Our Bodies, Our Barrio: Prostitutes, Racial Conflict, and the City in Early Twentieth Century Cuba

Nowhere is the struggle for freedom greater than over one’s own body. Prostitutes in early-twentieth-century Cuba knew this perhaps better than anyone else. This paper examines the everyday struggles for freedom enacted by black women who worked as prostitutes in one central Cuban city. These women sought to assert control over their bodies in everyday struggles with their clients, neighbors, and urban elites. These claims over their own bodies, by extension, presented a challenge to the increasing marginalization of people of African descent from the central urban space they inhabited—their barrio.

I analyze one instance in which prostitutes orchestrated an uprising to protest the conduct and demands of a prominent sector of their clientele: the American soldiers residing in Cuba during the second American military occupation (1906-1909). These soldiers, predominantly white, entered a predominantly black neighborhood to buy sex from women of color. At the same time, they demanded that the black male residents vacate their own homes. This paper seeks to uncover the gendered and spatialized dynamics of racial conflict, specifically, the role women of color played in the re-claiming their urban space. I investigate the ways in which black men and women’s struggles for freedom and access to urban space intersected over control of the female body.