Speaking of the World's Oldest Profession

Yesterday's brouhaha over the Times web page reminded me of something. Distasteful as it is to me that tourists take advantage of a cheap vacation on the backs of an oppressed people, it is the sex tourism that makes me crazy. Men who are overaged, or oversized, or just plain defective travel to Cuba where they have young women for the taking. At one point Iberia Airlines had a promo that showed cartoon mulattas tending to the needs of a baby. Wink, wink, nod, nod.

This all reminds me of another book: Mi Moto Fidel; Motorcycling Through Castro's Cuba. Originally intended to be a travel guide to Cuba, the book winds up being more of a travelogue. To give the author, Christopher Baker, his due, after slipping his minders and motorcycling across the country, he makes a real effort to get to know the real Cuba. He does not seem to belong to the earlier category of men and comes to the correct conclusion about Castro, but it is something earlier in the book that caught my attention.

When he gets to Havana, he hooks up with his girlfriend there, who is trying to get him to commit and take her away. Later in the book, her mother has taken up with an Italian who is going to take both women away. She regrets she will have to leave him. He writes about all this as if they were routine, run of the mill relationships. As I was reading, it was like looking at one of those pictures where another picture is embedded in the lines of the first.

The question that came to my mind, particularly in reference to the Eurosludge that takes advantage of desperate young women, was "Do these men think that in a free society with a robust economy these women would have the time of day for them? I'm not sure. I do know that the human capacity for self-delusion is large.