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

by Rosa Lowinger

Ardura was the other reason why, by 1952, Tropicana was the place for jazz in Cuba. No one with a superficial knowledge of Martín Fox’s dour-faced partner could have imagined that Ardura was a jazz lover. (“Cómo? Are you sure?” exclaimed Ofelia and Rosa incredulously, when I showed them a note to that effect in Cubano Be, Cubano Bop, a history of jazz in Cuba written by musicologist and alto saxophonist Leonardo Acosta.) But Bebo Valdés echoed the sentiment. “One day I was at Rita Montaner’s house rehearsing and I heard this clarinet playing [Cole Porter’s] ‘Begin the Beguine,’” explained the pianist recently. “I looked out and saw this young man playing. When I left we said hello to each other. Another day I saw him and we waved. The next time I saw him was in 1948 when I began at Tropicana. Alberto Ardura was that young man.”

But the most deliciously ribald tale Bebo told me pertained to a 1952 mambo he composed in honor of Miguel Angel Blanco, Tropicana’s notoriously rakish master of ceremonies. I had heard many times the story of this mambo, titled “Güempa,” based on Cuban slang for “good lay.” Yet there was nothing like hearing it from Bebo himself.

Miguel Angel liked to brag about his conquests. He was always coming in and saying, “I slept with that one, and with that one.”

Vaya, to hear him talk, there wasn’t a single girl that didn’t pass through his hands. One day this guapo [tough guy] came to see him at the club. Apparently he’d messed with the guy’s wife, and the man was itching for a fight. While this was happening, I walked by him and said, “Oye, Güempa, don’t take them all for yourself, leave some for us.” Güempa, of course, comes from buen palo, and you know what that means. And even with the guy standing there, [Blanco] responded, “Mientras qu...

Bebo was thrilled to hear that Ofelia was alive and writing a book about Tropicana. “Martín Fox was the best boss I ever had,” he exclaimed. “He’d sometimes be around while we rehearsed. He’d just stare at the trees, the mangoes, like a man in love. I’ve never met a man as good in business as he was. But Alberto Ardura was like my brother. He was my boss bu...

Ardura’s love of jazz might have been one reason Tropicana hired Woody Herman’s octet in 1950, and Cab Calloway, right after Calloway ha...

Given that he was in charge of entertainment at Tropicana, Ardura was probably aware of the vast tourist marketing appeal of a Cab Calloway or a Josephine Baker. But this could not explain why he was instrumental in opening Tropicana on Sunday afternoons so that jazz musicians, Cuban and American, could jam together in a free, unstructured environment. Those legendary sessions, which were the brainchild of Guillermo Barreto, were among the first meetings of the Club Cubano de Jazz. Every Sunday afternoon, a quintet that featured Barreto on drums, Bebo on piano, tenor saxophonist Rafael “Tata” Palau (who, according to Leonardo Acosta, “was heavily into the co...

“We asked her to sing ‘How High the Moon,’ but she said, “No puedo, that’s Mama’s song!” recalled Gilberto Torres, a seventy-five-year-old self-proclaimed jazzista whose home in the Santa Amalia district of Havana has been, for the past thirty years, the gathering place of a spirited, almost all-black private dance club called La esquina del jazz, “The Jazz Corner.” To jazzistas in the know, “Mama” is Ella Fitzgerald. Vaughan was reluctant to sing her colleague’s signature material, though in the end she did. On a recent Saturday night meeting of the dance club, an ebullient Gilberto, shouting above Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “What a Wonderful World” and the sound of expert dancers’ swishing feet, said of Vaughan’s performance that night, “She kept on going for an hour, with us clapping, barely able to stay seated.”

Right then the tune was “Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got that Swing,” as played by Sonny Rollins.

Benny Moré.

Those gathered in Santa Amalia were black Cubans, and the music was American swing and bebop. “We live for jazz,” explained Roberto Cabrera, another eager raconteur who worked as a tennis instructor when he was not dancing. “We followed it [in the ’50s] from bar to bodega to radio station. When the Club Cubano de Jazz met at Tropicana, you would find us there en masse, every Sunday afternoon, in Arcos de Cristal.”

Among those people was Lou Walters, manager of New York’s swanky Latin Quarter cabaret and the father of a future journalist named Barbara Walters. “Lou had been to Tropicana several days before,” recalled Ofelia. “He was sitting near us at ringside. He came up to Martín, looking almost annoyed, and said, ‘Listen, Martín, you’ve created a big problem for me. The Latin Quarter’s motto used to be the Most Beautiful Cabaret in the World, but now that I’ve seen Tropicana, we have to change it.’”

