After comparing various understandings of informal engagements between tourists and Cubans – those of the persons involved, of the Cuban authorities, and of scholars and commentators – you tease out three idealised scenarios. Can you describe these three lines of interpretation and their meanings?

The three main idealised scenarios portray Cuba and Cuban people alternatively (1) as virtuous victims spoiled by the neocolonial forces in tourism and their capitalist drive toward commoditisation and exploitation; (2) as cunning, subversive tricksters, resisting and taking advantage of these same forces; or (3) as mimetic agents that embrace tourism and tourists in a claim for equal membership in a shared world.

The first scenario exemplifies what we might call the “tourism impact” model that prevailed in social science critiques of tourism in the 1970s and 1980s and which is still very popular among tourism critics and commentators, including, in the Cuban case, foreign tourists and Cuban authorities. In this view, Cuba and Cuban people are portrayed as relatively innocent, powerless, and negatively affected by the forces of tourism and the vices and corruption that the affluent and powerful tourists bring with them. Accordingly, tourism appears here mainly as a source of exploitation that is grounded on striking inequalities and that commercialises difference, intimacy, and the Other.

The second is an approach that emerged among scholars particularly from the 1980s, as exemplified by a new wave of studies emphasising local people’s agency and active involvement in tourism. Criticising the view of local populations as passive targets of tourism (the “impact” model), scholars highlighted local agency, resistance and strategising in the face of affluent, but ultimately easily duped, tourists. What is idealised in this case is the image of cunning locals that, in spite of their subaltern position, are able to trick and deceive the structurally advantaged tourists. Tourists are actors for which academics and the public have traditionally displayed little sympathy, which makes it all the more appealing to expect disadvantaged local populations to rightfully “milk” them of some of their wealth. The risk, however, is to move from the reductionism that sees hosts as victims (scenario 1) to one that sees them primarily as shrewd economic agents, a perspective easily imbued by romantic ideals of resistance (scenario 2).

Going beyond economic spheres of action and reasoning, the third approach takes seriously Cuban and tourists’ idealised claims and aspirations for “true”, disinterested, long-term relationships, as exemplified by the idioms of friendship, love and marriage. This third type of idealism points toward Cubans’ mimetic engagement with tourists, and does not promote images of local resistance but shows instead their embracing of a more globalist orientation to the world, one that downplays difference and sees intimacy as a pathway to reduce inequalities.

You reflect on the copresence and competing rationales of these three scenarios, focusing on the conditions of their emergence and assessing their epistemological, moral and political implications. This is a very ambitious programme. Can you share your main conclusions?

A first important conclusion relates to the impossibility of capturing intimate relationships in touristic Cuba relying only on one of the three approaches outlined above. My findings suggest that all three approaches are at play, and show their complementary usefulness for scholarly conceptualisations of tourism. Scholars can strengthen their analyses by being reflexively aware of the moral underpinnings of each approach, the conditions that explain its emergence, and its effects on the realities they endeavour to describe: what do these approaches show, and what, on the contrary, do they obscure or excessively simplify and reduce?

To give one example, we may consider that the first approach, interpreting tourism as a form of neocolonialism and imperialism, has the merit of highlighting the broader structural inequalities into which tourism development is entangled, its historical continuities, and of not losing sight of who tends to have the upper hand in the encounters and relationships that tourism generates, i.e., foreign tourists. Such an approach finds useful refinements in contemporary political economy approaches to tourism.

The second line of interpretation, emphasising Cubans’ agency and local resistance to global forces and inequalities, has the advantage of moving us beyond excessively schematic, top-down and narrow views of domination and exploitation that leave little room for recognising people’s margins of manoeuvring and agency. It thus enables us to appreciate and account for Cubans’ sophisticated techniques, deception strategies and clever resistance in taking advantage of tourists, making for a subtler analysis of power relations. An important risk in this line of interpretation, however, is to make agency coincide with the model of rational economic action and with Western constructions of the person as a liberal, autonomous individual. In this sense, the epistemological implication is that in trying to be critical of the vision of host populations as powerless victims of tourism, we end up producing a reverse image – from domination to resistance – that makes it equally difficult for us to recognise alternative motives and drives in people’s conduct.

And yet alternative views of politics, morality and agency did emerge in intimate encounters between tourists and Cubans. For my Cuban research participants, being cast as powerless victims or as cunning tricksters limited longer-term prospects of intimate relationships with tourists. Both views highlighted differences, reinforced divides and ended up reducing their attempts to create intimate connections with visitors to dejected calls for help, or equally economically driven forms of emotional labour and tactical instrumentalisation. So, besides these two possibilities, my fieldwork among Cuban men and women engaging informally with foreign tourists led me to take seriously their drive to be at one with the foreign tourists and to share a common world with them; to recognise their desire for membership in a more global society, beyond Cuba, from which many of them felt excluded.

