Tourism, Migration, and Back in Cuba

CONTRADICTORY OPENINGS Working in Cuba and on Cuban migrants to Spain for a number of years, I realize that thought of Cuba tends to be overdetermined by the location from which one sees the island. Polarizing views often prevail, notably due to the political profiling of the country by mainstream media and governments. For example, seen from the leftist circles I frequented in the Swiss Italian canton where I grew up, Cuba gripped the imagination because of its peculiar socioeconomic and political system, and its associated narratives of resistance to imperialist and capitalist forces. So before going there for the first time in February 2005, I spoke to one of the leaders of a local Cuba solidarity association, seeking advice and potential contacts on the island. He discouraged me from researching the world of jineterismo (a neologism from the Spanish for “riding”), a milieu commonly associated with the “riding of tourists” for instrumental purposes, evoking hustling, prostitution, commercialized forms of relationality, and exploitation. I remember him saying, “This is not the real Cuba; these people [i.e., jineteros and jineteras] are not the Cubans you should meet!” Jineterismo was a rather embarrassing and marginal phenomenon that would tarnish the positive image of revolutionary Cuba he promoted, countering what he saw as misinformation orchestrated by mainstream media, particularly from the United States. So location mattered. In my subsequent stays on the island, I was repeatedly confronted with the typical tourism trope of seeking and accessing a “real” Cuba but realized that authenticity could be associated with very different, competing, and often opposing realities of social life in the country. People gave me advice—everything from avoiding official tourist circuits to keeping at bay ubiquitous hustlers, recognizing signs of revolutionary achievements, and even reaching beyond governmental propaganda. My own goals were to understand and uncover the moral and epistemological underpinnings and consequences of such narratives, which flourished in the tourism realms I frequented (Simoni 2018a). Later, and in my repeated stays on the island (eighteen months up to February 2019), I became acquainted with a heterogeneous mix of foreign tourists and Cuban men and women actively trying to engage visitors, giving life to what I termed “informal touristic encounters” (Simoni 2016a). Among the promises of this informal realm of interactions was for tourists to get “off the beaten track,” to enter tourism’s “backstage,” as MacCannell (1976) would put it, and to discover the “real” Cuba of “ordinary” Cubans, often said to be cheaper and more authentic than official tourism paths could provide.