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

by Rosa Lowinger

Then there was the theft of the Capitolio Diamond. Since the opening of the majestic government building in 1929, the yellow diamond had been more than simply a symbolic decorative element; it was the fixed point from which all distances in Cuba were measured. On March 25, 1946, someone chiseled it and pried it out of the floor of the great hall. A week later it mysteriously appeared on Grau’s desk in his office. The theft of the diamond became a bitter emblem of what had happened to the country under Grau. And though he had achieved some social reforms (in the area of pensions, in removing government from the control of the army), by 1948 Grau had so trampled the electorate’s hopes that his own party didn’t support him for reelection. “[Grau] did a great disservice to the cause of democratic reform, not only in Cuba but in the whole Western hemisphere,” wrote Hugh Thomas. “His period of power is appropriately commemorated by the career of his old friend José Manuel Alemán, in 1944 a minor official at the Ministry of Education, who arrived in Miami in 1948 after two years as minister with twenty million dollars in notes in his suitcase, not to speak of thousands of caballerias of land, sugarmills,… and a chain of houses left behind.” “And these were the same people who were blaming the gamblers for corruption,” Rosa Sanchez told me, laughing. “The gamblers were probably the only straight shooters in the country. They lived off their reputations. At least with them you knew...