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

by Rosa Lowinger

Now that I had spent so much time with former Tropicana showgirls, both in person and by leafing through the pages of the magazines that are a record of their glamorous past, I realized the mistake we made in simply showing up at Ana Gloria’s unannounced. The women of Tropicana do not face the public without looking their best; even now, when most of them are grandmothers. Cabaret women were revered for their beauty. Their looks earned them the name of diosas, “goddesses,” whose sequin-clad bodies were the quintessential expression of their country’s celebrated sensuality. At the larger cabarets, such as Tropicana, Sans Souci, and Montmartre, and even at many of the smaller ones, like the Cabaret Nacional at the corner of Prado and San Rafael in Central Havana, or the rustic Bambú on the road to the airport, production numbers included scores of dancers, singers, and vedettes. There were also modelos—models whose job consisted mainly of sashaying along the stage and, at Tropicana, on catwalks in the trees, wearing outfits designed to show them off. Jenny León was a modelo. So was Alicia Figueroa, though she had been trained as a dancer. Ana Gloria Varona was strictly a dancer. She was Cuba’s leading performer of baile típico, the term used for traditional Cuban dances like mambo, cha-cha-cha, guaracha, and son. Her fame came more from what she did than what she looked like. But her appearance contributed. Ana Gloria was small, shapely, with dark features and a rosebud mout...