From Cuba with Love deals with love, sexuality, and politics in contemporary Cuba. In this beautiful narrative, Megan Daigle explores the role of women in Cuban political culture by examining the rise of economies of sex, romance, and money since the early 1990s. Daigle draws attention to the violence experienced by young women suspected of involvement with foreigners at the hands of a moralistic state, an opportunistic police force, and even their own families and partners.
Investigating the lived realities of the Cuban women (and some men) who date tourists and offering a unique perspective on the surrounding debates, From Cuba with Love raises issues about women’s bodies–what they can or should do and, equally, what can be done to them. Daigle’s provocative perspective will make readers question how race and politics in Cuba are tied to women and sex, and the ways in which political power acts directly on the bodies of individuals through law, policing, institutional programs, and social norms.
Megan Daigle is a postdoctoral fellow at the Gothenburg Centre for Globalization and Development.
"Megan Daigle’s examination of Cuban sexual desire transported me to a world about which I knew little. With vivid stories, crisp writing, a unique ethnographic style, innovative methods, and precise theoretical analysis, she offers a provocative and visceral picture of sex work in Cuba."—Naeem Inayatullah, editor of Autobiographical International Relations
"Daigle is to be commended for her determination to go beyond the all-too-familiar ways of addressing a subject that is often treated casually, in fleeting journalistic visits to Cuba, or stereotypically, arising from a priori conceptions. Instead, her refreshingly different and welcome approach is not to condemn (either the system or the people involved) but rather to understand and explain."—Antoni Kapcia, Centre for Research on Cuba, University of Nottingham
"Drawing the reader in from the first sentence, Daigle’s book delicately weaves theory and storytelling. Counterintuitively reading agency and possibility through the lives and stories of the jinetera, Daigle tells a compelling story full of political insights about gender, race, and colonial power and the complexities of contemporary Cuba."—Marysia Zalewski, Head of the School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen
296 pp.6 x 9Illus: 21
9780520282971$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Jan 2015