MSM Sex Play-Labour in Havana: Mutual Exchanges between <i>Pingueros</i>, Fidel, and Foreigners

Abstract

The Special Period in Cuba and the subsequent boom of the tourism industry opened a window of opportunity for young black men to engage in the sex trade, or more reflective of how these men view their work, sex playlabour. Many Canadians and Europeans travel to the island and share their goods, ideas, and money with MSM sex play-labourers in exchange for companionship, romance, and sex. During sex, generally white foreign men are penetrated anally by black MSM sex playlabourers who have identified themselves as “pingueros” (cocks to be ridden). The typology, “pinguero,” has been collectively constructed by the men involved with MSM sex play-labour to better eroticize and exoticize themselves in the eyes of the foreigner. As a result of this identity being understood locally as belonging to penetrators of foreign male bodies, Cuban officials have turned a blind eye to the MSM sex trade. This can be understood to be the result of  machista beliefs by which the penetration of a male body results in the feminization and inherent relative inferiority to the dominator and by extension, becomes an ideologically charged act of anti-imperialism. The efficacy of paternalistic anti-imperial intentions may be multiplied by the fact that HIV is contracted eight times more easily by the receiver in anal sex than the penetrator, thus increasing the spread of the epidemic off the island. Negotiating with notions of blackness and white superiority, black MSM(O) sex playlabourers have ingeniously repositioned themselves in a Havana that is being reshaped by a tourism industry that penetrates the island with late capitalism and reglobalization.