Socialism’s struggles with Eros: Politics of the body in Cuba and China

For sociologists, love relationships in general, and eroticism in particular, have always been a core object of sociological enquiry. For Max Weber, for instance, each society consists of different ‘value spheres,’ such as the religious, economic, political, aesthetic, and intellectual. Of these spheres, the ‘erotic sphere,’ characterized by courtship, romance, flirting, sensual responses, sexual symbolism, lovers’ discourses, and so forth, is always the most important one for Weber because it is the only sphere that, arranged by the playful and poetic Eros, cannot be rationalized. The erotic (i.e., the transfiguration of sexual energy into cultural inventiveness by the imagination), Weber (1958: 347) explains, is ‘the kernel of the truly living.’ For Weber, all meaningful activity is creative activity. Because creativity includes disruption of everyday conventions, routines, institutions, and patterns, the erotic, a force of enchantment, poses a threat to organized order. Being the ‘the greatest irrational force of life,’ Weber (1958: 343) points out, the erotic is the problematic, rupturing, and transgressive part in society, precisely because it contains the potential to mitigate everyday disenchantment in rationalized value spheres. Megan Daigle’s From Cuba with Love and Everett Yuehong Zhang’s The Impotence Epidemic are two important, fascinating, and well-investigated accounts of the erotic sphere in societies in which socialist regimes seek to actively rationalize all value spheres. The authors seek to find out what happens with the erotic when eroticism is outlawed and the body is governed according to socialist doctrines, and made available for state intervention.

Both Zhang and Daigle provide, through their ethnomethodological studies, insiders’ accounts of the failures of socialist rationalizations in China and Cuba. In Listen Yankee, C Wright Mills (1960) identified the Cuban Revolution as a source of hope. Exotic, artful Cuba could become something more than an exploited US colony that was oppressed by a cruel, torturous ‘Yankee puppet regime’ (1960: 34). In From Cuba with Love, Daigle notes that five decades after the event it can be concluded that the Revolution has failed. The Cuban Revolution had failed to shake off exploitation, racism, and degrading poverty. Daigle (p. 231) emphasizes that her book casts ‘a critical eye on the Cuban political project.’ She points out that ‘Cuba’s Revolution has not in itself transformed, or even done much to challenge, the social production of raced women as sexual objects whose value lies in their bodies themselves’ (p. 232). Whereas Mills (1960: 8–9) articulated the perspectives of the Cuban revolutionary in a Cold War context in which the media apparatus in the United States could not be trusted, Daigle presents the voice of the oppressed, exploited young Cuban women and men who refuse to comply with state-centered ideals of socialist behavior, desire, and morality. As one of Daigle’s interviewees defines the situation in Cuba today, ‘our situation is bad, and people are desperate. Everything here is a lie’ (p. 84). Many of Daigle’s interviewees see the prospect of leaving Cuba as the only source of hope of a humane, meaningful existence. They do not expect meaningful transformation from within the (degraded) Castro regime.

But it is not only the bad situation, despair, and the lies so many Cubans are forced to live through that reveal the failure of the Cuban Revolution. Such phenomena also prevail for many people in the Western world. What really shows the failure of the Cuban Revolution, as Daigle explains, is Cuban socialism’s failure to live up to its promise of transcending the racist colonial experience in Cuba. In a fascinating account, Daigle explains how Cuba’s racist colonial legacy is organized around the ‘central mythic figure in the Cuban imaginary: the mulata’ (p. 31). The mulata is the sexual creation of colonialism. In Cuba, Spanish colonialists sought out African slave women for sex, often as a tool of colonial subjugation. This intermingling of races, often through rape, created the mulata. Daigle points out that the mulata ‘was interpreted as the embodiment of sex and sexuality’ (p. 31), ‘the quintessential mistress, characterized by innate beauty, sensuality, and licentiousness: born of lust, made of lust’ (p. 31). Throughout Cuba’s colonial history, the mulata was identified as an erotic figure, a woman who arouses and enchants, and ‘sexually available’ (p. 32). Being ‘a fetishized object of (white) male desire’ (p. 34), the mulata ‘performs the flirtatiousness that is expected of her’ (p. 33). The mulata is the lust object in a colonial, racist network of relationships that is defined by ‘colonial sexuality’ (p. 28), ‘anxiety over racial mixing’ (p. 28), and ‘the purity of white women’ (p. 29). In colonial Cuba, the white woman was always thought of in terms of virginity and chastity, strongly linked to family honor, whereas the mulata was identified as a hypersexualized flirt. In the colonial imaginary, which still prevails, Daigle explains, the mulata is ‘the counterpoint to proper (white) feminine virtue’ – an erotic but morally debased figure, ‘a predator who pursues and seduces white men’ (p. 34).

