Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub

by Rosa Lowinger

After the plane was gone, my parents were among those who went back indoors to continue partying. They were at their neighbors’ apartment, in the building where we all lived on Fifth Street, near the

Avenida de los Presidentes and five blocks inland from the seaside boulevard known as the Malecón. My paternal grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Hungary, had financed the building in 1952.

Mendoza, Celia Cruz, and the unquestionable favorite of all habaneros, Benny

Moré, the Barbarian of Rhythm, as he was called.

Tropicana belonged to the world that had been left behind, though my parents and their friends often spoke of it. “The most beautiful cabaret that ever existed,” said my mother with characteristic Cuban bravado. “They called it ‘A Paradise Under the Stars’ because it was just that—a paradise,” echoed my father, his voice thick with nostalgia.

All four of my grandparents were Jewish

immigrants, so our Cuban-based family was small and everyone left soon after the 1959 revolution.

Yet I am an art conservator by training, and for years I had been eager to see the country’s architecture, and particularly that of Havana, where I was born. Havana is an architectural historian’s dream. Walk from one end of the city to the other and you will pass stunning examples of almost every major architectural style that has existed since the mid-fifteen hundreds. Many of the buildings are in terrible disrepair. But look behind the peeling paint and rusting grillwork and you will find astoni...

Ofelia showed me pictures of herself with Joan Crawford, Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows, Nat “King” Cole, Liberace, and Carmen Miranda.

Ofelia talked about Tropicana like a proud parent. Yet her photos revealed more than the glamour of 1950s Cuban cabaret life. There she is, in one instance, draped in silver mink and sitting next to mobster Santo Trafficante, who ran several of the big-name casinos in Havana. “The mink stole was a gift from Santo,” admitted Ofelia.

According to Ofelia, Trafficante was her husband’s friend, and Clark was merely someone his casino had hired to lure gamblers from the United States. In any case, the appearance of these men raised unsettling questions: Was Tropicana’s cabaret just a front? What really lay

behind the glorious architecture and gorgeous showgirls, the costumes, the music, and the dancing? The popular view of 1950s Cuba is that it was riddled with mobsters who owned all the casinos. I wondered whether that was also the story of Tropicana. Was it a haven for criminals, or for artists?

The landscape in this part of Cuba (and indeed, much of the center of the island) is notable for its total lack of drama. Flat, scruffy, occasionally marshy, and ferociously hot most of the year, it has no alluring tropical features—no palm forests, no wooded mountains, and no sinuous rivers. What it does have is the richest soil in the entire country. The area around Ciego de Avila is the breadbasket of Cuba, and the city itself is the island’s Kansas City.

Founded in 1847 as a rural outpost that saw minor growth when soldiers from the Trocha settled in the area, Ciego de Avila is a relatively new city for Cuba. The region only began to flourish in the early twentieth century, after Cuba had won independence from Spain. The main reason was caña de azucar, “sugarcane,” the mainstay of the island’s economy since the late eighteenth century and the primary source of the wealth that had built the colonial cities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Matanzas, Trinidad, Camagüey, and Cienfuegos, as well as the imposing baroque and neoclassical buildings that made Havana one of the most European-looking cities in the entire Western Hemisphere.

By 1914, Cuba was producing 12 percent of the world’s sugar. This was actually a decline from the 1850s, when it produced a quarter of the world’s sugar.

At Jagüeyal he worked as a tornero, lathe machinist, fabricating metal parts to maintain the mill’s vast grinding machines and caramelization apparatus.

It was not the backbreaking labor of cutting sugarcane, but it was hot, dirty, hands-on work. During the period of the zafra, the winter months when caña was harvested, Martín and his coworkers would practically become part of the milling apparatus themselves. On duty eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, the machinists wouldn’t catch a full night’s sleep or get a hot bath for months at a time.

la bolita was—and still is—a national passion, as distinctly Cuban as royal palms, cigars, sugarcane fields, and the Matanzas-born guajiro who eventually became one of its kingpins in the heartland.

The defining feature of a Cuban,” pronounced Ofelia, “is a person who will do just about anything to get a minute of pleasure.”

He highlights Cuba’s licentiousness and sensuality: “Every restaurant and nearly every grocery in Havana is a barroom.” And, “You can stare at the pretty señoritas because such staring in Cuba is a compliment—not a crime.”

Woon could just have easily been describing Ofelia Fox. At the casino she is always certain that she’s just a roll of the dice away from recouping the day’s losses. At home, where she and Rosa frequently entertain, every guest knows that at some point in the evening she will break out the dice or cards or dominoes. Bets are even placed on pick-up sticks and on Jenga, that Milton Bradley game that involves pulling blocks of wood from a tall stack until it topples over.

Since 1518, when the Spanish crown moved the settlement named San Cristobal de la Habana from a swampy, malarial cove on Cuba’s southern Gulf of Batabanó, to a broad, narrow-mouthed harbor on the island’s north coast, Havana has always been a haven for gamblers.

By 1810, a census put the city’s population at 96,114, only 259 fewer souls than lived in New York.

The Prussian historian and naturalist Baron Alexander von Humboldt made a three-month visit in 1800.

The Marines did not have to land—Machado resigned—but his middle-of-the-night departure was followed by a bloodbath, as warring factions within the army, student groups, and organized vigilantes sought vengeance for the viciousness of the regime. Thousands were killed. One of the worst encounters took place at the Hotel Nacional, a luxurious Vedado hotel designed by McKim, Mead, and White, the prestigious American architectural firm responsible for New York’s Pennsylvania Station, the Morgan Library, the Boston Public Library, and Columbia University Library. The Nacional was a popular residence for American businessmen, journalists, and diplomats, including

U.S. Ambassador Sumner Welles. A group of Machado’s former army officers, wary of reprisals, holed up in the hotel for weeks. The new army besieged them, cutting off their water supply and electricity. Welles and the Americans evacuated in September. Two weeks later, the officers surrendered to a group of sergeants (the battle became known as the Sergeant’s Revolt); but as the officers were leaving the hotel, the army opened fire. The ensuing battle lasted days and left eighty soldiers dead and two hundred wounded.

