How the Revolution turned the Cuban art of flirting into a survival strategy
14ymedio, José A. Adrián Torres, Málaga, August 23, 2026 / For years I have resisted writing about Cuban jineterismo. Not out of decency or shame, nor because the subject was taboo, but for something almost worse for a columnist: because it seemed to have been written about too many times. Between the lubricated curiosity of the tourist, the revolutionary sermon, and the moral condemnation, the jinetera had been reduced to a prostitute and the jinetero to a hustler. Much was said about their bodies and very little about the society that had produced them.
It only interested me to revisit the topic if I could find a perspective that permitted me to understand it as a historical, sociocultural, and psychological phenomenon: as the transformation, under revolutionary necessity, of a much older repertoire of cunning, charm, sociability, and satire. Because jineterismo didn’t invent the Cuban art of charming; it made it a means of earning a living.
The word satería deserves a brief reappraisal. The Dictionary of Americanisms of the Association of Spanish Language Academies defines “sato” or “sata” as a person who is “flattering and excessive with those of the opposite sex.” In Cuba, however, the word possesses nuances that no dictionary can fully capture. Satería is not merely flirtation. It is the mixture of grace, effusiveness, theatricality, charm, and mischief with which someone can attract attention, obtain a favor, or disarm resistance without directly asking for anything.
‘Satear’ is to insinuate without committing, to promise without forming the promise, and to withdraw, leaving the other person with the impression of having been at the point of achieving something.
Satear is to insinuate without committing, to promise without forming the promise, and to withdraw, leaving the other person with the impression of having almost achieved something. It could be a self-serving practice, certainly, but also a social game, a small performance, and even a form of female power within a society organized by men. La satería didn’t promise surrender; it managed the possibility.
Although there were—and are—men perfectly capable of wielding it, Cuban culture ended up associating it primarily with a certain Havana woman: flattering, charming, quick-witted, aware of her influence, and not at all inclined to hide it. It wasn’t a genetic condition nor some tropical essence dissolved in the waters of the Almendares River. It was a historical persona learned and perfected over generations.
If we look for its distant relatives, we look first to the Spanish picaresque tradition. From Lazarillo de Tormes in the 16th century to the great rogues of the 17th, the character survives by reading others’ weaknesses, changing masters, feigning, exaggerating, and finding a way out where the straight path is reserved for others. The rogue doesn’t reform the social order: he learns to outwit it. He is, in a sense, a precocious expert at problem-solving
It is no coincidence that some of that literature and that attitude toward life matured in southern Spain, around the diverse and theatrical port cities of Seville and Cádiz. Through them the riches of the Indies passed, but they didn’t always end up in the hands of those who loaded the ships. Visible abundance and real poverty are often excellent schools for mischief.
Between those ports and Havana, circulated goods, words, music, gestures, and forms of interacting. Andalusian and Canarian Spanish provided a good part of the Antillean linguistic base, but the satería language did not disembark already formed from a galleon. Cuba reworked it in its own unique blend: port life, the Afro-Creole experience, the tenement courtyard, music, the street, theater, and a sociability accustomed to turning any conversation into a performance.
They were not schools of prostitution, but living archives of gestures and attitudes that could later reappear in other contexts.
The Spanish cuplé, zarzuela, and sainete found in the island a kind of comic theater, guaracha music, and mockery. Later came the revue, the vedette, and the cabaret. In all of these, a stage femininity was perfected, capable of holding an audience’s gaze, timing a pause, and converting a swaying of the hips into social commentary. These were not schools of prostitution, but living archives of gestures and attitudes that could later reappear in other contexts.
La Macorina represents one of the most provocative forms of that autonomy. María Calvo Nodarse was not a prostitute before her time, but an exceptional courtesan within a society where prostitution was perfectly recognized, hierarchical, and localized. Legend later retouched her biography, but preserved the essential: this woman who drove cars, displayed jewelry, and smoked with an ease then reserved for men, transformed her beauty into money, independence, and a public personage.
It isn’t necessary to moralize her or whitewash her profession. Her importance is in having reversed, as far as possible, a power relationship: she didn’t appear as a chosen woman, but as a woman who made choices. Her case was extraordinary precisely because the majority of prostitutes of the era didn’t drive convertibles nor receive musical tributes. She worked in brothels, bars, and low-life dens, principally around the port and the red-light districts.
Rita Montaner embodied another side, very distinct and entirely artistic facet of cubanía. With a solid musical background, she moved from zarzuela to guaracha, from theater to radio, film, and cabaret, commanding a presence didn’t need to ask permission. In Rita, her grace was not submission or subservience, but stage presence. She knew how to charm without demeaning herself and how to make irreverence a form of authority. They called her La Única (The One and Only) because any other classification fell short of describing her.