After Spanish colonialism, the legacy of ‘exoticized Caribbean beauty’ continued in 20th-century US tourism (p. 8). American tourists, Daigle points out, were thrilled by ‘the fantasy of the exotic, gorgeous, passionate mulata who danced to tropical rhythms and represented the most exciting kind of escapism’ (p. 47). In Cuba, American tourists encountered an open erotic sphere that provided an escape from their own unerotic, WASP way of life. In prerevolutionary Cuba, the cruel Batista regime, a ‘Yankee satellite’ as Mills (1960: 33) called it, pimped ‘Cuba’s women to provide sexual services to Americans,’ Daigle notes (p. 50). The sexual and racist exploitation of the mulata was so devastating that Cuban revolutionaries turned prostitution into a powerful symbol of Cuba’s subordination to foreign powers. Negating prostitution in Cuba was part of the socialist campaign to eradicate sexist and racist discrimination (pp. 50–51). In socialist Cuba, the mulata was educated. Her sensuality was tamed. Socialist disciplinary mores were enforced on her. Foreign tourists were no longer allowed to enter the country. And prostitution was outlawed as antisocialist behavior (p. 56). When the Cuban economy shrank by 40% overnight with the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Cubans came to experience a grinding poverty they had never experienced in socialist Cuba. In its quest for hard currency, the Cuban regime opened its doors for mass tourism from the capitalist West. Once again, the mulata became the specter that haunts Cuban socialism, as Western tourists seek to establish sexual liaisons with this erotic figure who appears not to have been tamed by socialist education and work. ‘Foreigners come to Cuba for its renowned sensuality,’ Daigle explains, ‘and the Cubans who seek them out become all the more sensual in the knowledge that it is expected of them’ (pp. 7–8).

It is in the context of foreign tourists coming to socialist Cuba that the erotic phenomenon of the jineterismo – Daigle’s core research object – emerges. Jineterismo is a Cuban term that denotes practices of jockeying for advantage. In the 1970s, the term had referred to illegal moneychangers, Daigle explains. But the term took on its sexual connotation when foreign tourists came to establish sexual liaisons with beautiful mulatas. In its contemporary Cuban meaning, as Daigle describes it, jineterismo refers to foreign men or women looking for young mulatas or mulatos (jineteras or jineteros). Jineterismo must be understood as an ambiguous erotic phenomenon. Daigle emphasizes that jineteras identify themselves as neither pure lovers nor prostitutes. The sexual liaison with foreign tourists – typically married, often Italian, men – is not exclusively finance driven. And it tends to involve genuine love and solidarity. The foreign tourist usually, but not exclusively, acts as a lover. He typically provides the jinetera, who may also be married, with gifts, clothing, jewelry, television, and restaurant meals. Sometimes he helps to support her family financially as well. Many of the jinetera relationships that Daigle describes are quite durable. Often foreign tourists return to Cuba, to be with their jinetera, for love or for indulging in an erotic sphere that is virtually nonexistent in their home country. Many of the jineteras Daigle has interviewed dream of leaving Cuba with their foreign tourist.

