Heat and Sex in Havana
Irina Echarry
Victoria fondles her breasts in front of the camera, she pinches them, bites them and caresses them. This is the innocent preamble to the combat she will face. Her opponent? Pleasure.
For more than a half hour (time that the amateur video shooting lasts) Victoria fights with pleasure.
She struggles to satisfy the foreigner that is filming her, she jumps on him, she moves, she smiles at the camera. His penis is shoved in all her orifices…
She might have enjoyed it a lot, but Victoria doesn’t relax. The whole time she’s focused on the camera and the male, concentrating on satisfying him another time. And so it went…
“Cuban pornography!” a friend says, while remarking that in the last photos of naked young woman that he saw, he recognized some of their faces.
I don’t know why he was surprised. It’s true that there’s a pornographic boom in the streets of Havana, but it’s understandable. What’s more, the conditions are favorable for this boom to become something long-lasting.
For many years pornography was seen as a stigma of corrupt capitalist society, something distant from what our leaders expected of us. Its existence today in Cuba comes from the suppressed yearning to find out about what is prohibited, which when uncorked is difficult to stop. That pent-up yearning is aided by the high temperatures. The heat arouses eroticism.
We already know that our climate is suffocating. Sweat discovers the curves and muscles of anyone, no matter how much clothing you wear (which is not so much the case here).
This past month some people were able to enjoy an erotic cinema series, though it occurred to somebody that air conditioning wouldn’t be necessary in the La Rampa cinema. So the audience listened to Marlon Brando moaning while naked in The Last Tango in Paris and was aroused. People (in this case they were men) moved inside the cinema from one row to another, perhaps trying cool themselves off or maybe looking for a little more (human) warmth.
With the arrival into the country of easily handled video cameras, as well as flash memories and hard drives to circulate what’s filmed, this has allowed home pornos to spread at dizzying speed, while the underground production market offers increasingly young woman in the most varied positions.
Today men and women of Havana are giving desire a commercial focus, something that happens in all societies but which in Cuba seemed so very remote.
Human being needs to fantasize, to channel the fetishes we have inside, and there’s nothing better for this than images (be they written, or in photos and videos or live).
If this is going to exist, it would be good that Cuban pornography was less sexist, that the women learn to relax and reach the same degree of satisfaction as the men, in short that they are allowed to seduce for pleasure.
As the very true saying goes, ‘you can’t legislate morality’ — meaning that all attempts to enforce rigid social mores will invariably lead to official hypocrisy and broken lives, with not much to show for it other than the criminalization of many people’s existence. Someone making money from (officially-declared) ‘moral depravity’ is one of the natural outcomes of attempts at enforcing the unenforceable; and thus this pathological praxis leads naturally to commercial — and thus capitalist — relations among all people it touches, even if this is simply the practice and business of prostitution. So it behooves self-declared socialist societies to seriously undertake the *liberation* of human relations — and not its mere, squalid ‘regulation’.
What we have here is the ‘natural’ result of the repression of people’s natural relations. And perhaps there is no ‘perfect’ way to work this pathology thru to the Light — simply the need to work it thru to the Light.