dollars they bring in.” All at once, Marquetti looked human and, indeed, rather enthusiastic. “They are very inexpensive,” he said. “They are very educated. They are very young and very pretty. Cuba is a country that attracts tourism for cheap sex,” he said, stopping just short of a wink. Marquetti tried to look grave again. “Since the crisis there has been a negative social impact, but you can’t eliminate it through repressive means.” It’s not like these girls are scattering mattress-price leaflets. “We have to look for other solutions, such as education.” But he’d just said they were educated. “Some sectors of Cuban youth, they view prostitution as a solution to their economic problems.” As for Hiram Marquetti himself, he was selling his report on the Cuban economy—five dollars per copy. Before the revolution, annual per-capita income in Cuba was $374; that’s about $1,978 in current dollars. So Cuba is poorer than it used to be, although the poverty is spread around a little more. Castro’s government is as dishonest as the prerevolutionary government was. The modern corruption involves more greed for power than passion for lucre, but that’s actually worse. And the depraved sex is still available if you can sneak the whores past the elevator operators. Getting more people to sneak whores past elevator operators was, so far, the best the Cuban government had been able to do in terms of a plan to improve the economy. Tourism was supposed to be the salvation now that Soviet aid had vaporized and sugar was selling for less per pound than garden loam. About 700,000 tourists a year were visiting Cuba, an increase of more than 100 percent since 1990. The Cuban government expected foreign companies to invest an additional $2.4 billion in tourist facilities by the year 2000. This would double the number of hotel rooms on the island. And every one of those rooms will be occupied, I predict, by somebody as ticked off as I was. Because Cuba does not quite have the tourism thing figured. When I checked into the Hotel Nacional, I was given the manager’s room, in which he was living. I was given another room. The key card didn’t work. The bellhop went to get another key card. Then the safe didn’t work—no small matter since Americans can’t use credit cards in Cuba and have to conduct all business in cash, an awkward lump of which I was carrying. When I returned from the hotel bar bloated with mojitos, the key card didn’t
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