The point of Daigle’s research is that the mulata has come to the fore once again to trouble Cuba’s socialist project in the form of the jinetera (p. 232). ‘The sexuality of black and mulata women is tacitly accepted as dangerous in and of itself, and a threat to social order, to the revolutionary ethic,’ Daigle points out (p. 124). In Cuba, jineteras were outlawed by the Castro regime as ‘sexual dissidents’ (p. 124), whereas the regime lets in tourists in search of jineteras. In other words, by opening its doors for mass tourism, the Castro regime ‘has created a tourist-oriented sexual-affective economy, an economy that is not purely economic but deals also in affect, love, and solidarity’ (pp. 4–5), while it hunts for the jinetera who is the key figure in this ‘sexual-affective economy.’ In the confrontation between the jinetera and the Castro regime, the jinetera is subjected to the ‘raced and gendered structures of prejudice’ that the Cuban Revolution had promised to wipe out (p. 108). ‘Mulata sexuality is read as deviant and troublesome, requiring police intervention,’ Daigle notes, which enables the exercise of despotic power through and above the law (p. 141). When mulatas are seen in the company of foreigners, the regime identifies them as prostitutes who are to be rehabilitated into ‘good socialists.’ Daigle points out reports of police violence and arbitrary arrests of mulata women, based on their style of dress and skin color. Jineteras are subject to extortion and sexual abuse by the police (pp. 25–26). Thousands of jineteras are detained in rehabilitation centers, where they face all forms of mistreatment, abuse, and hunger. One of Daigle’s interviewees, a jinetera, describes such centers as ‘concentration camps’ (p. 123).

Given such regime violence, it cannot be said that the jineterismo signals an erotic renaissance in Cuba. Far from it. For the Castro regime, the erotic is a rupturing force that sabotages its rationalization schemes. Daigle shows that in the wake of Cuba opening up for mass tourism, the Cuban government has created a new category of the mulata – a beautiful outlaw available for governmental intervention, rehabilitation, and practices of sexual abuse and other forms of violence (p. 23). And Daigle explains that this state violence is inspired by socialism. The liaison between the enchanting mulata and the wealthy white man, made all the more visible and objectionable by the racial difference between them, makes the jinetera problematic for the Castro regime (p. 228). Within the confinements of the regime, the erotic sphere is closed for the jinetera. The erotic sphere, ultimately the body of the mulata, becomes a site of jinetera resistance to the Cuban government. Daigle’s analysis of the politics of the body is a story of young Cubans ‘using sex, sexuality, affect, and even love as tools of resistance’ (p. 181). Jineteras and jineteros deploy their sexualities in opposition to a regime that, unlike foreign tourists, denies them a measure of personal independence, let alone freedom. Jineteras and jineteros, typically good looking and fit (p. 60), are filled with erotic potentials. Yet, by instrumentalizing their sexuality into a tool of resistance, they cannot transfigure their sexual desire into a cultural inventiveness that has the potential to rupture the Castro regime. Jineteras are incapable of threatening the Cuban Revolution. As Daigle puts it, the jineteras’ resistance, through the use of their mulata sexuality, is limited to the pursuit and enjoyment of ‘a life other than that intended by power’ (p. 216).

Like Daigle’s From Cuba with Love, Zhang’s The Impotence Epidemic is a most intriguing book about socialism’s anti-eroticism. More than Daigle, Zhang discusses at length socialism’s attack on the erotic sphere. Zhang explains that in China under Maoism ‘the desire for individual sexual pleasure was regarded as antithetical to the collectivistic ethos of revolution’ (p. 42). He points out that Maoism provided anti-erotic sex education. In such education, sexual desires, and indulgence in sex, were regarded as illegitimate expressions of ‘the decadent lifestyle of the bourgeois class’ (p. 39). Maoist sex education enforced constraints on feelings of love. It made the Chinese internalize ‘unauthorized feelings’ (p. 66) – feelings that a good socialist would always repress. Based on this type of socialism, some Chinese men with strong sexual desires, who failed to repress their lustiness, came to request castration. As Zhang explains, ‘in the context of China in the early 1970s, self-castration had a direct relationship to sexual moralism and the state’s tight control of sexuality, reflecting the negative terms in which desire was interpreted’ (p. 44). Zhang provides many examples of how Maoism crushed the erotic sphere in China, through ‘the collective ownership of the body’ (p. 60). He explains how under Maoism, schools had ‘the no dating rule’ (p. 57) in order to enforce socialist school discipline. The danwei (work unit) and hukou (household registration) systems physically separated couples, thereby sexually repressing married workers (p. 24). In Maoist China, ‘family concerns could in no way override “revolutionary needs” ’ (p. 57). Married couples were allowed to see each other one month a year. During revolutionary upheavals, such as the Cultural Revolution, ‘married couples were given only fourteen days to spend together (this included travel time)’ (p. 54) annually. Often workers were in fact married but had been physically separated from their spouses for more than 20 years (p. 54). In sum, the playful, unpredictable Eros was Maoism’s worst enemy.

