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

by Rosa Lowinger

including Roberto y Estela, who performed in the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and later went on to dance at New York’s Cotton Club.

“It was the country’s respite from the violence of the Machado era,” recalled bandleader Armando Romeu in one of his last interviews. “There we would be, with Rita [Montaner] onstage, singing, ‘Mejor que me calle, que no diga nada, que tu sabes lo que yo se [It’s better that I shut up, that I say nothing, because you know what I know]’ while outside the cabaret walls you could hear the shooting in the streets.”

Olga Guillot, the bolero diva who went on to become a star of Tropicana and later, after leaving Cuba, had a career in the United States that has spanned four decades, began her career at Edén Concert when she was nineteen. “Correa was the master of his time,” she said simply when I spoke with her in Miami.

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Her second marriage, to a United States senator named Henry Walsh, never made it past the honeymoon: Walsh had a fatal heart attack on a train trip up the east coast of the United States. Widowed again, Mina moved with

her son Marcial and one of her married daughters and put her Truffin Avenue property up for rent. She was asking for eight hundred pesos a month, equivalent to $10,000 today.

Correa did not hesitate. That very afternoon, while Emeterio López patiently continued smoking cigarettes by the garages, Correa ironed out the terms of an agreement with Rafael Mascaró and Luis Bular in the mansion’s chandeliered dining room. Mascaró did not waver from his original proposal: he would pay the rent, build the stage, buy the furnishings. Correa had simply to fill the place. The deal was sealed with a handshake.

The title of the song was “Tropicana,” a word that suggested everything the new nightclub had to offer: exotic beauty, sensuous rhythms, and balmy nights under the stars.

Ofelia slammed the book down on the poker table. “Por favor! What nonsense. Martín was more Cuban than the royal palms! And me, a model? I’ll take the compliment but, really, they should try doing a little research before they say these things. Martín used to call me china. It was a common pet name in Cuba. And he didn’t buy me the lion. Sunan was a gift from an African prince!”

The story begged for a few more details. For example, who was this African prince? Why did he bring a lion with him to Cuba? And how did it wind up as a house pet in suburban Miramar?

“Oh, no, no. The Prince didn’t bring the lion to Cuba,” said Ofelia, laughing. “One night he came to Tropicana. I don’t remember what country he was from. He was at my table. I was translating his conversation for Martín. At one point I made a comment on the beauty and majesty of the animals on his continent. And he asked me, ‘Which animal is your favorite?’ That was easy, because I’ve always been passionate about cats, especially lions. Bueno, one month later, this crate arrived for me at the port. Inside was a little baby cachorrito [cub], the cutest thing you’ve ever seen. It was love at first sight. I used to take him for rides in my convertible when he was a cub. Later he got too big and had to stay home. The nannies in the neighborhood would bring the children to see him.”

Martín

This Ferrer had a shill in the casino, a guy who plays, but for the house.

By early afternoon of the next day, when the winds had died down to about fifty miles per hour, Martín Fox drove his Cadillac through water and debris to Tropicana. He was expecting damage, but what he saw nearly brought him to tears. Apart from the royal palms and massive mamoncillos, almost every tree in Guillermina’s glorious gardens had been either uprooted or snapped. The paths were knee-deep in mud. All of the shrubs and plants were flattened or choked by mud. Piles of fronds and branches were strewn throughout the cabaret area. The cabaret’s stage had been destroyed; light fixtures dangled from torn wires.

Ramón Grau San Martín had entered the quagmire of Cuban presidential politics a decade before his 1944 election. In 1933, following Gerardo Machado’s resignation, he had served as interim president twice—first as part of a five-man team that served for six days and was called La Pentarquia, and then for a five-month stint that ended in January 1934. Grau was itching to be president. In 1940, he ran for the office, and was soundly defeated by Fulgencio Batista in what was the most expensive political campaign in the history of the republic. In 1944, Batista had decided not to run again; but no one in Cuba—not the press, nor the United States, which kept close watch on the politics of its closest trading partner in Latin America—expected Grau to win over Batista’s hand-picked successor, Carlos Saladrigas. First of all, no opposition candidate since 1913 had won a Cuban election. Second, there were Grau’s repeated failures at attaining the presidency. Third, there was Batista himself.

Unlike all of Cuba’s previous presidents since the beginning of the republic, Batista had no family connections and no wealth.

Yet neither the title of president, which Batista won in the 1940 elections, nor colonel, could begin to describe the extent of his influence. Throughout most the 1930s, the dashing Batista (so broad was his smile and so handsome his features that he was known, since youth, as mulato lindo, or “handsome mulatto”) ran Cuban politics through a series of puppet presidents. It was no easy task, but Batista had an extraordinary gift for leadership and manipulation. “His mind works like lightning. He can practically convince one that a thing is true and that he is logical, which is extraordinary in a country whose idea of logic leaves one gasping,” wrote Ruby Hart Phillips of Batista. “Boss Batista commands the biggest army in Cuba’s history (12,000 regulars, 20,000 reserves and a national police force of 4,000),” reported Time magazine on April 26, 1937. That issue of Time, which had the Cuban strongman on the cover with the caption, “Boss Batista: paternalism begins at home,” described Batista’s methods of controlling the presidency, which involved spending vast sums on the army. With the army and trade unions solidly behind him, the office of president was de facto his, whether he was elected to it or not. When he ran in 1940, he had even received support from the Communist Party, which he then legalized at a time when other foreign or nationalist parties had been banned. In 1944, given that Batista flexed his political muscle on behalf of Saladrigas, no one had hopes for Ram...

Grau’s speeches were often eloquent diatribes against the American domination of Cuba’s economy.

“Cuba es para los cubanos!” he railed, promising raises for the workers and an end to corruption, graft, and payoffs to government officials.

Loudly they cheered for Grau San Martín. Even more loudly they cheered Fulgencio Batista, the strong man who had muscled democracy into Cuba.”

“We already knew that if Grau took office, we didn’t stand a chance,” said Valentín. Grau’s pledge to end corruption never singled out the gamblers, but as Valentín remarked, “Corruption is a term that we all understood. To operate without incident you had to pay off the police, the inspectors…It’s part of the cost of doing business. And we had sources among Grau’s people—Martín had courted the men who were his top advisors. They had told him: ‘If Grau gets elected, the casinos will be shut down.’”

Unlike the others, Ardura was a debonair habanero, born to relative financial comfort. The world of gamblers would not have been his normal milieu except for the fact that his mother, a respected psychic and tarot card reader, was also a lifelong and avid roulette player. Ardura often accompanied his mother to the gambling parlors.

MARTÍN’S PREDICTION proved correct. By the time Grau’s term reached its midpoint, the rest of the Cuban population had joined the gamblers in their disillusionment. Despite his self-righteous patriotism, despite his diatribes against U.S. control of the island’s economy, Grau’s administration rapidly dissolved into a bacchanalia of theft.

Revolutionary action groups that had fought for change ever since Machado’s time dissolved into bands of gangsterish political splinter groups, with links to government, the trade unions, and the student body council of the University of Havana.

By 1946, gangland-style political killings were common enough in Havana that a term, gangsterismo, “gangsterism,” was coined, and stories were written about the violence in both Time and Newsweek. Also in 1946, despite Grau’s sanctimonious stance towards the Cuban gamblers, Havana’s Hotel Nacional became the site of the first meeting of the American underworld since 1932. Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who had been deported to Italy from the United States after serving ten years of a thirty-year sentence for aiding and abetting prostitution, arrived in October under enormous secrecy, to keep the American government from learning of his proximity to American shores. He was received by his old friend and boyhood colleague from the Lower East Side, Meyer Lansky, who arranged for a six-month extension of Luciano’s visa with Grau’s minister of the interior, and rented him a mansion in Miramar, the most elegant neighborhood in the city. In December, Lansky and Luciano were joined by Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello, Albert Anastasia, Joe Bonanno, Tommy Lucchese, Joe Profaci, Giuseppe Magliocco, Willie Moretti, Augie Pisano, Mike Miranda, Tony Accardo, the brothers Fischetti, Phil Castell, and Santo Trafficante—essentially a who’s who of the American Mafia—for a weeklong series of meetings that, according to Luciano’s as-told-to biography, began with the men putting up the money so Luciano could purchase a $150,000 interest in the Hotel Nacional casino. At the time, the Nacion...

took place right under the nose of Grau’s government, but the newspapers reported nothing. “In them days, the word was around that what was goin’ on at the Hotel Nacional was off limits,” said Luciano to his biographers. “It was easy to lose a licen...

