Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840-1920

By Tiffany A. Sippial

Between 1840 and 1920, Cuba abolished slavery, fought two wars of independence, and was occupied by the United States before finally becoming an independent republic. Tiffany A. Sippial argues that during this tumultuous era, Cuba's struggle to define itself as a modern nation found focus in the social and sexual anxieties surrounding prostitution and its regulation.
Sippial shows how prostitution became a prism through which Cuba's hopes and fears were refracted. Widespread debate about prostitution created a forum in which issues of public morality, urbanity, modernity, and national identity were discussed with consequences not only for the capital city of Havana but also for the entire Cuban nation.
Republican social reformers ultimately recast Cuban prostitutes--and the island as a whole--as victims of colonial exploitation who could be saved only by a government committed to progressive reforms in line with other modernizing nations of the world. By 1913, Cuba had abolished the official regulation of prostitution, embracing a public health program that targeted the entire population, not just prostitutes. Sippial thus demonstrates the central role the debate about prostitution played in defining republican ideals in independent Cuba.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781469608952

Tiffany A. Sippial

Tiffany A. Sippial is associate professor of history at Auburn University.

Book preview

Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840–1920

ENVISIONING CUBA

Louis A. Pérez Jr., editor

Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840–1920

Tiffany A. Sippial

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2013 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Set in Quadraat and Decotura by Integrated Book Technology.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sippial, Tiffany A.

Prostitution, modernity, and the making of the Cuban Republic,

1840–1920 / Tiffany A. Sippial.

pages cm. — (Envisioning Cuba)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4696-0893-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-0894-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Prostitution—Cuba—History. 2. Cuba—Social conditions— 19th century. I. Title.

HQ161.A5S57 2013

306.7409729109′034—dc23 2013015619

cloth 17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1

paper 17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1

for Trey

I think I could, if I only knew how to begin. For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Zones of Delinquency, Zones of Desire

Locating Public Women in the Walled City, 1840–1868

CHAPTER TWO

Sex, War, and Disease in the Tropics

Colonial Conflict and the Cuban Social Body, 1868–1886

CHAPTER THREE

We the Horizontals

Redefining Citizenship and Challenging Colonial Authority, 1886–1890

CHAPTER FOUR

A Pearl in the Mud

Social Regeneration, U.S. Intervention, and the Demise of the Colonial Order, 1890–1902

CHAPTER FIVE

On the Road to Moral Progress

The New Republic and the Abolition of Regulated Prostitution, 1902–1925

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations and Tables

ILLUSTRATIONS

View of the Alameda de Paula with the San Francisco de Paula Hospital in the foreground [28]

Contemporary view of the site of the San Francisco de Paula Hospital [35]

Map of Havana (1857) [39]

Exterior view of Havana’s hygiene hospital [59]

Pharmacy at Havana’s hygiene hospital [77]

Sleeping quarters for white patients at Havana’s hygiene hospital [78]

Members of Havana’s hygiene hospital staff [79]

Contemporary view of houses in Havana’s San Isidro neighborhood [103]

Dispensary established in Havana’s tolerance zone within the barrio San Isidro [122]

Mosquito Brigade distributing petroleum [129]

External view of the Department of Immigration at Tiscornia [130]

Floorplan of Havana’s hygiene hospital [138]

Group of female patients in the courtyard of Havana’s hygiene hospital [139]

Map of Havana (1909) showing the parameters of the tolerance zone [143]

Contemporary view of the dispensary located in Havana’s San Isidro neighborhood [168]

Anti–venereal disease cartoon [169]

Advertisement offering an inexpensive cure for syphilis [171]

