"Cigar? You want?"

Cate is studying in Havana, Cuba, this semester. The questions she has been asked are similar to the questions others have been asked, although sometimes with a unique Cuban twist:

"Where you from? Cigar? You want?"

"Do you have a boyfriend?"

"Hillary or Obama?" [The particular irony of this particular question is that Cate is a Republican.]

Here's what Cate has to say about the kinds of questions she's been getting asked:

"No lie, Alysa, these are funny, but they're actually the most common questions that I get. And they actually say quite a bit about the society here. The first one [is] from the "jinteros" that try to take advantage of any Caucasian person that they see here, because the racist concept is that anyone who has light skin automatically has money - it's a bad consequence of the rampant tourism that has hit the island. And its even worse in the eastern part of the country, in Santiago de Cuba. The second one illustrated how women are treated here - aka, like disposable playthings. Plus, when I say, 'yes, I have a boyfriend in the States,' they say, 'Ah, yes, but he is not here, and I am.' Fidelity is an unknown concept. The last question? Cubans are very aware of US politics/culture. Very much into it, actually. And no one thinks a woman or an African-American man can win."

In Cate's analysis of both the first and the second questions I am reminded of Stephen Gregory's The Devil Behind the Mirror  in which he looks at life in the Dominican Republic, especially as it intersects with Western tourism. Cate mentions that with the first question, Cubans are trying to wean money from her (assuming that because she is a white Westerner, she has money to spare), and I can't help wonder if the same is an underlying intention in the second question. Gregory talked about the way Dominican men would try to establish sexual or romantic relationships with Western female tourists as an economic benefit or a way to get out of the Dominican Republic; perhaps this form of sex industry has also spread to Cuba.

The question of whether or not one has a boyfriend seems to be quite common among most of our friends who told us about the questions they had been asked—at least, among the women. Men never seem to be asked if they have girlfriends, wherever they go. Why might that be? (We could also go into the heteronormativity of such questions, but for now we'll just stick with gender imbalance.)