She is tall, thin and fragile. Her name is Barbarita, she lives in the Palatino neighborhood and is Her father died when she was three, trying to reach the shores of the United States, and her mother is an alcoholic. From the way she expresses herself it seems unlikely she passed the fourth grade. Tonight Barbarita was waiting for Dayana and Lisandra, two friends age 21 and 16 respectively, who soon arrived.
The three of them in front of my eyes gave the lie to the official statistics. Dayana and Lisandra are cousins and live in El Cerro where they have been providing sexual services since they were The younger girl is called la Yegua the mare and the older Tetris , like the computer game. The increase in tourist arrivals has caused a surge in prostitution.
But below age 16, these are still cases of child prostitution. Three days earlier in the Monoco wifi zone, I had met Leydis, an exhuberant mixed-race girl from the San Peditro neighborhood in Santiago de Cuba. I wanted my mother to give me a little party for my 14 th birthday, I was mad for it.
A week later, she went to bed with an year-old Cuban, the son of a businessman. She got pregnant and was thrown out of the house and went to live with her grandmother. She had just turned Leydis is embarrassed, but told me her story after a beer. Her situation brought her to Havana, where she settled in the home of an uncle without a residence permit.
And you see, today they fined me 1, pesos and they seized from me soaps and tubes of Colgate toothpaste worth CUC. Here, in the Monaco neighborhood, there are rentals nearby and a lot of people with money. This was the response to a United Nations report which placed Cuba among the countries with the most cases of sexual exploitation of children in the world β along with Argentina, Brazil, Sri Lanka and Chile β while the authorities continue to close their eyes to the evidence.