When the post-Maoist regime enforced the one-child policy in the early 1980s, Zhang explains, it ‘reengineered Chinese sexuality in such a way that concern had shifted away from reproduction’ (p. 33) and to sexual enjoyment (p. 24). It is in this context that the so-called ‘impotence epidemic’ developed in China – Zhang’s key research object. In Zhang’s ethnomethodological inquiry, impotence is understood as a social, familial, intercorporeal, and gendered event of post-Maoist China. The widespread impotence of Chinese men today must be understood as ‘a disturbance resulting from multiple forces of social transformation,’ (p. 12), with the male body responding to stressful social ruptures. Zhang refers to the ‘impotence epidemic’ because with the ‘reengineering of Chinese sexuality’ so many Chinese men, old and young, have sought medication for impotence. Given widespread media interest and the rapid development of post-Maoist clinics specialized in treating sexual problems, impotence classifies as an ‘epidemic.’ Although at first sight China’s post-Maoist impotence epidemic may seem a real catastrophe (i.e., the end of erotic history), Zhang emphasizes that this unerotic phenomenon must be seen as something filled with erotic potential: ‘the willingness and urge to seek medical help to satisfy sexual desire represents a positive orientation’ (p. 13). He explains that the erotic significance of the impotence epidemic should not be underestimated: ‘we could even call the impotence epidemic “a contagion of desire.” It is one of the most profound changes in recent Chinese history’ (p. 15).

In Daigle’s From Cuba with Love, the failure of the Cuban Revolution is manifested in the persistence of the prerevolutionary erotic figure of the mulata. In The Impotence Epidemic, it is the continuation and increased popularity of prerevolutionary traditions, Taoism’s traditional Chinese medicine in particular, that reveals the failure of Chinese socialism. Zhang explains that Maoism delegitimized traditional Chinese medicine (p. 38). Sexual problems were treated as urological issues by medical specialists. In post-Maoist China, in 1983, traditional (i.e., Taoist) Chinese medicine facilities for treating impotence (called nanke [men’s medicine]) were established. These came to operate next to (typically commercialized, profit making) urology departments (pp. 29, 191–192). Whereas the medical specialists of the urology departments treat impotence as a biological, fundamentally unerotic problem, nanke takes a holistic approach. Traditional Chinese medicine includes an immaterialist, erotic focus on desire, potency, and vitality, which in Taoism are invested with a religious (pagan) and moral significance. As Zhang explains, ‘according to Chinese medicine, potency is not only the ability to get an erection but also an index of a man’s general health and of the fullness of his vitality’ (p. 33). Impotence, from this ancient Chinese perspective, is not so much a biological issue of producing semen as an erotic concern of the bodily and spiritual loss – or strengthening – of vitality (jing). Zhang points at the persistence of the Taoist ethos in post-Maoist China. Many Chinese men seek help for their impotence problems because they are concerned about their loss of vitality, as well as about the moral implications of such a loss. For the loss of jing, a spiritual life force or lustful drive at work in the body, implies moral degradation (p. 145).

This is the main reason why, according to Zhang, Viagra did not provide a solution to Chinese impotence. ‘Viagra did not sell as well as expected in China, because of the specific understanding among many Chinese men and women that sexual potency was not just an ability to get an erection but a measure of vitality as a whole,’ Zhang explains (p. 167). From a Taoist point of view, a Viagra-induced erection, the product of materialist science, would harm the fullness of the life force of jing (p. 181). Furthermore, Zhang points at the continuation of folkloristic myths in Chinese society that kept Chinese men from taking Viagra: ‘a good number of Chinese emperors had died at relatively young ages supposedly because they took chunyao [herbs that increase the level of sexual hormones] and overindulged in sex’ (p. 181). But the main failure of Viagra was, Zhang stresses, that it relied on modern medicine in its one-sided understanding of impotence as ‘a neurovascular event’ (p. 200). The impotence epidemic in China, Zhang convincingly demonstrates, is a social event generated by post-Maoist reengineering of Chinese sexuality, in a context of regime reforms and rapid societal transformations that correspond with the opening of the Chinese economy. ‘The demand for more and better sex’ (p. 20), ‘re-stratification’ (p. 74), the risk of ‘being laid off’ (p. 80), and a new ‘business culture’ (which includes heavy drinking and adultery; pp. 126, 148) are but a few reasons Zhang provides to support his argument that multiple frustrations prevented many Chinese men from developing intercorporeal intimacy of love with Chinese women.

