted on tourism in
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Cuba. He has chosen an important field he calls informal encounters, which

is methodologically challenging, often marginal (or even illegal) to official
structures and well-worn paths. These encounters, usually between younger
unmarried (or unattached) tourists and young Cubans on the make ‘with no
visible means of support’ involve intense intersubjective ambiguity. Simoni
makes a good point: we are dealing with what could be ‘friend-like’ relation-
ships, a field almost neglected by mainstream social anthropology, which has
found it easier to deal with set structures and roles, even if informal. Thus the
work is a methodological exemplar for contemporary anthropology, which
needs to deal with the more fluid, short-term, interethnic or intercultural,
and marginal relationships increasingly found in the modern world, such as
those of lifestyle migrants, refugees, economic aspirants, backpackers and
gap year travelers, self-seeking exiles (Graburn 2012) and so on.

ix

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Foreword

The Cuban case is more problematic than most because of issues of

ambivalence and (lack of ) trust. The young Cuban ‘entrepreneurs’ hope to
find friendship, economic support or even long-term relationships leading
to emigration with a foreign partner to his or her homeland. Their situation
emerged in the ‘special period’ of the 1990s after Cuba lost the massive sup-
port of the USSR (which consisted mainly of buying sugar at above-world
prices) and was plunged into an economic crisis that consequently moved
international tourism to the center of its international trade (as an ‘export’
industry, tourism brings in foreign currency that helps pay for imported
goods and services). This emphasis broadened tourism from its traditional
orientations to solidarity, culture and staid tropical luxury. Combined with
more permissive privatization, tourism opened up a field of entrepreneur-
ship for individual Cubans and households. For instance, in the (informal)
economy tourists were for the first time allowed to stay in private homes,
and prostitution was said to have flourished as never before, providing
much-needed income for the underemployed. Meanwhile tourist numbers
increased tenfold, and a new breed of younger, more exploratory tourists
came to take advantage of the opportunity for ‘authentic’ relationships with
ordinary Cubans, avoiding the formal role of following paid guides and
eating and staying in government-run establishments.
During this period there emerged the phenomenon of jineterismo, a name
given to the activities of outgoing Cubans who tried to make contact with
tourists in order to gain something from the encounter, be it money, gifts,
rewarded sex, privileged companionship and entry to ‘tourist only’ places, or
in their wildest dreams, invitations to go abroad for employment or partner-
ship such as marriage (Tanaka 2010). The word comes from jinete, jockey,
with the implication that the jinetero/a is ‘riding’, i.e. directing, the tourist
for his or her own advantage. The police often see such behavior as has-
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

sling or hustling and may go so far as to arrest the offender (unless bribed).
This open-ended role is central to Simoni’s ethnography, and he sensitively
dissects the sequence of processes by which the tourist tries to avoid being
‘taken’ while finding friendship and intimacy and the jinetero tries to allay
such suspicions by becoming a friend of the tourist in such a way as to also
achieve his or her goals and desires. These private and secretive behaviors
are revealed in a masterly ‘quadripartite’ ethnography that shows equally the
viewpoints and strategies of men versus women and tourists versus Cubans;
eventually, Simoni shows, male versus female gender roles take precedence
over national differences.
The stories lay out the principles and guises of trust, friendship and
market exchange in vignettes, also telling of both successes and failures by
following individuals over time and consorting with many people on ‘both
sides’. This approach is both remarkable and eminently readable; the author

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Foreword

shows how individuals keep a strong moral basis or at least a morally justifi-
able rationale while pursuing personal goals, all the while trying to maintain
the appearance of moral behavior. For instance, a young Cuban woman is
able to look down on taking money for sex by accepting twenty dollars in
‘taxi money’ after intimacy with a male tourist, rather than getting fifty dol-
lars for patently ‘transactional sex work’ – even though she always walks or
hitchhikes home. Unlike a few exceptional older and very experienced male
tourists, visiting young men also refuse to ‘pay for sex’, even though they
may pay for meals, drinks, taxis and so on to facilitate the consummation.
Female tourists almost never pay a Cuban man, though they have the means
to facilitate dance partnerships, friendship, intimacy or even permanent
relationships to be continued back home in Europe. Cuban men, with the
distant goal of marriage, may indulge the tourist’s desires in order to be
invited abroad; however, some men complained that they were just taken
and used for sex, while others failed in their dream marriages and had to return
home. This multi-sided ethnography only faltered, the author admits, in the
examination of the behavior of pingueros, that is, Cuban male sex workers who
have encounters with gay tourists. Some of these Cubans are straight men
practising another variation of jineterismo in order to support their families.
Though the most flamboyant cases of jineterismo centre on sexual rela-
tionships, especially European males’ desire for ‘hot’ black or mulata Cubans
and European women’s fantasies, the book’s main concern is social processes
and relationships. Indeed, the same kinds of games and negotiations, pro-
testations and informal relationships involving mutual gain play out in rural
Cuban tourism – sampling cigars, exchanging ‘gifts’, access to restaurants
and so forth – where the same basic asymmetries of power and wealth hold.
Not only do Cubans try to convince tourists of their honourable intentions
and authentic friendship, but they are often rivals amongst themselves for
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

tourists’ attention and benefits, bad-mouthing other Cubans as untrust-

worthy or even handing them over to the police. The tourists, on the other
hand, may eventually see that the Cubans have great economic needs that do
not necessarily preclude genuineness in friendship; in fact, the two may well
have to go together in touristic Cuba. Simoni stresses the relational idioms
into which these encounters are seen to fit – idioms of friendship, romance
and exceptionalism by which the partners eventually agree to a shared set
of meanings that downplay the irregular details and facilitate their continu-
ity. Immersed in situations where entertaining and cherishing relationships
abide across differences and inequalities, readers can realize the debates,
reflections and negotiations required in making their meanings as the actors
construct their own worlds. This reopens the question of what kind of rela-
tionships can emerge from touristic encounters, which deserves to be put
afresh at the forefront of anthropological research.

xi

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Foreword

This work is an exemplar for contemporary ethnographers studying open-

ended encounters in any series of relationship processes, taking into account
self-interest, moral necessity, gender and power asymmetries, and political
uncertainties. At the same time, the author is very aware of the unique
historical and political context, showing how jineterismo emerged as a public
concern during the critical period of Cuban economic weakness, and how it
swelled the informal economy that so many Cubans had to depend on while
also threatening the structures of a proud but struggling society that has had
numerous anti-colonial conflicts. The official censure and the police surveil-
lance and arrests of young Cuban ‘entrepreneurs’ perhaps cover an unofficial
permissiveness born of necessity, but any appearance of dependence on,
or selling out to, wealthy foreigners must be constantly subdued. In this
complex work, the anthropology of tourism reaches full maturity and offers
valuable lessons for today’s social sciences.

Nelson Graburn
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

xii

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Acknowledgements
n

The research on which this book is based started about ten years ago, in the
summer of 2004. Since then, my investigation and writing have benefited
from the help of many people and institutions, to which I would like to
express my gratitude here.
It all began at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change (CTCC),
at Sheffield Hallam University and then at Leeds Metropolitan University
(UK), where my researches benefited above all from the invaluable encour-
agement, expertise and guidance of Mike Robinson and Scott McCabe. At
the CTCC, I was part of a close-knit group of colleagues with whom I con-
tinuously exchanged ideas and insights, and I would like to thank here in par-
ticular Josef Ploner, Fabian Frenzel, Sean Kim, Tamás Regi, Desmond Wee,
Sonja Buchberger, Donata Marletta, Claudia Müller, Birgit Braasch, Ploysri
Porananond, Martin Bastide, Jakob Calice, Suleiman Farajat, Sunyoung
Hong, Yi Fu, Hannah C. Wadle, Mathilde Verschaeve, and Daniela Carl. At
the CTCC, I profited from stimulating conversations with the more senior
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

scholars David Picard and Simone Abram, with whom I have continued
exchanging and collaborating, as well as with Phil Long and colleagues and
advisors working in related fields in Sheffield and Leeds, including Rodanthi
Tzanelli, Jenny Blain, John McCauley, Dorothea Meyer, Lucy McCombes,
and Ko Koens. In Leeds I also had my first encounter with Nelson Graburn,
who throughout the years would continue to provide insightful feedback on
my work.
At the outset of my research in February 2005, I went to Cuba for a first,
exploratory fieldwork stay of one month. There I met many of the friends
and acquaintances with whom I am still in touch to this day, and who have
helped me greatly in my work. To protect their anonymity as research par-
ticipants, I will not mention their names, but I nevertheless wish to express
my immense gratefulness for their help and collaboration in my study.
None of this would have been possible without their willingness to spend

