Prior to the Special Period, Elenita was a chemistry teacher in the central Cuban city of Santa Clara; her salary, and that of her husband’s as a university professor, had been enough to live on. They would regularly go on weekends to the beach, buy new clothing, and eat out. But after the onset of the crisis in 1990, their salaries paid in the Cuban peso were devalued and they could no longer afford to purchase basic consumer goods sold in hard currency.1 In 1991, they moved to the tourist resort of Varadero, in the province of Matanzas. Elenita’s husband became a taxi driver for tourists, and she trained as a hotel waitress, earning up to six times more per day in tips than the monthly salary she had earned as a teacher. This decision changed their lives: within a couple of years they were able to build one of the best houses in a small town outside Varadero.I think that people have to fight if they want things. … They have to analyze whether what they are doing is going well and earning them enough to live on. If it’s not, they have to leave it and look for another job. You have to know how to adapt quickly. It’s your adaptability that determines how your life turns out … you always have to be doing something.
Elenita’s sister, who remained in Santa Clara, was a high-level manager at an agricultural engineering company in charge of 200 employees. Her state salary of 1100 Cuban pesos per month was more than double that of a doctor or teacher at that time. Her brother-in-law was also an engineer, employed by the state. Six people lived in their dilapidated two-bedroom house, and the quality of their diet was far worse than that of Elenita’s family. Elenita often gave money to help her sister’s family, but the difference in their lifestyles was startlingly obvious.
Prior to the Special Period, Cuba was one of the most equal societies in the world in terms of differentiation in wage income.2 Had Elenita not ‘adapted’ and gone to work in the tourism industry, earning hard-currency tips, she would have had the same lifestyle as her sister; perhaps even worse, given that a teacher’s salary at the time of researching this book was in the region of 400 pesos per month. However, Elenita’s decision came at a price: she left the profession she loved and had studied for to take on a relatively menial job employing feminized notions of labor, serving foreign tourists as a waitress in a hotel.
Elenita was not the only woman who changed profession in hopes of a better life during this period of extreme financial austerity, with the state wage so significantly devalued. The first three decades of revolutionary gender policy focused on women’s equality in the workplace, as this was seen as key to achieving equality within society as a whole. Though, prior to the revolution, Cuba had one of the lowest percentages of working women in Latin America and the Caribbean, Cuban women became one of the most highly educated, highly skilled, and diversified professional female workforces in the world. However, in spite of these exceptional advances in the public sphere, the government was unable to significantly influence the traditional division of labor in the private sphere. Given their role as primary caregivers and managers of household economies, it was women that bore the brunt of severe shortages and austerity measures.
A range of gender scholars on contemporary Cuba—including Ruth Pearson (1997), Maxine Molyneux (1996, 2000), Toro-Morn et al. (2002), and Safa (2009)—have argued that women were disproportionately affected by the crisis, given that they were excessively hit by unemployment and cutbacks in public services that had hitherto supported their productive labor, thus forcing them to look for other ways to earn money. This is popularly referred to in the academic literature as the feminization thesis. I build on this ‘feminization thesis’ by analyzing emerging gender inequalities through the paradigm of women’s employment. My contribution illustrates how and why women combined alternative forms of employment or new survival strategies in order to access hard currency and what these new forms of labor signified in terms of gender equality in post-Soviet Cuba.
Analyzing five distinct forms of employment—state work, tourism, cuentapropismo (self-employment ), la lucha (hustling or petty pilfering), and jineterismo (sex and/or romance tourism)—is crucial to the research as they reflect a broad picture of the changes in employment that were not present before the crisis, given that 94 percent of the Cuban population worked for the state.3 Key government policies implemented in response to the economic crisis resulted in better-paid legal work opportunities for women in tourism and self-employment, as well as informal and often illegal feminized work as unregulated cuentapropistas , jineteras , and luchadoras.
Gendered Work
Informal work is a way of life in the Global South and often escalates during economic recessions. Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto (1989) has maintained that unfair restrictions and unreasonable taxes force informal workers outside the legal framework. This has been the case in Cuba as strict restrictions on both employment in the international tourism sector and the regulation of self-employment have prompted hundreds of thousands of Cubans to gravitate toward unregulated economic activity outside the state sector . This study contributes to larger conversations on informality by applying established theories to a socialist context and focusing specifically on women.
Although self-employment was legalized in Cuba in 1993, there were not necessarily licenses for the kind of small-scale feminized services women offered, and their earnings did not warrant paying license fees or taxes. Women’s unregulated cuentapropismo was commonplace and technically illegal. The activities cuentapropismo and la lucha overlap in many instances, and even Cubans’ definitions can significantly differ. For the purpose of this study, I define cuentapropismo as providing a service or producing goods to sell, whether legal or illegal. This definition illustrates Castells and Portes’ (1989) theory that typical informal activities resemble similar activities that are legally regulated. La lucha, on the other hand, a term that traditionally represented collective revolutionary struggle and was adapted during the Special Period to describe individual daily struggles, more explicitly resembles illegal activity. Whereas the male context of la lucha is generally used to describe providing for ones’ family, women’s lucha tends to describe pilfering from work and/or reselling on the black market.
Another term referring to an illegal activity synonymous with the Special Period is jineterismo . Living off the earnings of prostitution was criminalized and sex work was successfully controlled under the revolution until the dual onset of the economic crisis and international tourism. The metaphorical term ‘ jineterismo ,’ whi...