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

by Rosa Lowinger

In the days to come Fornieles would introduce me to several other Tropicana performers, such as Gladys González, a member of the dance pair Gladys and Fredy, as well as a male hustler who used to hang around the bar and pick up tourists and asked to be identified only as

Pepe. Pepe’s stories ranged from the titillating (“the house knew what we were up to, and they encouraged us to be there”) to the positively scandalous. (“The one guy you had to watch out for was Papo Batista, the president’s son. If he took a shine to you, te ponía en candela!” which roughly means, “you’d be in big trouble.”) But those and other tales of gossip were still days away when I sat on Alicia’s leopard-print bedspread. Then Fornieles was eager to talk about himself.

This was at a time when the sheer number of Cuban players in the majors, and the number of American pros who played in Cuba during the winter season, made the difference between the two countries’ baseball leagues practically inconsequential. America’s national pastime is also Cuba’s obsession. For nearly a century it joined the two countries more than anything else.

Baseball made its way to Cuba sometime around the mid-1860s or the 1870s, roughly thirty years after it was supposed to have begun in the United States. It was brought to Havana by middle-and upper-class Cubans who were studying in the United States. Both Estéban Bellán, who played on Fordham University’s baseball team in 1871, and Nemiso Guillo, who was at the University of Alabama roughly ten

years earlier, are anecdotally credited with being the first to return to the island with bats a...

By 1920, the two nations’ baseball communities were as inextricably intertwined as the cork and rubber inside a baseball. Regular visits to Havana by Negro and major league teams such as the Cuban X-Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers, Pittsburgh Pirates, and both the Philadelphia Phillies and Athletics continued. Charles Stoneham and John McGraw brought the New York Giants down regularly, possibly so they could spend time at Havana’s Oriental Park, which they had purchased in 1919. Babe Ruth arrived in October of 1920 for the beginning of the Liga Nacional de Base Ball de la República de Cuba’s regular season—it was the year that he had hit fifty-four home runs for the New York Yankees—and made two thousand dollars a game playing with the Giants against the Havana teams Habana and Almendares. (It was reported that “the Babe,” an avid gambler, lost most of his earnings betting on jai alai.)

The website of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, names Dihigo “perhaps the most versatile player in baseball history.”

Yet perhaps the most important connection between Cuban and American baseball was eventually formed in the minor leagues. In 1954, the Havana Sugar Kings were established as a AAA International

League team affiliated with the Cincinnati Reds.

In October of 1959, almost ten months after Batista had fled the island, the Sugar Kings won the Minor League World Series in Havana. Fidel Castro threw out the first ball in front of thirty thousand cheering supporters who gave him a standing ovation.

Hearing Fornieles say this, Alicia cupped her hand over the receiver and pointed out the window. “Mira, la sección de interés,” she whispered slyly. Indeed, within a stone’s throw of her balcony stood the imposing stone and glass rectangle that houses the United States Interests Section in Havana. Up until that moment I had somehow not noticed it, but there it was—the hub of the exile drama, the symbol of the conflict between Cuba and the United States, or more aptly, between Cubans in Cuba and Cubans in the United States. La sección de interés, “the interests section” as it is called in Cuba, was a United States embassy until January 3, 1961, when the outgoing U.S. president, Eisenhower, broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba.

It was turned over to the Swiss Embassy, which represented American interests in Cuba and Cuban matters in Washington until 1977, when President Jimmy Carter established limited diplomatic relations with Cuba once again, in part to facilitate visits by Cuban exiles to their relatives on

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 prest...