xiii

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Acknowledgements

time with me and tell me their stories. In Cuba I also established connec-
tions with anthropologists working on related themes, or at least interested
in what I was doing, among whom were Pablo Rodríguez Ruiz, Avelino
Couceiro Rodríguez, and Abel Sierra Madero. Year after year in my succes-
sive stays on the island, I visited and talked to them about the development
of my research, and I am pleased to acknowledge the helpful insights of our
conversations here.
While undertaking research in England, in 2006 and 2007 I also partici-
pated in a Swiss postgraduate programme in Ethnology/Anthropology that
enabled me to come back regularly to Switzerland and continue my produc-
tive exchanges with Christian Ghasarian at the University of Neuchâtel. I am
indebted to Ellen Hertz and Heinz Käufeler for directing and contributing
to this postgraduate programme, which was a great platform for sharing the
early findings of my investigation. Feedback from the participants in this
programme improved the clarity and substance of my work, and here I wish
to thank in particular Christian Giordano and Erhard Stölting (from the
module on ‘trust’), and Shalini Randeria and Jean and John Comaroff (who
led the session on ‘power’). Throughout these years within the Swiss aca-
demic community I benefited from stimulating exchanges with Géraldine
Morel, Bastien Birchler, Séverine Rey, David Bozzini, Anne Lavanchy, Alain
Mueller, Hervé Munz, Julie Perrin, Jérémie Forney, Anahy Gajardo, Aymon
Kreil, and Alessandro Monsutti, among others.
In 2010 I left England to take on a research fellowship at the Centre
for Research in Anthropology at Lisbon University Institute in Portugal
(CRIA-IUL). In my four years there I had many fruitful exchanges and
discussions with new colleagues, among whom I should acknowledge
Francesco Vacchiano, Diana Espirito Santo, Anastasios Panagiotopoulos,
Sofia Sampaio, Cyril Isnart, José Mapril, Anna Fedele, Peter Anton Zoettl,
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ruy Blanes, Paulo Raposo, Micol Brazzabeni, Lorenzo Bordonaro, Chiara

Pussetti, Vitor Barros, Ambra Formenti, Marianna Bacci Tamburlini, Lira
Dolabella, Maria Cardeira da Silva, Miguel Vale de Almeida, Ramon Sarró,
Paolo Favero, Filipe Reis, Antónia Pedroso de Lima, Manuela Ivone Cunha,
Cristiana Bastos, Daniel Seabra Lopez, Paola Togni, Erin Taylor, Octávio
Sacramento, Fernando Bessa, Ema Pires, and Eugenia Roussou.
Since the start of my research on tourism in Cuba, I have received invalu-
able feedback from participants in the various seminars, workshops and con-
ferences I attended, some of whom were colleagues already acknowledged
above. Though it would be impossible to thank all the other scholars that
provided useful insights on my work here, I would like to mention at least
some of them, grouped nonexclusively by research focus and themes. On the
subject of tourism, tourism anthropology and mobility, I very much cherish
the exchanges I had with Susan Frohlick, Julia Harrison, Kenneth Little,

xiv

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Acknowledgements

Jackie Feldman, Naomi Leite, Michael di Giovine, Carina Ren, Quetzil

Castañeda, Elizabeth Carnegie, Stan Frankland, Saskia Cousin, Chiara
Cipollari, Sally Ann Ness, Claudio Minca, Pamila Gupta, Noel Salazar,
Jamie Coates, Roger Norum, Edward Bruner, Nina Glick-Shiller, Heike
Drotbohm, Liliana Suárez Navaz, Carsten Wergin, Kenichi Ohashi, and
Mathis Stock. Among anthropologists working on Cuba with whom I have
exchanged feedback over the last decade, I should mention Amalia Cabezas,
Maria Padrón Hernández, Heidi Härkönen, Kristina Wirtz, Nadine
Fernandez, Ingrid Kummels, Ana Alcázar Campos, Maki Tanaka, Kali
Argyriadis, Silje Lundgren, Emma Gobin, Anne-Mette Hermansen, Flora
Bisogno, Elena Sacchetti, Lorraine Karnoouh, Margalida Mulet Pascual,
and Thomas Carter. On the themes of intimacy, gender and sexuality I prof-
ited from the insights of Adriana Piscitelli, Maïté Maskens, Rachel Spronk,
Lorraine Nencel, Henrietta Moore, Christian Groes-Green, Matan Sapiro,
Wim Peumans, Misty Luminais, Nathanael Homewood, Jeremy Walton,
Nicole Constable, Jordi Roca, Yolanda Bodoque, Cristina García-Moreno,
Verónica Anzil, Claudia Barcellos Rezende, and Anne-Linda Rebhun. Also
linked to these themes were interesting discussions, centred more on anthro-
pological approaches to ethics and morality, with Jason Throop, Jarrett
Zigon, Douglas Hollan, Cheryl Mattingly, and Michael Lambeck. Finally,
in the field of economic anthropology, I learned much from conversations
with Susana Narotzky, Patrick Naveling, Keith Hart, and Stephen Reyna.
Besides the essays I delivered in the conferences and academic events
referred to above, and often as a result of exchanges initiated there, some of
the material presented in this book has appeared in earlier versions, as jour-
nal articles and book chapters. The comments of the editors of these publica-
tions certainly helped improve my texts and ideas, and I thank them all for
this. Among the articles and chapters whose reworked bits and pieces can be
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