(The club’s founding members had paid an ounce of gold in 1889 for three months of membership. Its 1924 building, with its second story loggia supported by eight female caryatids, remains one of the most recognizable landmarks of the Malecón.)

My brothers and I knew what to do if my father gave us the signal. There was a safe in the wall where we would put the cash, the dice, the cards—anything incriminating, then we would block it with a large painted plaster statue of

la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. No Cuban in his right mind was going to mess with one of the santos—that was the thought. But my father was usually warned before a raid anyway. I remember this police sergeant who was playing poker in our dining room turning to my father and saying: “Oye, they’re scheduled sometime this afternoon.”

It was a winning strategy, which demonstrated that his brilliance as a gambler (the official term for someone whose living is made from organizing and running games of chance, as opposed to the “bettor”) rivaled that of another occasional Havana resident, Meyer Lansky. Lansky and his partners, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Charles “Lucky” Luciano, had made a fortune from Cuban rum during Prohibition.

“I want to set the record straight about my husband,” she wrote. “He was not a gangster and Tropicana was never owned by the Mafia.”

“Okay,

They were among the last autographs the samba star would ever sign. Two days after Miranda left Havana, she was rehearsing for an appearance on The Jimmy Durante Show in Hollywood, when, out of the blue, she decided to call Ofelia. “She had called to ask about her guayabera shirts,” said Ofelia, recalling the traditional Cuban four-pocket linen shirts that Miranda was having made by Ofelia’s dressmaker. A few hours later, the forty-six-year-old Miranda died of a heart attack.

Music had always been the essence of the island culture. Its earliest roots were based in African rhythms such as conga and rumba; but by the early twentieth century, these mixed and blended with Spanish and French melodic elements to create a variety of musical styles, like son—the precursor to what is now known as salsa; guaracha, a musical form that is characterized by the satiric content of its narrative lyrics; and a myriad of other styles: the romantic songs known as boleros, and the formal danzón that originated from European contradances in the coastal town of Matanzas. Much of this music stemmed from the countryside, and it was rich in percussive texture, with instruments such as bongos, maracas, claves (the two sticks that are played to set the one-two, one-two-three beat of most Cuban tunes), and güiros, which are made from gourds. As in all things, Havana had a more direct European connection. There were danzas based on classic orchestral music and a strong musical theater tradition imported from Spain and

and the tres, a guitar-like instrument with three pairs of double strings.

These artists were the darlings of the cabarets and lyric theaters, and the new Cuban radio stations that opened in 1922, only two years after Pittsburgh’s KDKA became the first commercial radio station in the United States.

At the time, Cubans were partial to the café life, much like Parisians.

That afternoon, Simons, a bandleader, composer, and a descendent of Jewish immigrants, was leisurely drinking coffee at his table when he was caught by the lyrical call of a vendor hawking peanuts: “Maní! Maní!” (Peanuts! Peanuts!) Simons scribbled the words on a napkin, added his own, and before he knew it, he had written a hit.

Probably few foreigners understood the double entendres of the lyrics, which urged housewives and young women not to go to bed without tasting the vendor’s hot, salty nuts;

nonetheless, the song’s jaunty syncopation fired up audiences wherever it was performed.

The song was such a widespread hit that it was lampooned by Groucho Marx in one the first scenes of the Marx Brothers’ classic 1933 comedy, Duck Soup.

Though the rhythm of “El manisero” was, in fact, a son pregón (a type of song that relies on the give and take of street vendors’ cries), the music and the dance style that went along with it quickly became known as “rhumba.” Actual Cuban rumba (in Cuba there is no h in the word) refers to a series of Afro-Cuban dances—the yambú, guaguancó, and columbia—which are danced to percussion. Cuban music historian Ned Sublette notes that rumba “can refer to the dance or to the music played. But, most importantly, it refers to the party where it all goes on, a collective, rum-fueled atmosphere.”

He also served as the springboard for the careers of other Cubans, like the vivacious showman Miguelito Valdés, who introduced the boisterous conga rhythm to the American stage and became the first to take up Margarita Lecuona’s hit song, “Babalú.”

In 1935, his fourth year at the Sert Room, Cugat also introduced to America a “young, mild-mannered handsome Cuban from Santiago

[de Cuba] named Desi Arnaz, who asked to join my band as a vocalist.” Cugat auditioned Arnaz that day and hired him on the spot. Fifteen years later, Arnaz would also take up the cry of “Babaluuu!” to propel himself into the hearts of Americ...

conjuntos

An unabashed farandulero—roughly translated as someone who likes mingling with show business people—Correa was also a man of burning ambition.

Correa set up a small raised stage under a red-tiled roof. Tables lined the periphery of the walls and the middle was cleared for dancing. It was a veritable Garden of Eden of palm trees and colored lights, giving the illusion of an outdoor tropical experience right in the heart of the city.

And it was, most definitely, the heart. Edén Concert was within easy walking distance of many of the city’s best hotels—the Inglaterra, Plaza, Parque Central, and the Sevilla Biltmore.

Havana’s most crowded watering holes—Sloppy Joe’s, Dirty Vic’s, and Ernest Hemingway’s favorite daiquiri haunt, El Floridita—were...