Since I was nine years old I lived in a town that, still now, is somehow charming: Amancio Rodríguez, horrible name, imposed by the Revolution´s euphoria, something like a tribute for the martyr who sacrificed himself in front of the Workers´ Union. But before that it had another name, Francisco (also a horrific name) because that was the name of the sugar mill´s owner. It used to be a famous town, especially for its carnivals, “the best carnivals in Cuba”, people said, and because Benny Moré immortalized it in that song “Francisco Guayabal”, but it was also a town with such a bad luck that, after the Triumph of the Revolution, it assumed the new name, so it turned to be a common place, unknown.
When I visit my town I feel the nostalgia of the man who returns and starts discovering, sadly, that nothing is as big and beautiful as it used to be. Maybe because the eyes of a boy perceive everything smaller. Maybe because the eyes of a boy are blinded to certain phenomena, to certain ugliness of life. The last time I was there, sitting on a marble bench that the municipal government had planted at both sides of the main avenue, in the middle of such destruction and confusion, I was surprised at the fact that, in less than an hour, one after the other, six tourism automobiles passed through with their tourists and their respective jineteras. In such a dirty town, with broken streets, are peeping those luxury cars raising up mountains of dust. It is an aberrant contrast with the tractors that go along the avenue with that unbearably, beautiful noise. It is a contrast the peaceful face of the foreigner locked into the air-conditioned Toyota with the weather-beaten face of the peasant driving a Belorussian Yum. I suppose (I say this to myself to put sadness away) that it happens normally in every town. I suppose that it is not an exclusive case of Amancio, that all along the island those characters are showing off and that, in a small town, a jinetera is a public personage with certain notoriety and resonance. And then it happens to me the usual thing, that is, I go back to my childhood. Everything I see in Amancio takes me back to my childhood.
When I was a boy there were no jineteras. At least there was not that we know today as jinetera. By the time, the ships that usually docked in the Guayabal harbor (located 18 kilometers away from Amancio) were, of course, Soviet ships, but there were also Greek and, above all, Philippines. It looks like we were so used to the Soviets, they were so close to us, that the ones who really called the attention of the settlers of the fishing town and Amancio were the Philippines. They were weird in terms of features, very weird. Half Chinese, half Indian, too weird, too much contrast. Being a child, in the beach, I dared to say some words in English to a Philippine and he replied with an English phrase I now remember imperfect. That was the time when my professor Graciela used to punish me at her house and I started to become interested in “the enemy´s language”, just because I used to be bored during the punishment. And by that time there were women who used to offer their favors to those men, who were foreigners, although they didn´t go there to receive those favors, they used to go because they were sailors but, of course, they liked women and, of course, they used to leave one on each harbor. Just a cliché.
Prostitution is a phenomenon as antique as mankind, but that was really an event. We used to call those women filipinas, no matter if they were hanging around with a Soviet or a Greek guy. I remember them walking along the Guayabal main street, one of the most beautiful streets I ever saw, stretching beside the sea with a shadow of pines, that before the last hurricanes devastated the street and almost all the town. I remember them wearing denim shorts (very short indeed) and the hair usually dyed to look like blond. I remember them walking along the Amancio avenue, which I always compare with 23 Street in Havana. I remember them. I still remember them.
And still now, the Guayabal street should be, despite de hurricanes, a beautiful street, and still the avenue of Amancio will look like 23 Street, but those filipinas have nothing to do with today´s jineteras. The filipinas, the predecessors, received no sympathy from the people, they were not well thought of. In fact, when people called them filipinas was in a derogatory way. They used to have sex with those men but not for money, we have to remember that by the time the dollar currency was penalized and to have one was a crime as serious as to kill a cow. In return they used to receive soaps, perfumes, clothes and even apples. They brought those things in the ships, or were bought in a little store set for them in the village. The filipinas did not walk by the streets with authoritarian touch, with air of superiority. Nobody was dying to greet them. But that was another time. By then, my mother was a teacher, a respectable person in the neighborhood and no filipina could show off in front of her. In that respect they were modest, decent. Nothing to do with most of their predecessors, the jineteras, who feel a privileged class in the scenario of shortages and poverty that suffer the Cuban people since socialism collapsed, who find themselves lucky when sitting in a Toyota or a Hyundai next to a tourist who can be in their country a professor or a simple taxi driver; the jineteras, at least most of them and here I don´t want to be radical, are vulgar, marginal, ignorant and they flaunt that ignorance and hold it like a weapon, they raise it like a flag.
When I was in high school there were some girls (older than me) who were filipinas and then, as time passed by, turned into jineteras. It´s plain dialectics. When I was in high school, during the lessons of Marxism-Leninism, I learned the difference between Imperialism and Capitalism, that the first constitutes a superior stage of the second, and therefore it was a merciless, cruelest system. One day, when prostitution is deeply studied in Cuba, someone will have to write: “The jineteras, superior stage of the filipinas”.