found in this book, I should mention ‘From Ethnographers to Tourists and

Back Again: On Positioning Issues in the Anthropology of Tourism’ (Simoni
and McCabe 2008) and ‘Revisiting Hosts and Guests: Ethnographic Insights
on Touristic Encounters from Cuba’ (Simoni 2014a), on which I elabo-
rate in some sections of the introduction to this volume; ‘L’interculturalité
comme justification: Sexe “couleur locale” dans la Cuba touristique’ (Simoni
2011) and ‘Intimate Stereotypes: The Vicissitudes of Being Caliente in
Touristic Cuba’ (Simoni 2013), parts of which have been readapted in chap-
ter 1; ‘“Riding” Diversity: Cubans’/Jineteros’ Uses of “Nationality-Talks”
in the Realm of their Informal Encounters with Tourists’ (Simoni 2008a),
which contains some of the examples and reflections presented in chap-
ter 4; ‘Scaling Cigars in Cuba’s Tourism Economy’ (Simoni 2009) and
‘Tourism Materialities: Enacting Cigars in Touristic Cuba’ (Simoni 2012a),
most visible in chapter 5; ‘The Morality of Friendship in Touristic Cuba’

xv

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Acknowledgements

(Simoni 2014b) and ‘Introduction: Friendship, Morality, and Experience’

(Simoni and Throop 2014a), on which I have drawn for chapter 6; ‘Dancing
Tourists: Tourism, Party and Seduction in Cuba’ (Simoni 2012b), inspiring
chapter 7; and ‘Coping with Ambiguous Relationships: Sex, Tourism, and
Transformation in Cuba’ (Simoni 2014c), which also discussed some of the
ethnographic examples employed in chapter 8.
Different research grants and fellowships have enabled me to carry out
this ethnographic study, and the institutions that provided such funding
deserve acknowledgement here. Sheffield Hallam University and Leeds
Metropolitan University supported my investigations from 2005 until 2009.
Between 2010 and 2014 a grant of the Portuguese Foundation for Science
and Technology sponsored my research at the CRIA-IUL in Lisbon (SFRH/
BPD/66483/2009). Finally, in the final stages of the writing process I was
able to count on a research fellowship provided by the Swiss National Science
Foundation (Ambizione Program, PZ00P1_147946), which is financing my
current position at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
I wish to thank Jackie Waldren and the editorial team at Berghahn Books
for their support in the publication process: I had never imagined that rela-
tions with publishers could be so pleasant and productive. Thanks also to the
two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on an earlier version of
the text; I hope they will find it much improved now. In the last stages of
the publication process, I really appreciated the work of an anonymous copy
editor whose timely corrections and suggestions helped enhance the overall
quality of the manuscript. Nick James prepared the index with exemplary
thoroughness, and I thank him for his efficiency. I am very grateful to
Nelson Graburn for writing the preface, encouraging me throughout my
investigation and writing, and promoting my research among colleagues. I
do not think I could have found a better person to back my work.
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help and
support received throughout the years of my research and writing from my
family: Renato, Enca, Mara, Hisako, and Lin.
I am aware that the list of people mentioned above is far from exhaustive,
and I apologize to all those whom I have forgotten to mention here, but
whose insights are nevertheless also reflected in this book. Any shortcom-
ings in the text remain my sole responsibility, and I am very much looking
forward to the comments and criticisms that may help improve my findings.