In mid-2005, hopes of reconciliation between the two countries remain dim. That was a fact hard to imagine in 1953, when the building first opened its doors. Back then there was almost no border between the two countries. Americans flocked to Cuba, and tens of thousands of Cubans visited the United States annually. Among the many Cubans who honeymooned in Miami were Fidel Castro and his first wife, Mirta Díaz Balart, in 1948; and my parents, who were married in 1954. Pan American averaged twenty-eight daily flights between Miami and Havana. In 1948, roundtrip airfare cost thirty dollars. In spring and summer, Havana’s newspapers were filled with advertisements for hotels and shops in Miami. The Peninsular & Occidental Steamship Company, with offices at municipal pier #2 in Miami and on the Paseo del Prado in Havana, published guidebooks in Spanish for the Cubans who went to Miami for weekend shopping trips, advertising everything from Burdine’s department stores to Wolfie’s Jewish delicatessen. Martín Fox was liberal about sending his staff to the United States for anything that was needed. Pedro Fox and Ernesto Capote, Tropicana’s lighting designer, went several times a year to purchase meat and alcohol, as well as lightbulbs and electrical cable. Rodney and the costume designers went to New York annually to buy fabric, shoes, sequins, and feathers.

Nineteen fifty-three, the year that Alicia Figueroa began dancing with Alberto Alonso’s conjunto at Montmartre, was also the year that Meyer Lansky left the county jail in Saratoga after serving a two-month sentence and made what was to be a permanent move to Cuba. Lansky had pleaded guilty to conspiracy, forgery, and gambling charges brought against him by New York State under pressure from the Kefauver Committee. Despite this, Lansky was back on the nation’s payroll as a gambling advisor, courtesy of his old pal Batista, as soon as he made it back down to Havana. Lansky might seem a poor choice for a nation trying to maintain good relations with the United States, but gambling was Lansky’s business, and he had a reputation for

scrupulousness among both his peers and enemies. At the time Cuba desperately needed someone who could restore the reputation of the casinos after a cheating scandal tha...

“Suckers in Paradise, How Americans Lose Their Shirts in Caribbean Gambling Joints,” identified Tropicana as the operating place of Billie Bloom, “the most expert of the razzle pitchmen.” And it would have been disastrous for tourism had Batista not taken action before the article even appeared.

Anyone else would have been exasperated at this point, but Alicia’s only sign of impatience was the occasional tapping of her terracotta-colored nails against a tabletop. She was tall and long-limbed, with the robust sensuality of Sofia Loren, and a wide, perfect smile. Her skin was flawless. She was sixty-six years old, but if not for her white hair, which she wore cropped and swept off her face, she could have passed for forty. Not that she was trying to. Like Ofelia, Alicia seemed completely comfortable with age. She did not agonize over it; when asked, she told the truth.

They turned Sans Souci into a military school and made plans to do the same with Tropicana. But here let me tell you a lovely story about a worker of Martín’s. His name was Miliki, and he worked in the kitchen. He was a staunch supporter of the revolution, but when he heard what they were going to do to Tropicana, he became very distressed. Somehow he had access to Raúl Castro [brother of Fidel Castro and head of the army] and he asked for an interview with him. Miliki told him that

Tropicana had been created by a man who’d dedicated his entire life to that place. That he personally tended to every plant, every flower, every corner of that paradise. He’d go every day and if a plant was sick, he’d personally nurse it back, etc. The story of Martín’s utter dedication somehow convinced [Raúl Castro] that Tropicana should be preserved for the future and that the Cuban government would never regret it.

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...

magazine ran a photo of her with the caption “bella entre bellas” (a beauty among beauties). Actually, Ana Gloria was not as striking physically as Leonela González, Jenny León, or Alicia Figueroa; but she emanated playful sexuality. She oozed it and winked it from the pages of the February 1958 Show, where she is pictured crouching in a leotard on the cover, and smoldering in a black halter bikini on the pages inside. She was twenty-two then, and had been a star for seven years. The article in Show describes her body almost as much as it does the spice and speed of the mambos she performed with her longtime partner, Rolando. But this was the 1950s, when such things were applauded without reservation. More importantly, this was Cuba, where, even now, broad hips, a well-formed pair of legs, and most of all, full, round nalgas (the most elegant term used to describe a woman’s bottom) can still elicit block after block of heartfelt, if disingenuous, marriage proposals.