TABLES

1. Population Statistics for Havana by Location, 1827 and 1846 [24]

2. Comparative Population Statistics for Cuba and Havana, 1827 and 1846 [25]

3. Prostitutes in Havana by Racial Category and District, 1869 [52]

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of gratitude to so many people who have encouraged me along this journey. First and foremost, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at Auburn University who welcomed me in 2007 with open arms and are truly dream colleagues in every sense of the word. I am especially indebted to Morris Bian, Donna Bohanan, Christopher Ferguson, Charles Israel, Ralph Kingston, and Kenneth Noe, who offered their incredible encouragement, advice, and editorial skills along the way. As a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, I benefited tremendously from the guidance and support of Judy Bieber, Melissa Bokovoy, Kimberly Gauderman, Linda Hall, Elizabeth Hutchison, and Jane Slaughter. I am also indebted to the numerous institutions that provided the financial support necessary for me to complete this project. The University of New Mexico’s Latin American and Iberian Institute Field Research Grant provided funding for my preliminary research trip to Havana during the summer of 2000. A Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant and a University of New Mexico Latin American and Iberian Institute Ph.D. Fellowship allowed me to live and work in Cuba in 2003. Finally, a CCWH/Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Graduate Student Fellowship, an American Historical Association Albert J. Beveridge Grant for Research in the History of the Western Hemisphere, a University of New Mexico Latin American and Iberian Institute Ph.D. Fellowship, and a Dean’s Dissertation Scholarship provided much-needed financial support during the final writing phase.

Havana has been a second home to me since 1996, when, as an undergraduate student at Southwestern University, I received my first opportunity to conduct research in Cuba. As my fascination with Cuban history has evolved and expanded since that time, so too has my circle of beloved Cuban friends and colleagues. Specifically, I would like to thank the faculty and staff at the Instituto de Historia in Havana. Among the many generous individuals who facilitated my access to archives, discussed the nuances of my topic, and directed me to key resources, I must thank Yolanda Díaz Martínez, Mercedes García Rodriguez, Amparo Hernández Denis, Belkys Quesada Guerra, and Raquel Vinat. I also offer my sincerest gratitude to my Cuban family—Luis René Fernández Tabío, Mercedes González, and Luis Carlos Fernández González—whose beautiful home in Havana has been the site of many of my most cherished memories over the last seventeen years.

Over the course of my research, I have relied on the expertise (and tried the patience) of a number of generous archivists and librarians. In Cuba, I benefited greatly from the assistance of staff members at the Archivo Nacional de Cuba (especially Bárbara Danzie Martínez), the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Matanzas (especially Alejandrina Diaz and Caridad Acosta), the Museo de Historia de las Ciencias en Cuba Carlos J. Finlay, the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, and the Archivo del Instituto de Historia. In the United States, I received kind assistance from staff members at the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, the Manuscripts and Archives Collection at Yale University, and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. I am also grateful to the staff at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, who were tremendously patient and accommodating during a whirlwind trip to Spain in 2008.

Many thanks also to Elaine Maisner at the University of North Carolina Press and to Louis Pérez Jr. and the anonymous reviewers whose support and guidance improved this final manuscript considerably. I am truly honored that this book is in the Envisioning Cuba series and to have worked with such an exceptional press.

During all the years of my nomadic academic wanderings, my family has been a safe harbor. My beloved parents, Wade and Gail Thomas, have offered their home and their friendship without hesitation. My siblings, Jared Thomas and Lauren and Anthony Menn, are truly some of my favorite people. Their encouragement continues to propel me to greater heights. A special thank you also to my girls, Susan Biles, Lisa Brown, Adrianne Hodgin Bruce, Amanda Nowlin-O’Banion, and Amy Scott, who have been my friends for so long that I can hardly remember my life before they became a part of it. Thank you for being a touchstone for me all these years.

Finally, a special thank you to the four men who have changed my life forever: Trey, Sean, Mackenzie, and Joshua Sippial. Life is so much sweeter now that we have found each other.

Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840–1920

Introduction

Deviance is not a quality that lies in behavior itself, but in the interaction between those who commit an act and those who respond to it.

