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Paper short abstract

This paper considers textual articulations of the tourist imaginary in contemporary Cuba.

Paper long abstract

Cuba's economic crisis of the 1990s, following the Soviet bloc collapse and the ongoing US embargo, meant a radical rupture in the direction of its social revolution and forced the strategic growth of the tourist industry in order to generate foreign exchange. Despite the conditions of poverty Cubans endured during the Special Period, the tourism sector was "highly conditioned and structured to meet a tourist's needs - physical, emotional and sexual" (Cabezas, 2006: 509). In Cuba's current touristic exchanges, lack of material resources is often compensated for by the appropriation of other seemingly abundant type of capital - exotic, human, emotional, social, affective - which are marketed as inherent features of the landscape and population. Beyond scholarship's previous focus on sex-for-money encounters (O' Connell Davidson, 1996; Brennan, 2004; Cabezas, 2004) this project aims to explore the complex politics of encounters that operates in contemporary tourism in Cuba, based on discourses of fantasy, sexuality, morality, the exotic, love and human solidarity.