According to The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, Martin Gosch and Richard Hammers’s as-told-to biography of the notorious mobster, Frankie Carbo, a.k.a “Jimmy the Wop,” was a hit man who worked with Bugsy Siegel in the late 1930s.

The two men were indicted, arrested, and, according to Luciano, responsible for the 1939 Los Angeles contract killing of Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg, a mob enforcer who had threatened to talk to New York Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey.

Frankie Carbo’s name appears frequently in biographies of mob figures and on Internet mob and boxing history websites. He was known as a member of Murder, Inc., the media’s title for the enforcement arm of the Unione Siciliana that was run by Albert Anastasia and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and responsible, according to authorities in New York, for at least sixty-three murders. After World War II, Carbo cleaned up his act—somewhat. Though he had been already arrested eighteen times, including five times for murder...

When one day Carbo asked what else they might like to do, and Ofelia expressed a desire to see The King and I on Broadway, Carbo got center orchestra seats, though the musical was sold out for the next three years.

During the Kefauver Committee hearings, which began in 1950, these and other so-called mobsters were brought before Congress and questioned about the existence of a widespread organization known as the Mafia or Cosa Nostra, which originated in Sicily and controlled crime across the United States. The hearings were televised, thus popularizing the idea that in America there was a well-organized, nation-wide crime syndicate composed mainly of Italians and Jews.

One of these was Dino Cellini, a close associate of Meyer Lansky, who ran the croupier school at the Hotel Riviera and later, after the Cuban revolution, Lansky’s casinos in London and Freeport, Grand Bahama.

“Did it really? If Meyer Lansky’s man was Tropicana’s credit manager, and one of Santo’s men was doing Tropicana’s linens and running Martín’s money to Miami, it’s pretty safe to say that Tropicana was riddled

with mobsters.”

The whole idea is that these people look like your next-door neighbor. In the pictures Santo looks like a college professor. Martín’s the one who looks like he’s got a gun hidden in his pocket.”

The three shows were performed nightly in Arcos de Cristal—at ten, midnight, and two, although the outdoor cabaret was also used on holidays and busy weekends.

The proposal that Rodney made to Chiquita was to create a contemporary ballet based on an authentic Santería ritual, putting her at the center of the action. “I was to play this foreign white woman who goes slumming one night and finds herself at a bembé. I start to move to the music and suddenly I am possessed by the spirit of the santo.” It was the same idea behind Sun Sun Babae, but with two key differences: Chiquita’s acrobatic range, which would allow for far greater possibilities once the woman in the show became possessed; and Ardura’s promise to Rodney that he could have a nearly unlimited production budget.

An amazing idea!

There would be offerings of animals and fruit to the santos. This would set the stage for the next part of the ceremony, in which the family is allowed

to receive well-wishers. One of the visitors would be Chiquita, a white woman who is not an initiate. Upon entering the space of ritual, Chiquita would find herself possessed by a free-floating spirit of the dead. From there on, the show would center on Chiquita’s frenetic dance of possession, and the frantic efforts of those present to free her from this state.

Being Cuban, they could also perform the undulating movement and the syncopated swaying required by the drumming.

For Chiquita, on the other hand, it was not quite as easy. “The Cuban rhythm is very unique,” Erna recalled in Malibu. “The motions conflict. You have the upper body doing one thing and the lower body something else. It’s like trying to play the piano with each hand doing a different song. It was hard for me because ballet is very precise and this is all instinctual.”

After what seemed like hours, they came to a stop in front of a ramshackle stucco house that looked hundreds of years old. From the street, Chiquita heard powerful drumming.

We walked into an ordinary room, like someone’s living room. There was a table in the corner piled with food—bananas, mangoes, cakes. People were coming in, bringing more food, while these two guys played the bongos [the drums were actually two-headed

headed batá drums]. The place was crowded. People were sitting on the floor. Rodney told me to sit down, and I did. Some people were up and dancing, but mostly people sat in their places, swaying to the music, moving so naturally. As I listened and listened I became transfixed by the sound. The sound got into my bones and without even being aware of it, I started swaying a...

The title of the piece was to be Omelen-ko, a Yoruba expression that appears to be based on the words omele enko, which means “the music of your drum companion,” or “drum comrade.”