Ultimately, the article thus shows that each of the three approaches relies, often implicitly, on specific conceptions of agency, intentionality and power, and enables the emergence of certain subject formations and self-other relations, while obstructing others. Uncovering ethnographically and via a selective review of the literature these competing interpretations serves to problematise them, showing the way they relate to one another and teasing out their effects. The conclusion suggests that rather than simply replacing one approach with another, or establishing which is the best one, it is important to pay attention to their respective conditions of emergence; to who is using them, when, and for which purpose; and to our responsibility and complicity, as social scientists studying these phenomena, in reproducing or criticising one or the other.

You write that “the expectations, desires, and moral underpinnings that inform our findings and interpretative horizons resonate with those of the people we study”. How and why is this so?

The article focuses on resonances in approaches and perspectives to highlight what is potentially at stake in such convergences and commonalities, and what this may mean for the people and phenomena we study.

Let me exemplify this with a concrete example of such convergence, and what it could mean for the Cuban men and women I worked with. The first and second scenarios, in spite of their differences in apprehending Cubans’ agency in relation to tourism, seem to take for granted both that Cubans belong in Cuba and that their loyalties are (or ought to be) oriented toward their communities. The view of them as victims, and the correlated approach of tourism in terms of its negative impact, take as normative benchmark a cohesive Cuban community and nation to which Cuban citizens belong and contribute, and one that is best left untouched by foreign influence. By positing them as cunning strategists who instrumentalise tourists to their own advantage, the second perspective tends to imply that relations with foreign visitors are geared at benefitting Cubans’ (more) “real” life behind the scenes and fabrications of tourism, the “backstage” communities where their “true(r)” intimacies (ought to) find expression.

This is where the views of scholars and of the Cuban authorities may align, in a shared moral assumption and common desire to see “their” community either sheltered from the pernicious effects of tourism, of which it is a victim (first scenario), or as a cohesive body that can take skilful advantage of tourism without being disrupted by it (second scenario). But this is not where the Cuban men and women I worked with – their narratives, practices and relationships with tourists – always pointed to. Escaping these lines of interpretations, my Cuban interlocutors’ drive to reach toward the tourists’ world, their claims and efforts to establish serious and long-term relations with foreign visitors and life outside Cuba, disrupt the ideal of a Cuban community (from family to nation) to which Cubans “naturally” (ought to) belong and owe allegiance. This third scenario reveals how the other two implicitly reiterate and reinforce normative equations between community, nation, belonging, and allegiance. In Cuba, such equation resonates particularly well with a nationalist stance that sees tourism as something eminently external to the country, either disruptive of its local moralities, ideological foundations, and assumed solidarities, and/or something to be strategically taken advantage of as an economic resource. Such is the view of some representatives of the Cuban authorities, for instance, for whom no “real” intimate relationships could ever exist between Cubans and tourists. Such views, as the article shows, are highly problematic in that they are unable to account for a range of other expectations, desires, and moral underpinnings that these intimate relations bring into play, and which scholars must also be able to retrace and understand.

Your conclusions draw on huge ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Cuba between 2005 and 2016. How did you proceed?

Since the 1980s, scholars of tourism have been reflecting on the uncomfortable similarities between tourists and ethnographers. My ethnographic work in Cuba was no exception to the sort of ambiguities in positioning that characterise fieldwork in some tourist destinations, where the identification of any foreigner as tourist can be very strong and resilient. The first days I spent walking around tourist areas of Havana, in February 2005, the Cubans I encountered did see me mainly as a tourist. This was a challenge to which I responded with variably successful attempts to negotiate and shift my position. And my position tended to change, or at least assume other shades, after an initial exchange and explanation of my research and the purpose of my stay. No doubts that coming back to Cuba year after year and for long stretches of time helped in that. After over ten years of seeing the same Cuban men and women (and some tourist men and women too, as I was not the only one coming back regularly), I can say that we have become friends, and that such intimacy has greatly facilitated the sharing of our reciprocal thoughts, feeling, preoccupations and aspirations. Interestingly, on numerous occasions during fieldwork, I ended up acting as a sort of confidant for Cubans I met: a complicit outsider with whom they felt comfortable discussing their more intimate feelings, doubts and anxieties about their connections with foreign tourists, without, for instance, having to fear their Cuban peers’ cynical remarks about becoming “too soft” or sentimental. This is something that also happened with tourists, particularly men, with whom I occasionally assumed a similar role, enabling some to move beyond the prevailing narratives in moments of tourist sociability. It was also the recognition of the significance of these moments that heightened my awareness of the important ways in which the context of enunciation, and the moral expectations weighting on the protagonist at stake (such as the presence of peers), could shape accounts and assessments of encounters and relations in the tourism realm.