—Howard Saul Becker, Outsiders (1963)

Cities . . . are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1974)

A city map offers a glimpse into a society’s hopes, dreams, fears, and desires. The way a city is organized reveals a great deal about how its residents view their relationship to the outside world and to one another. Maps are never mere facsimiles of established spatial relationships but rather they serve as a means of symbolically and visually ordering space, of overlaying the chaos and bustle of urban life with the veneer of order, purpose, and meaning. With compass and pen, state-appointed mapmakers transform isolated, loosely defined, or geographically impenetrable areas of the city into rigidly bounded zones offering the promise of perfect state control over the lives of groups and individuals living therein. The projection of an ideal, maps rarely correspond to any true lived experience. Static lines of demarcation and grids of meaning superimposed upon urban areas characterized by shifting populations and rapidly expanding infrastructures quickly become anachronistic when a city enters a new cycle of growth or change. As growing cities push against, and ultimately burst, the seams of geography and meaning, state officials are forced to construct new maps keyed to new political, social, and economic relationships within the city. More than a mere redrawing of lines on a map, these large-scale reimaginings of urban landscapes can have a profound effect on the myriad sociospatial relationships contained within those spaces. Ultimately, both urban geography and the lives of urban inhabitants are shaped by the constant tension between state efforts to define, contain, and control urban areas, and peoples’ determination to move unfettered across those imposed boundaries.¹

Between 1840 and 1920, Cuba experienced three wars of independence (1868–78, 1879–80, and 1895–98), abolition (1886), U.S. intervention (1898–1902 and 1906–9), and the founding of the first Cuban republic (1902–33). Throughout this tumultuous time, Havana not only served as the island’s principal commercial port but also as a primary destination of unemployed rural workers, emancipated slaves, and international migrants. According to census data, the population of Havana—including its suburbs—almost doubled between 1846 (123,322 residents) and 1899 (242,055 residents).² By the 1919 census, the capital city’s population had increased a further 50 percent to 363,506 residents.³

As Havana’s population soared, thousands of local and foreign females migrated to the capital to seek employment. Those women whose labor was not absorbed within the predominant sugar, tobacco, or coffee industries worked as washerwomen, street vendors, cooks, seamstresses, and mid-wives. Still other women found employment providing sexual services to Havana’s expanding population of urban male laborers. Prostitutes seeking access to clientele took up residence within the centralized commercial zones of the walled city. The presence of these public women within honorable neighborhoods prompted varying levels of anxiety among public officials and local residents concerned with the potential impact of prostitution on the health and morality of both the city and the island as a whole.⁴ Colonial officials were thus forced to reimagine Havana’s sociospatial landscape by reformulating existing legislation in order to geographically segregate prostitutes—as well as many other members of the unruly masses—within a designated tolerance zone. Official attempts to relegate prostitutes’ lives and labors to the edges of the capital city were, however, rarely successful.

On 23 September 1888, a Cuban prostitute known only as, La Madrileña, published a letter in the Havana newspaper La Cebolla. A scathing critique of the state of Cuban politics and society, the commentary read: The Municipal Mayor, who is old and so grouchy even a fly won’t land on him, has ordered that we not exhibit ourselves in the doorway of our establishment. Is this fair? In what country are industrialists prohibited from exhibiting their merchandise to the public? We, the horizontals of this capital pay more tax to the State than is required to exercise the vote. Yet, even though we contribute more than the other classes to the nourishment of the Treasury with the sweat of our . . . brows, we are treated like slaves, as if we were outside of the law. That is to say, we are considered citizens with duties but not rights.⁵ For women like La Madrileña, life in Havana’s notorious tolerance zone was defined by geographic segregation, police patrols, and the constant search for economic security. Women traveled to the zone from as far away as Paris or as close as Pinar del Río. A place of considerable diversity in both experiences and inhabitants, Havana’s designated tolerance zone stood in the spotlight of a heated national debate for the better part of a century. Between 1840 and 1920, political authorities, public health officials, labor organizers, women’s rights advocates, and intellectual elites struggled to define an appropriate response to prostitution on the island. These debates impacted the material conditions of prostitutes’ lives, and prostitutes responded accordingly. By framing her discontentment within the language of a burgeoning Cuban labor movement and an abolition struggle resolved only two years prior, however, La Madrileña articulated much more than a condemnation of antisolicitation legislation targeting prostitutes. She also offered a pointed critique of prevailing definitions of citizenship as they related to the laboring classes. In short, La Madrileña’s statement sounded an important discordant note in the changing official discourse on modern nationhood in turn-of-the-century Cuba.