For his part, Rodney told them to keep throwing her. “Tírenla entre ustedes, así, así,” he would croak out in a voice made raspy by his illness, drawing the movements in the air with his gnarled hands and letting his ballet stars, Argentine Henry Boyer and Cuban Miguelito Checki, block them out for the company. For Rodney, rehearsals were always fraught with as much tension as excitement. “It was frustrating to him that he could not show us the moves himself,” said Eddy Serra. When Serra joined the cast of Tropicana in 1958, Rodney was already famous, but during that first season, in 1952, the choreographer’s reputation was on the line. Omelen-ko was his trial by fire: it had to outdo not only all of Tropicana’s previous productions, but everything Rodney had done up to that point.

“How about if I try it from halfway?” Chiquita called out, to placate her partner. Knowing her willfulness, Johnson nodded reluctantly. Chiquita climbed halfway down again as Johnson positioned himself. “Miguelito, Henry, get on either side of him,” said Rodney in his throaty growl. The two male dance stars stood beside Johnson, making a lattice of six arms to catch Chiquita as she swan dived. Chiquita leaned out from the metal sculpture, holding on with one hand. Then, carefully gauging the angle of her fall, she jumped. The landing was perfect.

Now it was time to see if they could pull this off when she jumped from the top. “First go up another five feet,” suggested Johnson. But Chiquita was tired of the arduous climb; anyway, she knew that she could do this. She dashed up to the top of Max Borges’s elliptical structure before her partner could protest. To those below she looked like a spider in her black rehearsal leotard. She remembered feeling like a monkey at the top of a jungle canopy. She could look out over the roof of the mansion where Martín operated his casino, and the tropical panorama that was Villa Mina. Again, she held onto the metal tubing and leaned out. Without taking his eyes off of her, Johnson clasped wrists once again with Henry and Miguelito. No one moved. Even the custodians who were sweeping and setting up the chairs and tables stopped what they were doing to look up. At the top of the sun-dappled sculpture, the tiny leotarded dancer unleashed the bloodcurdling scream of her Omelen-ko character, then plunged into the lattice of waiting arms.

The public was also buzzing about Martin’s recent acquisition of a famous Cuban landmark—the multi-figure marble fountain that for years had sat at the entrance to the Casino Nacional. Known as La Fuente de las Musas, or “Fountain of the Muses,” the early twentieth century marble sculpture by the Italian

Aldo Gamba consisted of a round basin topped by eight life-size nude nymphs.

The frenetic rhythms of a Lucumí ritual, exemplified by the tam-tam of the batá drums, the ilia, the okonkolo and the itolele, will be played by real members of the African faith.”

At

But the main reason that Martín was finding her indispensable was that he was falling in love with her. This took them both by surprise. Even during their New York honeymoon, they had both felt more like good friends than passionate lovers. But something had changed. It began the day they got home from the honeymoon. “It was afternoon and I unpacked our things, then we took a nap,” recalled Ofelia. “At eight, when we awoke, I began to dress for the evening without his saying a word, or my asking. I could tell he was moved that I was ready to go to Tropicana. And I continued going every night.”

“The boy is not a very good dancer, but he was Olga’s son with Norman Rothman,” explained Rosa. “Olga Chaviano was a striking dark-haired woman—very voluptuous, and a pretty good dancer. She was with Rothman

Guillot’s fame reached the United States in 1946, when she recorded a Spanish-language version of Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather.”

Haydee’s sister Omara Portuondo, who years later, as a grandmother would see a dramatic resurgence of her popularity after she was selected by Ry Cooder to be part of the Buena Vista Social Club.

FOR

THE one thirty A.M. show, called Luna de Tropicana, Romeu’s musical selections included: “Stranger in Paradise” and “Moonlight Serenade.” The finale, which was danced to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” featured all the performers—the models, the dance corps, a few trapeze artists, and the soloists—dressed in black outfits with fluorescent blue threads visible only under ultra-violet light. They even wore a blue makeup base on their faces which Gomery the makeup man had

specially produced by Max Factor ...

The honoree was Carmen Franco, daughter of “el Generalisimo,” Francisco Franco, who was then fifteen years into what would eventually become a thirty-five-year dictatorship of Spain.

feted

The pamphlet was seen as a sign that a revolutionary movement against Batista’s military government was beginning to take root.

“Martín was too busy running a business that employed more than four hundred people,” said Ofelia. She handed each of us an Omelenko, a drink she had invented in honor of the show of the same name. “Come on, let’s toast. To Tropicana.”

(Ofelia had forgotten about the Brando event until her memory was jostled by Fornieles’s recollection. When I told her about it, she said that she and Martín had failed to see Brando that night, but they had heard that the star had come to Tropicana dressed in a flowered shirt and casual slacks. “We had a closet full of men’s jackets and ties for that purpose. But I don’t think anyone went up to Marlon Brando and told him to improve his outfit.”)