Antonio Garcia Martinez (of Chaos Monkeys fame) recently made a Facebook posting from Havana:
The detailed how-to on how to bring home prostitutes from my Airbnb hostess is worth recording.
I should call her once I know I’m coming home with a ‘chica’, so she can be there to officially register her as ‘visitante nocturno’, which implies taking her identification details and sending them to the state. Once the girl robs me in my sleep, which she’ll inevitably do, the señora will report her to the police, and the full machinery of Cuban state suppression will be engaged to hunt her down. And hunt her they will: the señora reported that a guest of hers had a bottle of expensive cologne stolen, and the police found the girl and returned the cologne. Totalitarianism has certain advantages.
Lastly, Cuban sexual mores are evidently rather less than evangelical. ‘Las chicas…es lo normal,’ she intoned (‘the girls…it’s normal’), punctuated with that resigned shrug common among Habaneros. Note, this is a stately and briskly competent older lady well into her 50s.
I see a five-star Airbnb review in your future, Margarita.
This is consistent with a 2013 Miami Herald story:
easy access to young women willing to ignore age differences — in exchange for as little as $30 for the night.
Today, prostitution may well be the most profitable job in an island where the average monthly salary officially stands at less than $20 and a bottle of cooking oil costs $3.
What if the embargo collapses and it is straightforward to JetBlue to my home town of Boston, for example? Under the Massachusetts child support guidelines, the Cuban tourist who has sex with a local earning $50,180 will get $30 per day ($210 per week; $10,920 per year) for 23 years. If the Cuban tourist can find a partner who earns $250,000 per year, revenue per the guidelines is $40,000 per year ($920,000 over 23 years). (See “American Child Support Profits Without an American Child” within “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage” for how U.S. taxpayers will fund the administrative and legal costs of getting the cash flowing over the border.)
[Nearby Florida has similar laws, but child support ends at age 18 or 19 and the revenue is only about half of what can be obtained in Massachusetts or New York, so the return on investment in a few extra hours of air travel is substantial.]
It seems that some of this already goes on with respect to Canada, though if the biological parents had sex in Cuba rather than in Canada, the Canadian child support formula would not necessarily apply. From Havana Times:
a prostitute in Bayamo who gives birth to a Canadian client’s baby and receives just $100 per month from Canada will live better than the OB/Gyn who delivers the baby.
Readers: What happens when/if Cuba-U.S. travel is completely open?
Related:
- Cuban divorcee moves from Cuba to Florida and seeks modification of child support from $1.50/month to $8,000/month (2001) [but if the pregnancy had occurred in Florida she would have been able to collect at Florida rates even while remaining in Cuba]
- Where New York Times readers don’t want to follow Europe: Legalized prostitution
This “Germany sees rise in fake father scams with immigrants” [1] would be of interest to readers of Philg’s post.
“Some pregnant immigrant women are reported to have paid fake fathers and solicitors as much as €5,000 (£4,356; $5,628) to get paternity registered. Once that is done, the baby automatically becomes a German citizen and the mother has the right to stay.”
But don’t count on child support for those women:
“The fake fathers rarely pay any child support, as many are living off social welfare, ARD reports.”
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40171896
Good catch George A. I sent that one as well to Phil:
German men selling fatherhood to refugee women for cash, say prosecutors
https://www.thelocal.de/20170606/german-men-selling-fatherhood-to-refugee-women-for-cash-say-prosecutors
“The women pay several thousand euros for the recognition. On the other hand, the mainly unemployed men pay nothing to the women for the care of the children, with the state instead being responsible for welfare payments.”
“In some cases we have people who have claimed fatherhood for over ten babies.”
“But the prosecutors currently have few legal options at their disposal to tackle the deceit, as no law is being broken. Current law states that whoever recognizes fatherhood of a child is the father, regardless of whether this is biologically true or not.”
If an American man impregnates a Cuban woman to whom he is not married, it is entirely proper that he should pay a lot of money to her. I’m not sure about the point being raised here. It’s good that an American john can currently knock up a cuban girl with minimal consequences to himself?
@bobbybobob: My take is just that when you travel to Cuba don’t forget that someone you sleep with might have an incentive to get pregnant. And when they have a child it may be without 2 parents who are ready for a child.
