Customer Reviews

Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic

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For anyone with personal experience in countries where flourishing sex industries beckon legions of sex tourists, most of the writing on the subject simply fails to "get it." The guide books, blogs, and web sites of the sex tourists invariably miss or sugarcoat the users' role as exploiters while essentially reveling in the myth of the "happy hooker." At the other extreme, the works that are properly suspicious of sexual relationships across vast economic and cultural divides are invariably too quick to reduce every relationship that has a whiff of money about it to prostitution (often in hyper-moralistic terms). Both camps miss the truth, namely that many of these relationships hover in an economic and romantic gray area where material circumstances and emotional desire are intertwined.

The achievement of "Economies of Desire" is to explore this area in between economics and sex/romance in two concrete cases, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and to show how the various participants construct novel identities and notions of relationships that defy the existing either/or stereotypes. While the cases are drawn from these two countries, anyone with experience elsewhere will readily appreciate that similar dynamics operate there too. Importantly, the author never loses sight of the fundamentally exploitative aspect of a global tourist industry, yet manages to reveal both the affluent and the poor as people with human agency and humane feelings. It's a remarkably nuanced and therefore important book.

A serendipitous benefit of the book for me was simply the discussion of the growth of the tourism industry in these two countries. I had wondered how and why the industry arose in Cuba especially, and this book explains that. For others, a serendipitous benefit will be the concluding critical discussion of the limitations of existing human rights instruments to address the moral problems of the global sex trade. I didn't dislike this discussion, or disagree with it. It just wasn't a discussion that particularly interested me.

I resist giving this book the full five stars mainly to alert readers to the presence of some academic jargon in it, as well as a bit too much (to my taste) of telling the reader what will be said later rather than just getting on with the business of saying it. At the same time, there is some labeling of others as "feminists," an in-house practice of label-dropping that I find off-putting. (I don't care if someone is a "feminist" or not. All I care about is what they say.) In short, the book has some of the sins one expects to find in an academic book. However, if you are familiar with these academic excesses you can skim over the occasionally overwritten paragraph or annoying label-dropping and get back to the story and interpretations, which are lucidly presented.

And, will somebody please buy this book and send it to Rush Limbaugh? After he was discovered to have Viagra without a prescription on a return flight from the Dominican Republic . . . well, you guess what he was doing there. The problem with books like this is that the people who should read them don't.