Summary Of From Cuba With Love

Bibliographical Information
Daigle, Megan. From Cuba with Love: Sex and Money in the Twenty-First Century. University of California Press, 2015.
Summary of the main thesis
In this book, the author seeks to understand how bodies are governed in Cuba, specifically the bodies of young women of certain ethnicities and not others. One of the central concepts that the author explores is jineterismo, as a sexual practice where young Cuban women engage in sexual activities with foreigners, but in a grey area between economic gain, love, and sexual desire (Daigle 12). Thus, using this concept as a backdrop, the author wants to answer the question of why young black or mixed-race women are governed differently by the state (Daigle 12). Indeed, the author

In chapter three, Daigle discusses the actions of women who resist in certain ways the weight and punishment of law enforcement in Cuba by subverting the role of the jinetera and defying institutions (Daigle 120). This idea connects to Nagel's description of racialized, ethnicized and nationalized ideas of womanliness, as young Cuban jineteras are stereotyped, yet they assume these ideas and seek ways to subvert them (Nagel 31). On the other hand, in chapter four the author discusses the role of the Cuba state in enforcing one idea of sexuality, one idea of the Revolution, while socially jineterismo is accepted, the state paints it as deviant (Daigle 156). This matches Nagel's definition of the moral boundaries of the state, which includes sexuality, and the way the state can deem someone deviant, as well as using the punishment of deviance as a form of enforcing the rules of the state and the morality of the nation (Nagel 147). While on the fifth chapter Daigle discusses how young Cubans use their bodies and their sexual practices as jineteras as a form of political resistance, as opposed to traditional forms of activism that are prohibited in that country (Daigle 197). This shows a connection to Nagel's description of globalization and ethnosexual tourism, because this new market allows young Cubans to engage with the

The social construction of ethnicity and its role in people's sexuality, as understood by Nagel, marks the vast differences between two groups that might live in the same geographical space but whose lives are not the same. In the case of Cuba, jineteras live differently than other young Cubans due to their specific intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that marks them a certain way. Therefore, the ideas explored here are useful to apply them in other scenarios where social and cultural differences arise among groups that do understand each other because of