xvi

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduction
Relating Through Tourism
n
‘The problem here is that you never know why they are talking to you; if
there is some hidden interest behind. Well, I guess they are always trying to
gain something.’1 This is what I retained from a conversation I had in a café
in Havana with Sandra and Marta, two Swiss women in their late twenties
who were travelling independently around Cuba in the summer of 2007.
Their account of tourists’ first encounters with Cubans in the streets of
the capital was rather typical, as were the questions these relationships
raised: ‘Are these people sincere?’ ‘Can we trust them?’ ‘What do they
want from us?’
Before my first visit to Cuba in 2005, as I thought about doing research
on tourism in this country, I had several conversations with friends and
acquaintances who had recently travelled there. Their encounters with
Cuban men and women dominated much of our talk. What struck me
most in this respect was the nuanced balancing of positive and negative
aspects: ‘Many Cubans just want to cheat you, but I also developed nice
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

relationships with them’, was the sort of reasoning I recalled from these early
conversations. Setting off for this Caribbean island, my impression was that
encounters between tourists and Cubans oscillated between two extremes.
Put simply, on the one side were the positive promises of mutual understand-
ing, hospitality and friendship, as well as romance; on the other was the
daunting prospect of deceptive relationships where reciprocal manipulation
and exploitation prevailed, as exemplified by notions of tourism hustling,
sex tourism, and prostitution. How did tourists, in their engagements with
Cuban people, discriminate between these two opposing scenarios, and
what, if anything, lay in between them?
To a certain extent, these contrasting views were echoed in the writings
of scholars and commentators who had attempted to evaluate the overarch-
ing nature of touristic encounters, which I had started to read. Whereas
these encounters were said to be fraught with striking inequalities, highly

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba

deceptive and constantly productive of misunderstanding (Krippendorf

1999 [1984]; van den Berghe 1980), they also appeared to hold the promise
of cultural understanding and the establishment of positive connections
between people from across the globe (Ki-Moon 2007). These contrastive
narratives seemed to mirror and relationally constitute each other by way of
opposition, outlining an either/or scenario not unusual in tourism literature
at large, particularly when ‘the big story of tourism’ (Jack and Phipps 2005)
is at stake.
In the conversations I had before leaving for Cuba, the contrasting tropes
of mutual exchange and exploitation were hotly debated. A recurrent narra-
tive saw people who had been warned of the potentially deceptive character
of intimate relationships with Cuban men and women nonetheless being
drawn into romance with locals in the course of their journey. Some had
ended up marrying their Cuban partner; others looked forward to pursuing
the relationship and returning to the island as soon as possible. How could
expectations of cheating, deception and manipulation in relationships leave
room for such gratifying and intense connections? The stories I gathered
before my departure also significantly featured critiques of ‘tourism apart-
heid’, segregation between tourists and Cuban people, and an authoritarian
communist regime that tried to monopolize tourists’ expenditure and atten-
tion by obstructing and penalizing informal engagements between foreigners
and ordinary (i.e. not employed in the tourism industry) Cubans. These
critiques raised another question: how could encounters and relationships
develop in spite of the alleged overwhelming control and institutionalization
in the tourism industry?
In a wider sense, I was dealing here with what has been considered, for
more than half a century now, a central paradox and dialectic informing the
development of modern tourism, which Enzensberger (1996 [1958]: 129)
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

phrased as ‘the yearning for freedom from society’ being ‘harnessed by the
very society it seeks to escape’. According to this interpretative model, the
channelling of tourists into pre-established channels is in tensile relation
with tourists’ longing for freedom. To a certain extent, touristic encounters
in Cuba seemed to echo this dialectic, or at least to be initially informed by
it. However, these initial conversations also suggested that touristic encoun-
ters held the potential to break Enzensberger’s ‘vicious circle’ of tourism’s
‘inner logic’ and ‘confinement’ (1996 [1958]: 132), and that human rela-
tionships could not be reduced to any deterministic and ineluctable scenario.
A closer look at recent anthropological debates on the matter, coupled with
my ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba, progressively worked to support this
view. This book shows that touristic encounters’ potential to generate some-
thing new and to have effects that cannot be entirely predicted must not be
underestimated and deserves all our attention. Writing about relationships