La Macorina transformed the desires of others into a personal legend; Rita Montaner transformed talent and personality into national art. There is no need to confuse them or morally link them. Together, they serve as a reminder that, long before the rise of jineterismo, Cuba already possessed a feminine repertoire of defiance, sensuality, theatricality, and mastery of the male gaze.
La Macorina transformed the desires of others into a personal legend; Rita Montaner transformed talent and personality into national art. There is no need to confuse them or morally link them.
Nor should we imagine the Republic as a succession of elegant couplets, red cars, and lavish cabarets. Prostitution was widespread and, in many cases, miserable. American sailors constituted a significant clientele, especially in the port areas, but not the only one: there were Cubans, merchants, tourists, gamblers, and travelers. Alongside a few high-class courtesans, there existed a mass of women exploited in disreputable establishments. Furthermore, the commercial sexualization of mulatto women predated 1959.
Castro’s propaganda has always been known how to employ a half-truth as if it were the whole truth. The existence of that reality doesn’t mean all of Havana was a brothel, but neither is it necessary to perfume the Republic to criticize what came after. The fundamental difference is not that there was artistic seduction before and prostitution after. It is that the former prostitution had designated spaces, intermediaries, and a recognizable professional identity, while revolutionary jineterismo ultimately decentralized and expanded the trade.
During the early 1960s, the new regime closed bordellos, prosecuted pimps, and subjected many prostitutes to rehabilitation and work programs. The regime presented the disappearance of red-light districts as the definitive end of the phenomenon. In a certain measure it succeeded in dismantling that visible circuit. But eliminating the geography of a practice does not eliminate the conditions that can reproduce it.
When Soviet subsidies collapsed and the so-called Special Period began, prostitution didn’t return to its old neighborhoods. It reappeared in a different, more dispersed, and far more ambiguous form. The dollar was legalized, tourism became the state’s lifeline, and foreigners began circulating on the island like walking currency exchanges with legs. A doctor, an engineer, or a teacher earned a salary in pesos that wasn’t enough to fill a refrigerator; any tip or gift from a tourist could acquire exorbitant value.
The Revolution proclaimed that it had redeemed Cuban women and ended up building an economy in which a smile paid for in dollars was worth more than a university degree.
The Revolution proclaimed that it had redeemed Cuban women and ended up building an economy in which a smile paid in dollars was worth more than a university degree paid in pesos.
That’s where jineterismo truly emerged as a revolutionary creature: not because the government decreed it, nor because sexual exchange didn’t exist before, but because the economic organization of Castroism produced that specific form. Prostitution was ancient; jineterismo, on the other hand, was a genuine child of the Revolution, not of its ideals, but of its failure.
A study by Charles Trumbull published in 201, based on fieldwork in Cuba and various sources from the 1990s, observed precisely this difference. A large network of brothels had not reappeared, nor was the traditional pimp predominant. Many relationships were established directly in hotels, discotheques, on beaches, in the streets, or through friendships. The jinetera might not consider herself a prostitute, nor might she work full-time: she could be a student, a technician, an employee, or a mother, and occasionally resort to a relationship with a foreigner to obtain what neither her salary nor the ration book could give her.
In that nocturnal economy, the boundaries between prostitution, hustling, and seduction with a migratory horizon were porous. Daliany Jerónimo Kersh notes that the expression jinetera-mambisa was already circulating in the 1980s … The jinetera became more associated with immediate or professional transactions, while the mambisa aspired to become involved with a foreigner and, if the “military campaign” prospered, to marry and leave the country. It was said of those mambisas, with the customary mockery, that they were “finishing off the Spaniards”; later, the enemy became multinational.
The boundaries, of course, remained fluid. There were Havana women who knew the ropes, girls from the provinces who circumvented residency restrictions to try their luck in the capital, and women who went out for a single night and ended up in show business. They weren’t distinct species or military ranks in a sexual taxonomy, but rather shifting positions within a continuum of necessity, curiosity, fun, ambition, and survival. Old-fashioned prostitution required entering a circuit; to hustle, all it took was finding a tourist and knowing how to please him.
The whole country was learning how to ‘resolve’, to get by: obtaining ‘on the left’ what couldn’t be obtained on the right, diverting resources, inventing family ties, feigning enthusiasm, and cultivating the right contacts.