Sitting in a marble bench by the avenue of Amancio, the town where I grew up, I kept on looking at those tourism cars peeping by. They are like diamonds in the middle of a pigsty, a spaceship in an African jungle. Then, suddenly, Amancio came to my mind like a beggar who asks for pennies and wears in his wrist a golden Patek Phillippe.
When I visit my town I feel the nostalgia of the man who returns and starts discovering, sadly, that nothing is as big and beautiful as it used to be. Maybe because the eyes of a boy perceive everything smaller. Maybe because the eyes of a boy are blinded to certain phenomena, to certain ugliness of life. The last time I was there, sitting on a marble bench that the municipal government had planted at both sides of the main avenue, in the middle of such destruction and confusion, I was surprised at the fact that, in less than an hour, one after the other, six tourism automobiles passed through with their tourists and their respective jineteras. In such a dirty town, with broken streets, are peeping those luxury cars raising up mountains of dust. It is an aberrant contrast with the tractors that go along the avenue with that unbearably, beautiful noise. It is a contrast the peaceful face of the foreigner locked into the air-conditioned Toyota with the weather-beaten face of the peasant driving a Belorussian Yum. I suppose (I say this to myself to put sadness away) that it happens normally in every town. I suppose that it is not an exclusive case of Amancio, that all along the island those characters are showing off and that, in a small town, a jinetera is a public personage with certain notoriety and resonance. And then it happens to me the usual thing, that is, I go back to my childhood. Everything I see in Amancio takes me back to my childhood.
When I was a boy there were no jineteras. At least there was not that we know today as jinetera. By the time, the ships that usually docked in the Guayabal harbor (located 18 kilometers away from Amancio) were, of course, Soviet ships, but there were also Greek and, above all, Philippines. It looks like we were so used to the Soviets, they were so close to us, that the ones who really called the attention of the settlers of the fishing town and Amancio were the Philippines. They were weird in terms of features, very weird. Half Chinese, half Indian, too weird, too much contrast. Being a child, in the beach, I dared to say some words in English to a Philippine and he replied with an English phrase I now remember imperfect. That was the time when my professor Graciela used to punish me at her house and I started to become interested in “the enemy´s language”, just because I used to be bored during the punishment. And by that time there were women who used to offer their favors to those men, who were foreigners, although they didn´t go there to receive those favors, they used to go because they were sailors but, of course, they liked women and, of course, they used to leave one on each harbor. Just a cliché.
Prostitution is a phenomenon as antique as mankind, but that was really an event. We used to call those women filipinas, no matter if they were hanging around with a Soviet or a Greek guy. I remember them walking along the Guayabal main street, one of the most beautiful streets I ever saw, stretching beside the sea with a shadow of pines, that before the last hurricanes devastated the street and almost all the town. I remember them wearing denim shorts (very short indeed) and the hair usually dyed to look like blond. I remember them walking along the Amancio avenue, which I always compare with 23 Street in Havana. I remember them. I still remember them.
And still now, the Guayabal street should be, despite de hurricanes, a beautiful street, and still the avenue of Amancio will look like 23 Street, but those filipinas have nothing to do with today´s jineteras. The filipinas, the predecessors, received no sympathy from the people, they were not well thought of. In fact, when people called them filipinas was in a derogatory way. They used to have sex with those men but not for money, we have to remember that by the time the dollar currency was penalized and to have one was a crime as serious as to kill a cow. In return they used to receive soaps, perfumes, clothes and even apples. They brought those things in the ships, or were bought in a little store set for them in the village. The filipinas did not walk by the streets with authoritarian touch, with air of superiority. Nobody was dying to greet them. But that was another time. By then, my mother was a teacher, a respectable person in the neighborhood and no filipina could show off in front of her. In that respect they were modest, decent. Nothing to do with most of their predecessors, the jineteras, who feel a privileged class in the scenario of shortages and poverty that suffer the Cuban people since socialism collapsed, who find themselves lucky when sitting in a Toyota or a Hyundai next to a tourist who can be in their country a professor or a simple taxi driver; the jineteras, at least most of them and here I don´t want to be radical, are vulgar, marginal, ignorant and they flaunt that ignorance and hold it like a weapon, they raise it like a flag.
When I was in high school there were some girls (older than me) who were filipinas and then, as time passed by, turned into jineteras. It´s plain dialectics. When I was in high school, during the lessons of Marxism-Leninism, I learned the difference between Imperialism and Capitalism, that the first constitutes a superior stage of the second, and therefore it was a merciless, cruelest system. One day, when prostitution is deeply studied in Cuba, someone will have to write: “The jineteras, superior stage of the filipinas”.
Sitting in a marble bench by the avenue of Amancio, the town where I grew up, I kept on looking at those tourism cars peeping by. They are like diamonds in the middle of a pigsty, a spaceship in an African jungle. Then, suddenly, Amancio came to my mind like a beggar who asks for pennies and wears in his wrist a golden Patek Phillippe.
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