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 o...

Rosa waited until Ofelia was out of earshot, then continued. “Martín began moving money out of the country long before the revolution. God knows how many bank accounts he had. The two of them went to Mexico in 1957 and he placed four hundred thousand dollars into two accounts in the Banco Mexicano. The accounts were in both of their names, but Ofelia can’t remember which names he used.” Perching her handbag on the back of a chair piled high with pink Porto’s boxes, Rosa pulled out a piece of paper. “We’ve tried searching with no luck. They could be under any of the following: Martín Fox and/or Ofelia Suarez, Martín G. Fox, Martín Gabriel Fox, Martín Gabriel Fox Zamora, Ofelia Suarez de Fox, Ofelia Suarez González, Ofelia Fox.”

But of those five, Tropicana alone was owned and operated by its Cuban owner. Sans Souci was nominally run by an American named Norman Rothman; however all signs indicate that it was under the general control of Santo Trafficante Jr., whose family ran the numbers game in Tampa. Montmartre was soon under the control of Trafficante’s chief Havana rivals, Jake and Meyer Lansky. Tropicana, on the other hand, was wholly owned by Cubans: the property belonged to Guillermina Perez Chaumont; the cabaret concession was owned and operated by Victor de Correa; and the casino belonged to Martín Fox and his partners.

One

Martín’s “agenda” would lead him, later, to court the heavy hitters of Havana’s underworld, like Sans Souci’s elusive Trafficante, a man so aware of his mobster status that he would refer to himself only as el Solitario, “the Solitary One,” when he called Martín on the telephone. Trafficante would have certainly seen Martín as a competitor had they not been personal friends. To a lesser extent, Martín also cautiously courted the self-styled “Chairman of the Board,” Meyer Lansky. “Martín hardly knew Lansky,” Ofelia insisted repeatedly. Yet on several occasions she told me that she and Martín had paid Lansky a visit at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1957, when Martín was in Boston for his annual health checkup at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.

“the Americans were known for running clean casinos, so it made a good impression to have those connections.”

Spare, geometric, and light as air, Cuban architecture of the 1950s arose directly out of the international modernist style that was being touted by French architect Le Corbusier and embraced worldwide with almost religious fervor.

This mix, whose most widely practiced version is known as Santería, slowly became the unofficial religion of Cuba. In every neighborhood of Cuba are practitioners, both full-fledged santeros and novice initiates, walking in their pristine white clothes and colorful beaded necklaces, each particular to a specific santo.

MOST CIGAR connoisseurs acknowledge that the best tobacco in the world is grown in the province of Pinar del Rio in western Cuba, especially in the rich, red soil of the Vuelta Abajo, a ninety-mile-long valley that runs south of the Sierra de los Organos mountains, about two hours

from Havana.

CUBA,

It was also carnaval time in Havana, a nonstop partying season that begins on Ash Wednesday (February 27th that year) and continues until Easter.

Vedado Tennis Club.

Even the upcoming presidential election failed to stir the emotion that it had several months earlier, when Prío announced that he would not run again. And it was nothing compared to the previous August,

when the leading opposition candidate, the ardent, rabble-rousing leader of the Ortodoxo Party, Eduardo “Eddy” Chibás, took out a gun and shot himself in a radio station just after completing a live broadcast.