With all this Chinese impotence, it cannot be said that the post-Maoist reengineering of Chinese sexuality has inaugurated an erotic reawakening in China. Far from it. Love does not rule in China. Although the shift from the Maoist repression of sexual desire to the post-Maoist sexual enjoyment, supported by traditional Chinese medicine, certainly contains erotic potentials, the economic and familial struggles of everyday Chinese existence, Zhang demonstrates, continue to produce erotic deficits. The daily life struggles of post-Maoist existence are such that sexual desire is not transfigured into cultural inventiveness. In post-Maoist China, body (desire), mind (imagination), and social world (intimacy) are left unconnected. In China, the body, Zhang explains, is exhausted and poisoned (mainly by the alcohol consumed during business dinners), it has become ‘the site of business competition at the cost of seminal essence’ (p. 149). In China, with all its industrialism, the imagination is most unpoetic, which, combined with erotic ignorance, generates erotic deficits. One of Zhang’s impotent interviewees remarks that his spouse, ‘in twenty-some years of marriage, did not know about orgasm until recently’ (p. 144). According to a doctor Zhang interviewed, ‘men often did not know what to do after the penis entered the vagina’ (p. 207). Many of Zhang’s impotent interviewees learned sex from animals, not from the poets (p. 207). And when it comes to social relationships, post-Maoist conditions of Chinese industrialism are such that few can attain levels of love and intimacy, let alone erotic intimacy. Zhang explains that in a group of 35 impotent men, with an average age of 31 years, many watched pornography, but only nine of them had ever had sexual intercourse in their lives (p. 111).

From Cuba with Love and The Impotence Epidemic are important reminders that, for sociologists, the erotic problem that Daigle and Zhang describe always comes first, before political or economic problems. As Karl Mannheim (cited in Kettler and Meja, 1995: 125) once declared during the crisis years of the 1920s, ‘the economy provides the framework, but the erotic problem, as asceticism shows, is the one most central to humankind.’ The problem of socialism is that it puts other problems before the erotic problem. Given this prioritization of problems, the imagination is destined to become stifled and cultural regress is doomed to set in. Yet, as Daigle’s and Zhang’s ethnomethodological studies uncover, there are different types of socialism. The Cuban Revolution is very different from Maoism or post-Maoism. And Cuban eroticism, with the persistence of its national yet persecuted figure of the sensual mulata, stands in sharp contrast to Chinese impotence. Daigle’s and Zhang’s well-articulated criticisms of Cuban and Chinese socialism’s anti-eroticism should in no way be read as a self-applauding story of victorious Anglo-Saxon capitalism. On the contrary, both scientists are well aware that capitalist regimes also produce erotic deficits. Allan Bloom (1993: 15) has stressed that ‘the de-eroticization of the world’ is typical for all modern societies. The fall of Eros in the West, Bloom (1993: 28) points out, began with the rise of ‘materialistic science’ – and this type of science, positivism in particular, informs both socialist and capitalist projects. Daigle suggests that when it comes to the badly needed reeroticization of the West, Western people have a lot to learn from the Cubans. One of the jineteros she interviewed stresses that Western women are erotically poor. ‘Foreign women don’t know how to move – not on the dance floor and not in bed,’ the jinetero explains (p. 183). And Zhang explains that Western medicine, grounded in materialistic science, deeroticizes the body into a biological entity, whereas traditional Chinese medicine eroticizes the body, with its gaze on jing, the creative life force.