Though I’m not sure how the laws are different depending on whether the man is on vacation in Cuba or the woman is on vacation in the US.
MVI5: “Though I’m not sure how the laws are different depending on whether the man is on vacation in Cuba or the woman is on vacation in the US.” That was the point of the original post! Generally speaking, the cash value of a baby conceived in Cuba is determined by Cuban law whereas the cash value of a baby conceived in the U.S. would be determined by the child support guidelines of the state where the biological parents had sex. (see the UIFSA summary in http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Relocation ) or the state where the target of the child support action normally resides. So it could be $200,000 in Nevada, for example, and $2+ million in New York or California (given the same parental incomes).
Bobby: Sorry that the point of the original posting was not clear. The question was not whether receiving cash for having a baby was good or bad. The question was how much cash is likely to start flowing across the border once it becomes practical for babies to be conceived in the U.S. and then reared in Cuba (current population: 11+ million).
@MVI5
> when you travel to Cuba don’t forget that someone you sleep with might have an incentive to get pregnant
Don’t sleep with a girl who isn’t your wife and hasn’t been vetted through the church and both your families. It’s such a silly thing to worry about. These men losing their money are such idiots.
Bobby: Although this is not related to the original topic of cross-border cashflow, I’m confused as to why you think that marriage in a no-fault divorce jurisdiction such as the typical U.S. state is somehow useful as a means of financial protection. See http://www.realworlddivorce.com/MassachusettsPrenuptialAgreements for example, for the story of the successful financial services industry fund manager. We noted that “After a bit of litigation it turned out that, under the Massachusetts no-fault system, ‘I want to have sex with 22-year-olds off Craigslist’ is as good a reason for a divorce as any. The husband got paid tens of millions of dollars down at the local family courthouse.” It was the marriage per se that enabled this woman’s plaintiff to make significant money.
The deeper question would be “In the age of no-fault divorce, what is the meaning or relevance of civil marriage?” You’ve posited a situation in which a spouse has been “vetted through the church and both your families,” but there are at least millions of such marriages that have ended in divorce litigation where one former partner is trying to extract maximum cash. One thing that the winner-take-all states have proved is that being religious about one or more gods doesn’t prevent a person from having a near-religious devotion to obtaining cash via litigation. Nor does regular church attendance seem to be a strong deterrent to wanting to have sex with other people. In fact, for some of the cases that we heard about, the reason for the divorce lawsuit was that Spouse A met a new sex partner at church (sometimes a new church for which Spouse A had a real passion) and wanted to get rid of Spouse B while retaining access to Spouse B’s income.
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/01/atheist_marriages_may_last_longer_than_christian_ones_partner/
suggests that the divorce rate among Christian believers is not dramatically different from that of nonbelievers.
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/catholics-continue-to-have-lowest-divorce-rates-report-finds/
describes 28 percent of ever-married Catholics being divorced.
https://www.soundvision.com/article/divorce-among-american-muslims-statistics-challenges-solutions
says that North American Muslims sue each other at a rate of roughly 31 percent (lower than non-Muslims, certainly, but not so low as to be irrelevant).
Your priors on divorce are screwed up. It’s very easy to not wind up divorced in America. Every time I hear the details I know it’s a situation I couldn’t have wound up in and the fellow was kind of silly. That’s not to say the legal environment is irrelevant.
Bobby: How could the fund manager described above have avoided being divorced, then? I believe that she was in her 50s and had been married for about 25 years. What “easy” steps could she have taken? And why wouldn’t you have ended up in her situation if you had enjoyed similar financial success and lived in a no-fault jurisdiction where your spouse could take half of your earnings and then do as she pleased with the $tens of millions?
This fund manager was almost certainly a bad judge of women and lacked the family and friends to help him judge. He was the worst kind of dumb: dumb and didn’t know it. Shrewder people would have steered him clear of the situation altogether.
Well same difference with reverse genders, now that I bother to glance. But you do also get into gender roles there that shrewder people wouldn’t be so dumb about. Same deal here, I’m pretty short on sympathy. In the same way I’m short on sympathy when drunk white kids get mugged in the ghetto at 2AM.
Over half of American catholics are functionally atheist. Nominal religiosity is irrelevant here. I think evangelicals have sky high divorce rates.
