INTERNET
Controversial cartoon ad shows up on the Web
An Iberia Airlines ad that played on negative stereotypes of Cuban women
has found a new life on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZiLMf8rnPg
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment