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

by Rosa Lowinger

the island. Henceforth, the interests section has effectively become an embassy, with a chief officer whose diplomatic status is equal to that of an ambassador. You can’t miss the interests section when you walk along the Malecón. The building is ringed by a series of guard kiosks and a forbidding-looking steel-post fence painted beige, presumably to blend visually with the local Jaimanitas stone that now covers the facade (originally it was clad in travertine). The structure is an austere rectangle of glass and stone that would fit in at Lincoln Center in New York or on the Mall in Washington. In fact, the building’s architects, the New York firm of Harrison & Abramovitz, later went on to design Avery Fisher Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, as well as Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York; the firm had already designed the United Nations headquarters in New York and CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. According to Eduardo Luis Rodríguez, Cuba’s leading authority on modernist architecture, the prestige of Harrison & Abramovitz and the building’s prime location on the Malecón caused something of a sensation in 1953. Yet, writes Rodríguez, “The architects failed to take into account the Cuban climate, to which the building exposes an excessive amount of glass.”