First of all, the fund manager described in the book is herself a cisgender woman. So I don’t know why she would be a “bad judge of women” because she has been a woman for her entire life. She was shrewd enough to make tens of millions of dollars in a highly competitive marketplace, but you’re saying that she was “dumb” and needed to have been “shrewder” or rely on shrewder people? You consider yourself to be more shrewd than this woman, right? Had you been with her 30 years ago, how would you have divined that the man she was contemplating marrying would, about 25 years into the project, reveal his strong preference for having sex with 22-year-olds over 50-something-year-olds? Would you also have been able to predict this man’s career trajectory and thus seen that he would turn out to be the lower-earning spouse?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/opinion/04bair.html covers divorces after about 40 years of marriage. What mistake did the defendant in those divorce lawsuits make 40 years earlier? (from the article: “Margaret Mead thought every woman needed three husbands: one for youthful sex, one for security while raising children and one for joyful companionship in old age.”)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/opinion/l12divorce.html is letters responding to the above article. One guy writes “I am 73 years old and recently divorced after a long marriage. After many coffees and lunches with septuagenarians in similar situations, I have concluded that the most prevalent common denominator causing couples to break up at this stage of life is weariness at making the compromises that are inevitably part of living with another person.” How would one predict at age 25 or 30 the probability of another person becoming “weary at making compromises” at age 70?
I am finding it very easy to read between the lines in this story. She got mixed up with a bum, so she can’t be that shrewd. If you don’t think a lot of rich people are idiots, go hang out in Manhattan.
Furthermore, being a married woman and making tens of millions in financial services practically precludes being a proper wife. I’m sure the guy was a bum from the get-go, but she steered a course toward the disaster that she could have easily avoided.
As for the 70 year olds and 50 year olds getting divorced after long marriages, I can only say that I know the type. How come it’s a totally non-existent phenomenon in my extended circles? These sorts of people are easy to spot.
Bobby: you obviously know this woman and her plaintiff a lot better than I do! (I would call her a friend of a friend.) But basically it sounds as though it should have been obvious to her, a decade or more prior to her financial success, what his response to her financial success would be.
Why don’t more people take advantage of this clairvoyance? Employers, for example? Most of them have at least one shrewd person on staff. Why not refrain from hiring people who are going to become depressed or dependent on drugs or alcohol 10 or 20 years later?
> Why not refrain from hiring people who are going to become depressed or dependent on drugs or alcohol 10 or 20 years later?
Because it would require forms of discrimination and screening that are illegal and time consuming. But these options are fully available in the marriage market.
Bobby: If you can, in fact, deliver on these screenings, you could make crazy money as a matchmaker! There are a lot of people who would pay big $$ for a guarantee that they would never be divorced by the person that they hoped would be their life partner.
@ bobbybobbob: I find the opposite of your conclusions to be generally true. Despite any good planning, common sense, community steering, proper judgement a divorce or relationship break should be seen as a likely end, particularly given the lack of discouragement for such decisions. What do you think these predictors of non-divorce are that you see in your social circles?
@philg: in re Margret mead quote- this sounds like many students situations over 4 years, a partner to study with, a partner to go to the club with and a partner to get coffee with
MVI5: I think that Bobby is saying that, compared to the average person, he has superior judgment and ability to forecast the future. The litigators we interviewed thought that humans in general and judges in particular lacked these abilities. From http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Litigation :
Will justice prevail as a result of a trial in front of a judge? Attorneys were generally negative regarding the ability of judges to sort out the truth. “People who are crazy and sociopathic are great witnesses,” said one attorney with more than 20 years of experience in the courtroom. “They can lie without batting an eye and sound completely credible. That’s why con artists thrive. If we were good at assessing credibility none of us would ever get ripped off.”
I can spot sociopaths easily. I have dealt with them many times and I can spot them now. Juries are formed on the basis of throwing out people who are any good at judging character. Lawyers reject them right away. I will never serve on a jury, I am sure.
It’s not a rare ability to spot people who will cause trouble down the line. I suspect you are in fact correct that there is a business to be done in America with competent matchmaking, though all I could really say is possible is saying: Your marriage is on a tough row to hoe; a bad risk. It’s typically both the man and the woman that have problems.