An Iberia Airlines Ad Depicts Negative Stereotypes of Cuban Women

Now if this isn't one of the biggest cases of 'I think I am Privileged,' then I honestly don't know what.

I am giving this to you just as it reads from the Miami Herald.

BY FRANCES ROBLES
frobles@MiamiHerald.com

Iberia Airlines yanked a promotional cartoon video off its website, featuring an infant who wins a trip to Havana and gets babied by voluptuous black beauties, after a consumer group complained the ad denigrates Cuban women.

The video posted earlier this month on the company's website showed the baby being coddled by two black women with exaggerated full lips and wide hips squeezed into hot pants.

The women fed, massaged, fanned and danced with the infant as he sang, in an adult male voice, ``Mulattas, feed me. Come on mulattas, take me to the crib.''

''It used the imagery of two sexy women of color, not nurses or home attendants . . . and the image of Cuba as the place for the male Spaniard to go and be pampered like a baby,'' said Ileana Fuentes, executive director of the Miami-based Cuban Feminist Network. ``If that's not a sexual tourism ad, then I'd like to see a sexual tourism ad.''

The ad played on the stereotype that Cuba is a hotspot for single European men to find dark-skinned ''girlfriends'' know as jineteras. The cartoon, part of a series of videos promoting an Iberia.com contest, was yanked from Iberia's website but has found a new life on YouTube. Other ads featured a sheep rapping in New York and a vacuum cleaner doing the tango in Buenos Aires.

It was the Cuba cartoon that drew fire from a consumer action group, which said it was a sexist insult to Cuban tourism workers.

''Cuban tourism workers do not massage you, fan you and dance with you,'' Ruben Sánchez, spokesman for the Consumers in Action Federation, said by phone from Madrid. ``This ad denigrates people who work in tourism.''

He said the ad violates a 1988 Spanish law that prohibits advertising that is denigrating to groups of people. In this case, Sánchez said, the video was demeaning not only to tourism workers, but Cuban women and Cubans.

The organization complained about the ad last week and Iberia pulled it four days later, he said. Advertising professors are requesting copies so they can show them to students as an illustration of what not to do, he added.

View the actual video of Iberia's controversial ad.

What About Our Daughters, thanks for making me aware.