In Cuban argot, the comments that men deliver to women on the street are known as piropos. Piropos are not lewd and aggressive. They are usually uttered softly, unlike a catcall. The classic piropo is affectionate, expressing joy at what the Cuban man considers God’s greatest creation. Sexist? Absolutely. But when you walk down the streets of Havana and someone murmurs, “Mami, me estás matando (Baby, you’re killing me)”; “Voy a soñar con esos ojos (I’m going to dream of those eyes)”; or the most famous piropo of all, “Si cocinas como caminas, me como hasta la raspa (If you cook the way you walk, I’ll eat even what sticks to the pan),” it is hard not to feel your step grow a little lighter. It’s a good idea to keep going, but you might find yourself tossing a smile over your shoulder, ...

Nowadays at Tropicana, most of the modelos are attenuated, medium-to-dark-skinned black women. (“Where do these beauties hide? I’ve never run into a single one!” lamented my artist friend the first time he went to t...

at least had pale skin. “No one could imagine una negra as a standard of beauty back then,” said a former dancer who asked not to be named. It was unfortunate, for then, as now, the country teemed with stunning women of all skin colors. Tropicana was not alone in this policy of only picking white, or white-looking models and dancers. The pages of Show reveal hardly any black women at all, the exception being the singers. On the other hand, there are many, many light-skinned women of mixed race, for the problem was not race itself, but appearance. “There was a standard,” said dancer Eddy Serra. “If you were reasonably light-skinned, tall, and shaped like una guitarra, you had a chance at stardom.” Still, the general dearth of blacks at Tropicana, both onstage and in t...

BLACK OR white, rich or poor, capitalist or communist, there is one thing Cubans on both sides of the Straits of Florida have always agreed upon: a woman’s beauty depends upon fullness—especially of the thighs and nalgas.

And

in Havana, the idea has always been to keep them staring. Rodney looked for that quality directly when he scouted for modelos on the streets and in el campo, where he could spot a guajirita with the proper raw material a mile away. “He chose them mainly for their bodies, not their faces,” remarked Gomery, Tropicana’s former makeup man, when I visited him in Miami. “An ugly face can be disguised with makeup, but you can’t fake a tiny waist that blossoms into colossal thighs and hips or monumental height. Por dios, those women were magnificent!” he cried, looking at photos of Sandra Taylor and Zita Coalla, two of Tropicana’s most celebrated modelos. Raw material was only the beginning of the process of becoming a Tropicana modelo. “The women had to carry themselves regally, like true diosas de carne,” said dancer Hector Leal, referring to Rodney’s April 1958 production, Diosas de Carne (Goddesses of the Flesh)—a tribute to female sexuality that was based on the women of Greek literature and mythology.

Show magazine featured the women monthly in their saucy “Ensalada de pollos” (chick, or chicken salad) pages. The pollos electrizantes (electrifying chicks) were posed in bikinis, shorts, and garter belts, crouching in the sand, sprawling across the deck of a yacht, one leg hitched up, knees crossed, gazing at the viewer from the back, over pointedly provocative captions: “Monica Castell—with that anatomy one can never lose a battle”; “The sculptural Mitsuko Miguel—a splendid invitation to life”; “The sweet and spectacular Sarah Corona—few women in this world can offer the characteristic of a twenty-three inch waist and thirty-nine inch hips… upon her graceful gait one can hear unanimous murmurs of exaltation among the public.”

ceviche,

The government made plans to spend $350 million building roads, sewers, aqueducts, and even a tunnel under Havana Bay that would facilitate access to the powder-sand beaches fifteen minutes east of the city. There, a series of grand casino-hotels were about to be built, so that Havana could compete with beachfront resorts in Puerto Rico and Acapulco.

Perhaps it was simple exhaustion—a half-century’s worth of outrage quelled by an economy that seemed to have no limits. As my father said, “You can’t always worry about politics. In Latin America there’s always corruption in elections. If things are basically functioning, you have to move on and keep making money.”