NEGOTIATING PROSTITUTION

In this study, I define prostitution as a form of labor that involves attending to the sexual desires of a particular individual (or individuals) with bodily acts in exchange for monetary compensation, goods, or protections.⁶ Facile references to the world’s oldest profession obscure the differences in social and cultural context that shape the significance and structure of prostitution within any particular historical space.⁷ Within popular imaginings, the quintessential Cuban prostitute was typically cast as a poor, vagrant racial minority. Based on (albeit limited) qualitative and quantitative data, however, it appears that the majority of registered prostitutes in Havana were Cuban women who came either from the city proper or from surrounding municipalities. Furthermore, the actual ethnic and class makeup of these prostitutes was far more complex than many Cubans presumed. In their court testimonies, for example, the women identified themselves with their particular towns or countries of origin, with a specific ethnic group, and even with a specific brothel or madam in order to define their social position relative to other prostitutes working in the city. Prostitutes also moved in and out of other types of work according to shifts in the labor market and individual economic circumstances. In this context, prostitute was a highly flexible signifier for many different kinds of women engaged in many different kinds of labor.⁸ In order to historicize how prostitutes moved across both geographic and social boundaries, therefore, we must first accept a definition of prostitution as a permeable site of international and regional female labor, not as a fixed or unitary occupation.

This study also traces the discourse on prostitution in Havana during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this study, discourse refers not only to language used to describe prostitution in various official and unofficial sources, but also to the social institutions and practices that helped to constitute, and were constituted by, that language, including brothels, tolerance zones, hospitals, prisons, and courts.⁹ My investigation into Spanish, Cuban, and U.S. sources reveals that as Cubans struggled to define a sense of national identity in the face of changing political alliances and shifting populations, prostitution became a focus for the expression of contemporary political, social, and sexual anxieties. Equally constitutive of this discourse on prostitution were the everyday aspects of the prostitutes’ own lives. Prostitutes negotiated their way through the vagaries of the shifting urban labor market, police incursions, racial prejudice, and governmental intrusions in ways that shaped the very terms of their lives and labors.

State policies designed to control prostitution during this period ultimately occupied a heavily contested and dynamic terrain upon which state and local imperatives frequently collided. Government authorities, local residents, and prostitutes negotiated every aspect of Cuba’s regulatory project, from the geographic boundaries of Havana’s tolerance zone to the legal and medical precepts that guided the treatment of venereal disease. These negotiations over the form and function of Cuba’s regulatory mechanism ultimately shaped, and were shaped by, broader competing discourses about citizenship, the legitimate exercise of state power, and the development of Cuba as a modern nation.

ON WRITING A HISTORY OF CUBAN PROSTITUTION

This study is, at its heart, a gender history of Cuba’s transition from a colony to a republic. Debates surrounding the issue of prostitution between 1840 and 1920 provided a forum within which an array of Cubans—including physicians, policymakers, women’s rights activists, local residents, business owners, and even prostitutes themselves—could define an authentic cubanidad (national identity). This study thus connects prostitution—both as a system of control and as a lived experience—to four larger areas of inquiry: space and sexual geographies, bodies and disease, agency and resistance, and national identity and state formation processes. First, I endeavor to trace how social debates related to issues of public morality and honor shaped sexual geographies in Havana during the period under study.¹⁰ Urban spaces are frequently coded, defined, and often ultimately moralized—to borrow historian Sueann Caulfield’s formulation—by state officials determined to exert control over popular social and sexual practices. At the same time, meanings imposed upon public spaces by state officials are frequently challenged and rearticulated by groups and individuals operating on the ground. These conflicts exert a profound shaping force upon urban landscapes, both physically and symbolically. In this study, I thus give significant weight to discussions of the dynamic negotiations that shaped urban geography, zoning legislation, and mapping projects as they related to the development of Cuba’s regulatory apparatus over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Second, this work overlaps a growing body of scholarship concerned with questions of bodies, medicine, and disease as they relate to nation-building processes.¹¹ Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the prostitute body—both physical and symbolic—became a particular obsession for Cubans struggling to respond to shifting constructions of public health, sexuality, and vice. Isolated, examined, categorized, and sanitized, prostitutes’ bodies became flesh-and-blood maps of the inconsistencies of international scientific and medical thought regarding the connection between prostitution and public health and the efficacy of state regulatory policies. Prostitutes’ bodies also served as the ultimate staging ground for the women’s own struggles to resist state incursions into their lives and labors.

