Cuba's Prostituted Revolution

Frank Calzon
The Miami Herald, September 16, 2002

Add one more issue to the debate about lifting U.S. restrictions on travel to Cuba: the exploitation of Cuban woman and children.

Earlier this year, researchers at the Protection Project, a human rights institute based at Johns Hopkins University, reported: ''Canadian and American tourists have contributed to a sharp increase in child prostitution and in the exploitation of women in Cuba.'' A crackdown on sex tourism in Southeast Asia and the lifting of political restrictions on tourism is contributing to such increase, the researchers wrote in their report "Human Rights Report on Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children."

Prostitution exists in many countries, but Fidel Castro's communist polemics and repressive controls compound the problem in Cuba.

Immediately after seizing power, Castro blamed prostitution on ''capitalist oppression'' and American tourists. In his new society, he assured the Cuban people, prostitution and the ''exploitation of man by man'' would disappear. Forty years later, the situation is much worse. Not only do Cuban women and children face exploitation by men, but everyone -- men, women and children -- also face the ''exploitation of man by man'' as indentured servants of a government that assigns jobs and housing, sets pay and dictates when and where Cubans may shop and travel.

Cuba no longer has a civil society nor does it have a way to build one. The government owns the media; only if and after Castro himself discovers a problem can it be reported and commented on, and then it's to blame ''the imperialist monster of the North.''

Independent organizations, which elsewhere can demand protection for women and children, don't exist in Cuba. Years ago, Castro was forced to acknowledge widespread prostitution; he dismissed it offhandedly declaring that Cuban prostitutes were ''the most highly educated in the world.'' He has denied the existence of widespread AIDS in the island. He unlikely will acknowledge the extent of sexual abuse of children; to do so would call into question his revolution's alleged "special concern for children.''

NO MILK AFTER AGE 7

Even in Havana that ''special concern'' and the revolution's ''achievements'' are no longer taken at face value. This is a country that suspends the milk ration for children after they turn 7. Parents have little or no say about state-run schools or the enrollment of their high-school age children in the work-study programs that send teenagers to distant rural communities to work on government-owned farms. Pope John Paul II described this forced separation of families as ''traumatic'' and warned against the ''profound and negative'' effects of increased vulgarity and promiscuity and a lack of ethics. Teens begin having sexual relations in these camps and have easy access to abortions.

The Protection Project's report notes that Cuba has signed numerous international conventions, but "has not ratified the [International Labor Organization] Convention to Eliminate the Worst Forms of Child Labor and not signed the U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.''

Public perceptions of Cuba take a while to catch up with realities there. In 1996, the University of Leicester published a report entitled ''Child Prostitution and Sex Tourism: Cuba,'' based on in-depth interviews conducted by two British sociologists in Cuba. The report found that "most of the child sexual exploitation that does take place in Cuba is perpetrated by tourists.''

But should the U.S. Congress act as blindly and callously as it debates lifting all restrictions on travel to Cuba? Those asserting that unrestricted, no-questions-asked U.S. tourism will help the Cuban people -- not enrich the repressive, exploitive Castro government -- would be somewhat more persuasive if they coupled their courtesy toward Cuba's dictator with demands to end the unspeakable outrages that Castro foists and fosters on Cubans.

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