Very astute remark!

The partners charged a percentage of the take for the rentals and were the only ones allowed to empty the machines. Valentín would usually make the rounds with an associate named Efrain Hernandez, who had been sent to Chicago to learn how to service the traganickels; and with Ardura, who received 2 percent of the profits, an amount equal to roughly half a million dollars a year, for bringing this business to Martín through his childhood friend. Fernandez Miranda himself was reported to receive a whopping 50 percent of the profits, which amounted to almost $1 million a month.

The donation was a shrewd move, designed to keep popular opinion favorable to the ever-growing presence of gambling in the nation. It was an act worthy of Evita Perón (wife of Batista’s contemporary and fellow dictator, Juan Perón of Argentina) who was adored by the poor because of her very visible charitable work. Her charity notwithstanding, Evita owned a king’s ransom in jewels, which, through a gambling debt, once wound up in Ofelia’s hands. “I forget the date, but it was probably in 1957,” she recalled one rainy night in Glendale. Un argentino named Jorge Antonio spent a night playing baccarat at Tropicana and lost badly. Turns out that this Jorge Antonio had been Eva Perón’s secretary. He had no money to pay his debt. But he had this small bag of Evita’s jewels that he left as collateral. Probably he stole them, who knows? Or maybe it was payment for something. By then Evita was deceased and this man was living in Spain. Martín took the bag of jewels home for safekeeping, and I had un banquete [a feast] poring through that bag. There were necklaces, diamonds, rings with emeralds, stones the size of almonds. It all seemed make believe. They sparkled like a treasure chest you see in the movies.

Jorge Antonio eventually paid his baccarat debt to Tropicana; and Armando Freyre, Tropicana’s lawyer, returned the bag of jewels to him in Spain. “I’ll tell you, when I was holding those jewels I could not help but remember that time Martín and I went to Argentina during our honeymoon,” said Ofelia on that rainy night. “Things were so bad in that country that even the taxi doors were held together with rope. And I wondered, if Evita was able to buy all those jewels, why couldn’t she do more for Argentina’s poor?” I was tempted to point out that Cuba in the 1950s was also a place of poverty, yet there was no shortage of jewels in the lives of the rich

w...

Martín, for example, continually showered Ofelia with jewelry, cars, and exotic pets. For their third anniversary he gave her a four-inch, diamond-encrusted crucifix pendant. For her thirty-fourth birthday, in 1957, he gave her a new cream-colored Eldorado with a 14-carat-gold key. He himself took to wearing a 13-carat diamond ring. “The stone was the size of a cooked garbanzo,” remarked Ofelia, admitting that it was somewhat extravagant. Though she already had a dog and cat, Martín bought Ofelia a pet rhesus monkey that she named Tito. Another time he came home with a pair of tiny spider monkeys that she told him to return because they were too ferocious. In 1956, a year before the Kenyan tribal prince sent Ofelia the...

The official fee for licenses was merely 25,000 pesos; however the real price included a kickback to Batista amounting to somewhere around 250,000 pesos, equivalent to $1.6 million today.

Over and above, there was a monthly operating fee of 2,000 pesos, plus a profit percentage—usually a fee paid directly to Batista or a member of his family. The size of these payoffs was staggering; several accounts place the annual totals at $10 million. The government also provided loans through Cuba’s state-controlled banks as a further stimulus to construction. Those most aware of the potential, most notably the American gambling syndicates

that ran Cuba’s casinos at Sans Souci and Montmartre, rushed to come ...

Thus began what would become the 1950s version of the danza de los millones. This time, however, the avalanche of moneymaking would be accompanied by actual dancing: all the proposed hotel-casinos were going to feature cabarets with all-night music, big-name headliners, and showgirl-studded dance revues that rivaled those at Tropicana.

