Clothes Off for Phone Credit

By Pedro Pablo Morejon

HAVANA TIMES – As I was signing into my Facebook account one day, a while ago, I found a friend request from an unknown “lady” that seemed Nordic from her name and appearance. Even so, I thought it might be somebody who knows me through one of the literature groups I’m a member of.

I accepted it like I do with every request or, to be precise, almost every request because I don’t accept people from the far Left.

Anyway, she wrote to me in perfect Cuban Spanish (the girl is from Havana) and gave me an indecent proposal. I could see intimate photos and videos of her, but I’d have to pay, of course.

Payment of a specified amount in the form of a mobile data top-up.

What was she thinking? Did she think I looked like an idiot? Or worse yet, a wanker? That’s what inevitably crossed my mind.

I was quick to respond. I told her in harsh Castellanothat “somebody who has the chance to get free vagina doesn’t need this crap,” I added that “If I don’t pay to screw a prostitute, I’m not going to pay to see her naked.”

Plus, I don’t have money for any of this. Yes, I admit my response was unpolite, that I have too much of an ego.

Havana photo by Juan Suarez

Ever since then, and as if the Law of Attraction were real and worked inversely in my case, I receive one or two similar offers every week. Are they confusing me with some guy from Miami?

Calmer and less proud now, I just reply with a flat-out “No”, remove them from my friend list and that’s that.

The reality is that stripping naked for phone credit has gained a lot of momentum among young Cuban girls, a modus operandi that has been established in these digital and cellphone times.

An army of girls who are willing to offer the view of their splendid flesh, in pictures or videos, to pay for their access to the Internet and phonecalls in a country where these services are charged at abusive rates by an entity that goes by the name ETECSA (Cuba’s state telecommunications company.) and holds a monopoly over telecommunications.

But this isn’t only limited to girls, there are also men who hide behind fake profiles and pretend to be women to scam certain dupes with a level of degradation and lack of manly pride that makes it clear that they no longer conform to prepaid sex like they did in my grandfather’s day. No, now they are going to the extreme of paying for a simple picture.

Just looking at it and not having sex. Behind a screen… the lowest of the low.

But stripping for phone credit is just one of the latest symptoms of Cuba’s social disaster, a cancer that has spread amongst our entire society. Forcing thousands to emigrate in masses nowadays, or so many young Cubans into selling their dignity to get a measly top-up for their phone.

Read more by Pedro Pablo Morejon here.