Hustling wasn’t limited to sex, nor was it exclusively female. A hustler could sell counterfeit tobacco, find a room, act as a guide, fetch fuel, serve as an intermediary, or cultivate a self-serving friendship. There were also men who offered sexual services. The term encompassed much more than just the bed: it referred to any way of “riding” foreigners to overcome the scarcities.
That is why it came to be said that in Cuba anyone could hustle. It didn’t mean everyone was a prostitute, but rather that the logic of the transaction was no longer confined to a specific profession. The entire country learned how to ‘resolve’: obtaining ‘under the table’ means what couldn’t be obtained through legitimate means, diverting resources, inventing family ties, feigning enthusiasm, and cultivating the right contacts. The picaresque provided the method; satire, the style; the Revolution, the necessity.
The decisive transformation occurred in the meaning of the gesture. The ‘sata‘ turned another’s desire into triumph; the prostitute needed to turn it into income. One could enjoy leaving the admirer waiting; the other depended on that wait eventually paying for dinner, soap, perfume, or a passport. Perhaps the smile was the same, but the freedom from which it was offered had changed.
It was not, therefore, a natural evolution of Cuban street smarts into prostitution, but rather a repurposing of them under economic duress. Necessity requisitioned old social skills and put them to work. Sympathy became an investment, conversation a probing exercise, and romance a possibility through migration. There were sincere relationships, real affection, and marriages that cannot be reduced to a mere calculation. But therein lay the psychological complexity of the phenomenon: need, affection, and friendship could coexist without even those involved knowing where one ended and the other began.
Meanwhile, the State condemned the prostitute for doing on a retail basis what it practiced wholesale: selling a tropical fantasy to foreigners in exchange for currency. Tourist campaigns offered rum, music, sensuality, and smiling bodies, while the police watched over the Cuban woman who approached a visitor, trying to “smother” him. They called it “the siege of tourism.” She sold companionship; the State sold the island.
Havana could make fun of even that back room, but romanticizing jineterismo would be another way of misrepresenting it.
As it grew, this initially scattered activity also created its own rearguard. There wasn’t always a recognizable pimp: sometimes that role was played by the husband, the “little husband”—the informal partner—or even a brother who waited at home and participated in the takings; other times, it was the taxi driver who brought the tourist, the owner of a brothel who lent the room, or the policeman who took bribes to look the other way.
The girls who arrived from the provinces could rely on fellow countrymen and relatives to find lodging, protection, and a work area, or to move around certain nightclubs and bars. In some circles, there was even talk of groups identified by their province of origin, closer to networks of local ties, mutual aid, and territorial division than to organized crime groups. Among the newcomers, the old-fashioned solidarity of the eastern guajira and the good nature of many of those girls and women often outweighed any underworld discipline. The Revolution had closed the brothels; necessity rebuilt the supply chain.
Havana could make light of even that back room, but romanticizing prostitution would be another way of distorting it. There was exploitation, deception, violence, degradation, and a profound erosion of trust. When every kindness can conceal a price and every infatuation a visa application, sensitivity ends up defending itself through cynicism. The foreigner learns to interpret every smile as an offer; the Cuban, to see every foreigner as a possible way out of a problem. The moral damage lies not in the loss of a supposed purity or freshness of sex, but in the colonization of intimacy by survival.
The art of distance was also lost. The old satire thrived on insinuation, circumlocution, and what might never actually happen. Revolutionary urgency shortened the distance between a wink and the price, with brazenness as the only stop along the way. The so-called “flip-flop slap” or ” flip-flop-ification” wasn’t about poverty or footwear, but about the disappearance of ceremony, the ritual of courtship: when seduction ceased to be a game and became a mere formality.
Now that ecosystem is also dying out. According to official figures from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), during the first half of 2026 the number of international visitors received by Cuba was only 39.3% of that recorded in the same period of the previous year. Even the caricature of a tropical paradise is beginning to lose its audience.
In Cuba, meanwhile, the concern has become less erotic and more electric. Desire needs a certain confidence in tomorrow, some intimacy, and, if it’s not too much to ask, electricity. Before thinking about falling in love, seducing, or procreating, one has to find out what time the power comes back on.
The Revolution can perhaps claim one last moral victory: it has reduced prostitution, not because it has redeemed the prostitutes, but because it has scared away tourists and because many of them left to build their futures in other countries, far from the revolutionary “burundanga” that had driven them to seek work.
Today, the Cuban people, exhausted even from practicing that old art of catcalling, wait for someone or something to change their destiny. But no collective destiny changes simply by waiting, however much, ninety miles away, there may be those longing for a good excuse to act. In the Cuba where once people went out to meet tourists, today they wait for the tide to turn. And even flirting waits its turn to start its engine.
______________________
COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