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Relating Through Tourism

in tourism research, Strathern (2010: 82) recently argued that ‘you can’t
actually read off from the characteristics – including race, gender, class – of
any of the parties to a relationship just how that specific relationship is going
to grow, unfold, develop a history, implicate others, expand, shrivel, die, and
so forth, or what rules or expectations get put into place’. Reflecting more
generally on ‘the inherent ambiguity of everything human beings say and do
in the presence of one another’, Michael Jackson (2007: 148) observes that
‘something irreducibly new is born of every human encounter, and it is the
possibility of this newness that explains the perennial hope that inheres in
every human relationship’ (149). In the light of Jackson’s remarks, we could
argue that much of the ethnographic material discussed in this book draws
attention to ‘the energy devoted to reducing this intersubjective ambiguity
and dealing with the fallout from never knowing exactly what others are
feeling, thinking or intending’ (148).
But there is more to it. In touristic Cuba, ambiguity could act as a key
challenge to the establishment of encounters and relationships, but it was
also what enabled such relationships to move forward. Jackson’s (1998:
14) insight that ‘intersubjectivity is inescapably ambiguous’ finds echoes
in Henrietta Moore’s (2011: 17) consideration of ‘the general underde-
termination of cultural meaning, its ambiguity and indeterminacy’, which
‘provide the core conditions … for self-other relations, the making of con-
nections, cultural sharing and, ultimately, social transformation’ (17). For
Moore, subjectification would be impossible without ambiguity, given that
‘human beings would be too overdetermined to become human subjects’
(17). As I show in this book, the protagonists of touristic encounters in
Cuba struggled with the potential overdetermination of their identifica-
tions as (gullible) tourists on the one hand, and as (deceitful) hustlers on
the other. Highlighting asymmetries in knowledge and economic resources,
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

these dyadic identifications called forth notions of trickery and exploitation,

and were not a promising start for touristic encounters. They threatened
the range of relationships and subjectivities aspired to by the tourists and
Cuban men and women I engaged with, making it hard for them to establish
gratifying connections. Part One of the book illustrates how these precon-
ceptions gained shape and salience, and highlights what it took for people to
meet, initiate interaction and eventually overcome such reductive framings.
Following on from there, Part Two considers the different kinds of relation-
ships that people tried to establish. Thus confronted with notions of market
exchange, hospitality, friendship, festivity and sexual relations, we will follow
closely how these relational idioms, about which both tourists and Cubans
held a priori assumptions, acted as framing devices to qualify what was at
stake in their interactions and to (re)define the agencies, subjectivities and
moralities that informed them.

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba

But while relational idioms could help people cope with intersubjective
ambiguities, they could also generate new ones. It was one thing for visitors
and Cubans to share some common understanding of notions of market
exchange, hospitality, friendship, or festive and sexual relations; and quite
another for them to enact these relationships in ways that fulfilled each
other’s expectations. If these forms of relationality could help soothe fears of
trickery and exploitation by opening up possibilities, they also introduced
their own demands and closures, calling for specific actions and behaviours.
As such, they also channelled and delimited the scope of touristic encoun-
ters in certain directions, constraining their open-endedness and entailing
choices and commitments that people were not always ready to make.
Investigating the formation of relationships in a tourism context, the
book may be read as a journey into a real-life laboratory of human encoun-
ters, one in which relational norms and ideals were explicitly discussed,
enacted, and put to test. We could argue, following Moore (2011: 15­­–16),
that my wider interest is in ‘comprehending the forms of complex relational-
ity that characterize’ ‘the world we share with others’. Indeed, I wish to draw
attention to the ‘forms and means … through which individuals imagine
relationships … to others’ (16), uncovering how and how much any ‘sharing
with others’ took place in an ethnographic context – that of tourism in Cuba –
characterized by striking differences and inequalities. As Moore puts it, ‘the
recognition of diversity and difference produce particular kinds of self-other
relations’ (12). One of the aims of this book is precisely to specify what these
forms and kinds look like, tracking their emergence, negotiation and consti-
tution in touristic encounters in Cuba. The hope, as it were, is also to make
some headway in grasping the implications of what Strathern sees as the
‘Euro-Americans’’ need for ‘fresh ways of telling themselves about the com-
plexities and ambiguities of relationships’ (Strathern 2005: 27). This need,
Copyright © 2016. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

which contrasts with the ‘huge investment … in the language and imagery
of individuals or groups’ (27), hovered over the encounters addressed here,
in which people strove to make sense of a multiplicity of engagements with
a limited relational language, and struggled to actualize and reinvent their
ways of talking about relationships.
The encounters that are the focus of this book confronted people with a
range of specific, tourism-related situations that activated a set of assump-
tions, dispositions and expectations about roles, identities and agendas, and
about the kind of relationships that could ensue. Uncovering these assump-
tions, dispositions and expectations is integral to my approach, which backs
away from holistic views of ‘the tourist’ and ‘the local’ to focus instead on
situated identifications and modes of engagement. In this sense, my goal
is to shift the focus of analysis from ‘tourists’ and/or ‘locals’ to what hap-
pens between them – the practices, discourses, materialities, affects and

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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