[1] From the late sixteenth century onwards, Havana was a port of call for transatlantic sailing ships, and developed an economy serving the needs of sailors and passengers.
[12] Havana's rapidly expanding urban population in the mid-nineteenth century, a result of the booming tobacco industry, led to colonial officials relocating prostitutes to the margins of the city.
[14] The abolition of slavery in 1886, and Cuba's three liberation wars against Spain, resulted in the migration of significant numbers of Afro-Cuban workers to Havana in search of housing and employment.
[17] In Havana, Cuba during the late 19th century, a group of sex workers who called them Las Horizontales produced a newspaper La Cebolla.
[18] In 1913, President Mario García Menocal announced Cuba's deregulation law, saying that regulated prostitution was "incompatible with ... the spirit of freedom that governs our nation".
[21] The English novelist Graham Greene, writing in his autobiography Ways of Escape, described: "the Shanghai Theatre where for one dollar and twenty-five cents one could see a nude cabaret of extreme obscenity with the bluest of blue films in the intervals.
[23] Tourism had become Cuba's second-largest earner of foreign currency, with around 350,000 visitors per year, and the brothels and bars of Havana catered to Americans visiting on weekend excursions.
[20] The sex industry in 1950s Cuba was primarily based on the provision of sexual "services" by black and mixed race women to predominantly white North American men.
[24] Troops raided the red-light districts of Havana, and rounded up hundreds of women, photographed and fingerprinted them, and required them to have physical examinations.
[23] Transactional sex continued during this period, with some women forming relationships with high-status men, in return for better access to consumer goods.
[28] In the 1970s, some women were independently offering sex in Havana hotels, in exchange for consumer goods,[24] but prostitution remained extremely limited until the early 1990s.
[32] The British-born writer Pico Iyer reported in 1994 that, "Prostitution, which was scarcely visible (if only for security reasons) five years ago, is pandemic now: The tourist hotels are filled with Cuban teenagers reddening their lips with children's crayons".
[35] Prostitution was practiced widely and openly in tourist areas,[36] and was generally tolerated by the police, for the revenue it brought into the country.
[39] Financial need was the primary motivation for people entering prostitution during this time, and Cuba gained a reputation as the "Thailand of the Caribbean".
[41] Prostitution also began to be presented in Cuban films, acting as a metaphor for the downfall of the socialist system and for the island being sold out to foreign tourists and investors.
Cuban laws prohibit the sexual exploitation of girls or boys aged under 15, and those convicted can be sentenced to maximum of 30 years in prison, or the death penalty if there are aggravating factors.
Traffickers recruit Cuban citizens through promises of work abroad, providing fraudulent contracts and immigration documents for a fee, and subsequently coercing these individuals into prostitution to pay off these debts.
The law criminalizes inducement to or benefiting from prostitution, but treats force, coercion, and abuse of power or vulnerability as aggravating factors rather than an integral part of the crime.
At that time, World Health Organization figures put the infection rate at less than 0.1 percent of the population, the lowest in the Western Hemisphere, one-sixth that of the US, and far below that in many neighbouring countries.
[43] Another incentive is the lack of social stigma associated with single male tourists visiting Cuba, in comparison with the better-known sex tourism destinations of Thailand and Cambodia.