Concerns with prostitutes’ bodies intersected frequently also with questions of race during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as state officials grappled with the consequences of urban demographic shifts caused by the rapid influx of ex-slaves and foreign laborers into Havana in the years following abolition (1886). As words such as progress, order, and honor became national battle cries, ethnic minorities, prostitutes, and foreign immigrants—the perceived embodiment of a range of interrelated social ills—frequently found themselves standing in the crosshairs of the modernizing mission. Connections drawn between race, slavery, and prostitution were only occasionally grounded in demographic data, however, as Hygiene Section officials did not maintain consistent, detailed records on an individual prostitute’s work history. Women were likely also hesitant to provide state officials with this kind of information. Contemporary Cuban social critics thus frequently read skin color (which was not always consistently noted by Hygiene Section officials either) as an indicator of current or former slave status in order to make their broader claims about the role of the state in controlling prostitution during times of social upheaval.

Despite the often-unsubstantiated discursive links made between prostitution and race, prostitutes were indeed subject to policies intended to segregate undesirable ethnic groups—including individuals of African, Mexican, or Asian descent—both geographically and socially to the margins of the capital city. As the abolition of slavery and decades of warfare rocked the island into the late nineteenth century, Cuba’s political and scientific elite, hoping to address the island’s perceived social chaos, gravitated toward the writings of criminal anthropologists such as Césare Lombroso, who defined criminals as a clearly identifiable social group sharing basic physiognomic, psychological, and cultural traits that distinguished them from the rest of the population.¹² Spurred by this new racialized theory of a distinct criminal class, the noted Cuban physician Dr. Benjamin de Céspedes published a highly polemical treatise on prostitution in Havana in 1888, which blamed Cuba’s chaotic social, political, and economic climate on the African-descended and peninsular laborers who flooded Havana in search of housing and employment. According to de Céspedes, rampant prostitution was the direct result of the dramatic social and moral decline that accompanied the arrival of these groups into the capital city, and the publication of his work set off a veritable firestorm of debate concerning the connections between shifting racial demographics and rising levels of prostitution.

With the end of Spanish colonial rule and direct U.S. military intervention on the island after 1902, connections drawn between issues of race and prostitution underwent a dramatic shift. Eager to construct and assert internationally a new Cuban national identity based on the ideas of independence, progress, and modernity, many Cuban social reformers during the early republican period lambasted Spanish—and to a lesser extent U.S.—authorities, who they argued had promoted regulated prostitution, and slavery before that, on the island merely as a means of extracting wealth from Cuba. By mobilizing a discourse of colonial exploitation of Cuba’s socially and economically vulnerable classes—most often slaves and prostitutes—republican reformers linked the institutions of regulated prostitution and slavery to the exploitation of Cuba writ large.

Third, this study is concerned with questions of agency and resistance. Elite concerns with questions of sexuality, public health, and progress as they related to prostitution represent only one half of the Cuban story. Equally important to any study of prostitution are the ways in which definitions of progress, modernity, and nationhood impacted the options available to, and decisions made by, prostitutes themselves. As historian Cristina Rivera-Garza states in her work on prostitution and public health in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Mexico, Little attention has been paid to the role of prostitutes themselves in the breakdown of the [regulatory] system.¹³ I am thus especially interested in exposing the ways in which prostitutes continuously challenged the supervisory and disciplinary intentions of the state by appropriating and rearticulating key aspects of government policy and ideology to suit their own needs. In order to avoid reading for prostitute resistance—with all the romanticism such an approach implies—I have tried to read my documents along the grain. To read along the grain is to seek to understand how state agendas of control and patterns of prostitute resistance and/or compliance were mutually constituted and dialogic.