By dawn, President Prío, who had been at his own country estate (his brother, Antonio, had been dancing at Sans Souci when he received word of the coup) was back at the presidential palace, desperately, if ineffectually, trying to deal with a fait accompli. Later that morning, the radio stations began to broadcast news that Batista had taken control in order to save the country from “chaotic conditions which endangered lives and property.” The streets were deserted. Tanks surrounded the presidential palace. Scores of university students gathered outside to protest and to demand that their elected president, who was packing his family to leave for Mexico, mount more than a tepid response to Batista’s audacity. Eventually, inevitably, there was a bit of bloodshed, but it was minor considering the magnitude of what had happened. On March 10, 1952, constitutional rule was revoked on the island of Cuba. As of this writing, more than fifty years later, it has not been restored.

They would seek out other Cubans, like congüero and former Tropicana star Chano Pozo, or the composer and arranger Mario Bauzá, the consummate musician’s musician, whose credits included writing “Tanga,” the first Latin jazz tune. (Bauzá also introduced Chano Pozo to Dizzy Gillespie, and Gillespie to Cab Calloway, and possibly most important of all, he was one of the musicians who urged the big band conductor Chick Webb to hire, in 1934, a then-unknown seventeen-year-old singer named Ella Fitzgerald.)

After that, Correa, who had parted ways with Alfredo Brito, called Romeu and asked him to assemble a new house orchestra for Tropicana. Since then, the Tropicana orchestra had featured the greatest talent in the country, jazzmen who took the big band and bebop sound of their North American counterparts and fused it to their country’s native folk music to create the sound known as Latin jazz.

Havana brimmed with great musical talent—sextets, septets, troubadors, combos, all-girl rumba bands—but the jazzmen were the vanguard. They searched out new trends and new sounds, and when they found them, in New York especially, they bathed the notes in rum and sugar and served them to a public that craved novelty and lived to dance.

Jazz and Cuban music have been intertwined since the onset of the twentieth century. Jelly Roll Morton, one of the undisputed fathers of jazz, believed that “if you ...

tunes, you will never be able to get the r...

The Afro-Cubans recorded prodigiously and played all over New York: uptown and downtown; in the Puerto Rican clubs of Spanish Harlem; and most notably, at the Palladium, where they were the main house band from 1946 into the 1960s.

At the time, the most popular of the new rhythms was mambo—a music and dance style with rapid-fire syncopation and jazz-fueled improvisation. The word mambo comes from the Bantu African dialect. Arsenio Rodríguez, one of the early founders of the genre, whose grandfather was a slave from the Congo, claimed that the word came from the phrase, abre cuto güirí mambo, which means “open your ears and listen up.” “It’s hard to give a precise definition for the mambo,” writes musicologist Ned Sublette. “It can be instrumental or vocal. It’s an up-tempo, horn-driven music, but there are slower mambos. It’s big band music, but you can play it with a combo if you must. It was the biggest musical craze in the United States in the days immediately preceding rock-and-roll, peaking around 1953, and it has been fabulously recycled as nostalgia.”

Few of the patrons on the Arcos de Cristal dance floor probably knew this, but the musicians in the pit were all jazz stars, with a following that extended from Havana to Harlem and Paris. Barreto was the island’s first real bebop drummer. Pianist Ramón “Bebo” Valdés was one of the island’s best improvisationalists and a composer of mambos whose output rivaled that of Pérez Prado. Chico O’Farrill was, by 1952, a legend in his own right: before his stint with Romeu, he had played with Benny Goodman in New York, and composed “Undercurrent Blues” for Goodman as well as “Cuban Episode” for Stan Kenton. O’Farrill’s works of Afro-Cuban jazz, written for Machito and Dizzy Gillespie, were so impressive that when he finally met his idol, Count Basie, the great bandleader expressed his amazement that a white person could write such arrangements. Romeu himself penned “Mambo a la Kenton” based on the tunes of his idol, bandleader Stan Kenton. The band’s sound was full, yet effervescent. “You could barely stay in your seat when they played,” said Ofelia. Of course, Ofelia rarely made it onto Tropicana’s dance floor; she was usually by Martín’s side, or at her table, entertaining Martín’s guests while he worked.

“Even President Batista was invited,” said Ofelia. Batista declined to come, however, the opening taking place a mere week after the golpe de estado. But he sent his good wishes with General Fernandez Miranda, who communicated them to Ardura on behalf of his brother-inlaw.