One Cuban musical giant who was conspicuously absent from Tropicana’s roster of stars was Benny Moré. By 1955, El bárbaro del ritmo, as he was called, was considered one of the most talented and versatile singers in the country, quite possibly the best musician Cuba has ever produced, according to listeners as well as critics. A self-taught musician who never learned to read notes, Moré was born Bartolomé Maximiliano Moré in Santa Isabel de las Lajas, a rural town near the southern coastal city of Cienfuegos, in Las Villas Province. Like Armando Romeu, Moré’s musical talent came with his birthright. His great-great-grandfather had been a slave brought to Cuba from the Congo. Upon emancipation, Ta Ramón Gundo Moré became the first “king” of a casino, or society, to maintain Congo traditions in Santa Isabel de las Lajas. Foremost among those traditions was music. Young Bartolomé was welcomed into the Casino de los Congos from an early age. By the time he was six he was adept at playing the tres and singing and dancing rumba, son, guaracha, and all manner of Afro-Cuban music. He was also an expert improviser and could make up verses on the spot in the best tradition of guajiro country music.

One day Ofelia did ask Martín why Tropicana never hired the man who was unquestionably the greatest Cuban singer of his era. Martín told her to see about it with Ardura, who made those decisions. “The reason Ardura gave me,” said Ofelia, “was Benny’s drinking. He was unreliable. He’d miss performances or show up late.” Other cabarets, including Sans Souci, were willing to work around Moré’s weaknesses. Rodney, on the other hand, was not. He demanded rigor and professionalism from his cast. At Tropicana the concept was the star of the show, not any individual performer.

The payoff to all this work was evident in the reactions of the public. Recalled Ofelia, “I’ll never forget when Joan Crawford came with her husband, Alfred Steele. She grabbed my hand and held it, telling me over and over how the show had been the best thing that she’d ever seen and how the architecture and setting were magnificent. She asked to be taken backstage, and all the cast went crazy. The models were still in their gingham costumes with ribbons. [Crawford] was a legend, and she had her picture taken with the cast and told them that she had never seen anything as exciting or beautiful.”

Straitlaced 1950s America already had a vision of Cubanness, via the comic, family-style cubanidad depicted every Monday night on the I Love Lucy show.

When presented with this perception of Cuba as a place of licentiousness, Ofelia laughed. “Everyone complains about prostitution, but tell me where in the world it doesn’t exist. Wherever there are men there are prostitutes. And it also serves a practical purpose. In Cuba, fathers would often take their sons to houses of prostitution for their first sexual encounter. Not a bad thing, so they can learn what to do.”

She turned around and fixed me with that stare that looked like it could melt iron. “If you are going to say that Batista is a dictator, then you’d better say the same thing about Fidel Castro. And I know you aren’t going to put that in the book, because otherwise you’ll never get back into Cuba.”

Excellent point!

The Homeland Security Act deemed all Cubans, even the elderly singer and Grammy winner of Buena Vista Social Club fame Ibrahim Ferrer, a threat to our country. The thought of also being kept out of Cuba by the Cuban government made me think twice about broaching political subjects.

I tried to avoid direct political confrontation, though sometimes it was difficult, such as on the night after the 2004 presidential election when I sat glumly at the poker table while Ofelia danced around the room and poured celebratory cocktails. I hadn’t seen her this happy since Arnold Schwarznegger had been elected governor of California.

“The great economic conditions that you and Rosa are always telling me about didn’t exist in the countryside. The cities had excellent hospitals and free education, but the same wasn’t true en el campo. There was extensive seasonal unemployment. There were very few hospitals. A majority of guajiros lived in houses with dirt floors, without electricity, plumbing, or bathrooms.” “Do you think Mexico and Brazil took better care of their rural populations?” Ofelia countered. “If I understand correctly, now there isn’t even running water in Havana. Doesn’t everyone have water tanks because of shortages? My sister, La Niña, had one installed in her Vedado apartment in the seventies. We’re talking about Havana, once one of the most beautiful and modern cities in the world. How can you justify that?”