Why Have the Number of Italian clients in Nigeria gone down?

Today I had the opportunity of attending a series of presentation put together by the Tourism Studies Working Group at Berkeley. The series sponsored a speaker, Florence Babb, “Love for Sale: Sex, Sentiment, and Tourism in Contemporary Cuba.” Incredibly insightful, Babb provided an anthropologist's perspective of sex tourism that may also be defined as romantic love. The sex tourist industry developed in the 1990s during Cuba's economic crisis. The question of the day from my own positioning was that there was a notable decrease in Italian tourists, male tourists, in recent years. Historically, throughout the 1990s Italians were primary tourists/sex tourists. The question brought to the table is why? It is evident in this case what Kamala Kempadoo called "push-down, pop-up" where, the government is cracking down on prostitution which leads to it pushing down in some areas and popping up else where, as a theory does not work. Although prostitution is illegal in Cuba, the Cuban government is not cracking down on prostitution. In part, as delineated in the series lecture, it is the government's focus on tourism as a point of increasing the Cuban economy, which includes sex tourism. Thus, the question continues to be, why the decline? My response is that there is a need to utilize a transnational feminist lens, in which we need to look towards Italy to understand this decline.

In order to understand this decline, we must look towards Italy. With the easing of borders, 500,000 women and children are trafficked yearly through European countries, with 50,000 to 70,000 ending up in Italy. In 2004, BBC featured a series on Albanians being trafficked through Italy to western Europe and many eventually ending up in the UK. Most are girls ages 14-18 years old, mainly from Romania, West Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. This suggests that Italians no longer need to leave in order to seek services or if you want to call it "companionship." In May of 2006, Italian police dismantled prostitution rings that brought women from Uruguay under the operation, "Montevideo" reinforces the notion that the Latina may now be found in Italy. The women/girls, 50 of them rescued, were brought through Milan over the past three years. However, the extocization of the Latina is not merely any Latina, but also inclusive of the Afro-Cuban. In Italy there is an increasing demand for Black bodies, where 60 percent of women trafficked in Italy are from Algeria. However, these women are treated differently under dire conditions in contrast to their European counterparts: they earn 40-50% less for sexual services -- this is not suggesting that they get any of their "earnings."

Nonetheless, while all is interesting, one note of comparison that I find useful to share: A significant portion of the talk was dedicated to the notion that the women/girls were not considered prostitutes, and that there is a difference: these girls were looking for love, for possibility of leaving Cuba. However, I would like us to remember, so were many of the women who worked in Korean hostess bars in Korea: they too, were searching for a way out of Korea to "America." While many of them only found another version of the America Town in Korea, only in the U.S., why is it then that the Koreans were prostitutes and the Cubans, women/men in search of love?

The answer to this is multiple, but I hope it will allow us to think about the way differing bodies are racialized in the industry and also to consider how communities themselves endorse through rhetoric/denial. In this space of condoning in Cuba reinscribes a society of also condoning violence in essence, through silences and by calling it "romance".