Tracing prostitutes’ interactions with the array of state authorities that comprised Cuba’s regulatory apparatus is a highly complicated task. Utilizing the microhistorical techniques advocated by Lara Putnam and José Moya, among others, I have been able to track several groups of prostitutes over time as they collided with the officials and institutions of the state regulatory system.¹⁴ Though hardly illustrative of broad social patterns, these cases do offer some insight into the ways that prostitutes—often sharing common ethnic or national ties—collaborated with one another in order to thwart the disciplinary efforts of state authorities. All prostitutes were not, however, united by a common sense of solidarity in the face of state incursions upon their lives, labors, and bodies. While prostitutes often banded together to challenge state authorities or local residents who threatened their livelihood, they also frequently supported—and indeed patrolled the boundaries of—the state classification system in order to hinder competition from lower-ranking prostitutes. In short, lines of domination and resistance were drawn not only between state officials and prostitutes, but also among prostitutes themselves.¹⁵

Finally, I find that prostitution provides a useful lens through which to trace what historian Mark Thurner refers to as shifts in the historical self-fashioning of empires and nations.¹⁶ While this is not a comparative study, Cuba’s unique timeline vis-à-vis the abolition of slavery, independence, and modernization relative to other Latin American countries necessarily shaped the island’s particular responses to prostitution. In the early twentieth century, many countries began to reevaluate their national prostitution policies in the face of a global abolition and antitrafficking movement centered primarily in Europe and the United States. Advocates of the movement to deregulate prostitution exerted powerful pressure on national governments by linking deregulation to modernity—admission into the global fraternity of modern nations now hinged, at least in part, on a country’s approach to prostitution. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of Latin American countries eventually aligned themselves with the deregulationist cause, whereby prostitution was considered a legal (unregulated) economic transaction, but organized aspects of prostitution such as pimping and brothels were criminalized. Even those countries that continued to support licensed prostitution—Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Panama, Uruguay, and Paraguay—set geographic limits on its practice and charged state (as opposed to national) officials with the responsibilities of regulation. Four Latin American countries—Haiti, Guyana, Suriname, and Puerto Rico—fully criminalized prostitution at the national level.

For most Latin American countries participation in the global deregulationist debate was a means to update a definition of modern that they had already laid claim to (albeit at varying levels) since achieving independence in the early decades of the nineteenth century. When Argentina abolished regulated prostitution via the Anti-Venereal Prophylaxis (AVP) Law of 1936, for example, the measure was celebrated as the completion of ‘the work of social progress.’¹⁷ By contrast, when President Mario G. Menocal announced Cuba’s deregulation law in October 1913, he proclaimed that regulated prostitution was incompatible with . . . the spirit of freedom that governs our nation.¹⁸ Deregulationist debate in Cuba was thus framed not only by the terms of modernity, but also of independence. Advocates of deregulation argued that licensed prostitution on the island was a remnant of the exploitative colonial project to which Cuba had been subject for centuries. While Spain, as the originator of Cuba’s regulatory system, bore the weight of the responsibility for this abuse, the United States was charged with complicity for maintaining the system during the intervention period, despite criminalizing prostitution both on the U.S. mainland and eventually in Puerto Rico. Embracing deregulation thus provided a means for Cubans to advance their own decolonization process.

By linking prostitution to colonialism, social reformers, physicians, women’s rights advocates, and republican authorities won powerful support for their cause. The rejection of the regulatory system as an imposed system of exploitation foisted upon Cuba by immoral and exploitative colonial authorities resonated widely during a period when throwing off the political and economic chains of colonialism served as a rallying cry to forge a new independent nation. The Cuban prostitute was herself recast as part of this discursive shift. Once vilified and ostracized, the Cuban prostitute was recast as a symbol of the prostituted Cuban nation writ large. A victim of circumstances who was in need of salvation, the Cuban prostitute became the unlikely embodiment of the promises of a republic based in a new, progressive, modern national status.

PROSTITUTES IN THE ARCHIVES

Historians of the subaltern classes work extensively in the silences and gaps that run through state archives. The work of mapping prostitutes’ lives and labors over time is complicated by both the inconsistent nature of state attention to the issue of prostitution as well as the women’s own actions. While prostitution was a source of anxiety for state officials and local elites, a set of complex international, national, and local forces—ranging from national wars to local prostitute resistance—shaped the ways in which that anxiety was manifested discursively during the period under study.