The variety of situations and registers of conversations in which I became involved during fieldwork – from the most transitory auto-ethnographic moments to the more prolonged and confidential relationships – ultimately gave me access to touristic encounters and relationships from a multitude of perspectives. It is precisely this diversity of fieldwork engagements that enabled me to remain sensitive to a wide range of enactments and interpretations of these encounters, and to tease out, as I do in the article, their competing approaches and interpretations. The article is in this sense informed by the difficulties I encountered during fieldwork in trying to make sense of the multiple, often paradoxical, ways of experiencing and interpreting touristic encounters and relations in Cuba. A key challenge was how to produce an anthropological perspective that could account for the different views and interpretations of the Cuban authorities and of my tourist and Cuban research participants, without simply privileging and adopting one of these views in my analysis.

The touristic imagery of Cuba tends to emphasise the sensuality attached to this Caribbean destination. Is this still a reality?

Indeed, this is one of the longstanding stereotypes characterising Cuba as a tourist destination. Reflecting on these stereotypical formations, scholars have underlined their continuities with the slave and colonial past of the island, exemplified by the persistent image of the “mulatta woman” (la mulata) as the illicit lover of white men. These considerations converge with broader assessments of the links between racist and colonial constructions of black women as “naturally hot” and promiscuous, and contemporary developments of sex tourism in the Caribbean. Besides the eroticisation of mulatas and black women, stereotypes of primitive black male potency are likewise said to lure female (sex) tourists to several Caribbean countries. The reproduction of racial stereotypes explains here the attraction of the Caribbean as a tourist destination where sex is deemed easy and even a natural ingredient of the holiday experience.

Is this caricatural portrayal evolving? And can your article help correct such idealisation?

While scholars are certainly right in emphasising continuities in the persistence of racial stereotypes from colonial times to the present, the thorough understanding of the conditions under which such representations emerge and of the specific uses to which they are put remains an important avenue for research. A first observation stemming from my own research indicates indeed a certain evolution in this caricatural portray: the stereotype of the “hot” Cuban is often actualised in a more culturalist/nationalist vein in interactions with tourists, in the sense that it can easily be applied to all Cubans regardless of gender or racial attribution. During fieldwork, I was repeatedly confronted with Cuban men and women praising their amazing sexual skills to foreign visitors, encouraging them to “let go” and indulge in the exceptional sensuality and sexuality of Cuban people. But besides sex, there were also care and romance, which were important relational idioms especially when the goal was to establish long-term intimate relations with tourists. I realised that my Cuban interlocutors could invest an incredible amount of time and effort in cultivating relationships with tourists, and that such experience also helped turning them into extremely sociable, seductive and charming persons, in ways that went well beyond any superficial image of the “hot” Cuban as just another tourist fantasy. Put simply, it could be said that there was more than a superficial sexual stereotype at play here, and that at stake was also the cumulative reservoir of skills, competences and sensitivities that Cubans developed in their intimate relations with tourists.

We may therefore argue that my Cuban interlocutors were not so much resisting the caricature, but more likely appropriating it, trying to tailor and expand its meaning and potential effects, and turning it into an asset that could facilitate the establishment of relations with foreigners. A key aspiration for many of the Cuban men and women I worked with was precisely to establish long-term, life-changing relationships that went beyond exceptional “tourist time”, engagements in which they wanted their emotional involvement and commitment to be taken seriously.

The article shows the importance of taking such commitments seriously. It highlights the risk that in limiting ourselves to the other two scenarios, we reproduce the most reductive side of the “hot” Cuban caricature and neglect my Cuban interlocutors’ efforts to work over it and change its meanings in ways they deemed more beneficial and gratifying.

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Full citation of the article:
Simoni, Valerio. “Approaching Difference, Inequality, and Intimacy in Tourism: A View from Cuba.” Journal of Anthropological Research 74, no. 4 (Winter 2018). doi:10.1086/699942.

Related information:
Dr Simoni’s book Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba (Berghahn Books, 2016) has just won the 2018 Nelson Graburn Book Prize awarded by the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group (ATIG) of the American Anthropological Association.

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Interview by Marc Galvin, Research Office.