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

by Rosa Lowinger

“Yeah. When Roosevelt’s men came to fight in our War of Independence, they began calling the Mambises ‘war heroes.’ Well, you can imagine that no Cuban could pronounce that, so it simply became guajiro.” It was startling to learn that the name for the quintessential Cuban,

the backbone of the nation’s agriculture, came from the United States.

Despite these threats, Cubans expertly skirt the restrictions on a daily basis. In the 1950s, everyone played the bolita. Today, anyone with expendable income can purchase satellite television and Internet service on the black market.

“When I was in school the teachers were these mean old broads, but this girl’s twenty-five, twenty-eight, tops. Looks like she could be on television. I mean, how’s a teenage boy s’posed to concentrate?”

The California gaming laws allow only for card and lottery games. Craps is therefore played using dice whose colors match two decks of cards. The cards are imprinted with pairs of dice, and the die with the higher number signals the dealer which card to turn over. “It’s a pretty clever way of getting around the law,” I said to Ofelia as she continued to roll. “Worthy of Martín himself,” she replied, as the croupiers egged her on. She kept the game alive for about twenty rolls of the dice. People clapped each time the dealer turned over a card and it did not show seven. “Alrighty, Miss Ofeelia, keep it going!” said the white-haired cowboy as his chips accumulated. The enthusiasm was infectious. To Ofelia’s delight, I even placed a bet myself. I lost immediately.

(Ofelia claims that she and Martín considered having children, but decided that it would have been impossible, given their lifestyle. And Tropicana, as she had seen repeatedly, was no place to leave a husband alone.)

Halfway through the show, the music drifted into something more romantic. The lights dimmed again and the cast slipped off-stage. The catwalks lit up gradually, as if a cloud had just unveiled the moon. Eleven of Tropicana’s modelos glided out onto the cat-walks, holding huge black discs in front of them. Each disc carried the words “Capitol Records.” Rolling the records like wheels, the women moved along the catwalks to the stage, forming a line before the audience. Then they spun the discs around. The backs were hot pink. On each was printed a bold black letter, spelling out N-A-T K-I-N-G C-O-L-E. The audience began to cheer and clap, as the voice of Miguel Angel Blanco boomed out once again: “Ladies and Gentlemen, señoras y señores! The Tropicana cabaret is proud to present the one and only…Nat ‘King’ Cole!” The line of modelos parted to either side of the stage and the music started up again. Only this time it was not the Armando Romeu orchestra playing, but the celebrated Nat “King” Cole Trio, including John Collins on guitar, Charlie Harris on bass, and Lee Young, brother of

the great Lester Young, on drums. The “King” himself, one of America’s biggest recording stars, a man who had earned so much money for Capitol Records that its signature cylindrical building in Hollywood was known as “the house that Nat built,” came out in his white tuxedo with black lapels, wrist cuffs, and a matching bow tie. Cole sat at the piano and began to pound out one of his hits. Which one, exactly, is lost to memory, but it was probably “Caravan,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” or “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” Though most of the audience was Cuban, many mouthed the words as he sang “Nature Boy,” “Mona Lisa,” and his signature song, “Unforgettable.”

When the performance was over, the audience was on its feet, demanding more, but Cole had to perform again that night and the crowd had to content itself with the second half of Fantasía Mexicana while he went backstage. “No one loved the Tropicana shows more than me,” Ofelia admitted, “but after hearing Nat ‘King’ Cole, I didn’t want to hear anything else!” Neither, apparently, did the rest of the audience. While Nat Cole was singing, the silence had been so palpable it seemed to throb. “No one moved, not even a fork was lifted,” said Ofelia, who had been worried earlier that Cole’s romantic style would demand too much from a ra...

LaPalm, meanwhile, was uneasily eyeing a group of thuggish bodyguards who sat with their guns on their laps. “They were protecting the general, that dictator who ran the country. Nat Cole wasn’t too happy about it,” LaPalm told me. But both Ofelia and Valentín insist that Batista was not there the night Nat “King” Cole played Tropicana. “And even if he had been,” said Ofelia, “in my nine years at Tropicana I never saw someone openly brandishing a weapon inside the cabaret.”

“Tropicana invests $230,000 in three months for artistic talent!” announced Show in January 1956. It was an astonishing amount of money, but Cole was one of the most famous musicians in America, and immediately after his appearances ended, Tropicana opened a four-week run

(Investigators in New York linked the 1957 murder of Albert Anastasia to his attempts to muscle in on the Hilton casino concession.)

Very interesting!

Rather than sell Tropicana, Martín and his brother Pedro came up with another plan to make the cabaret the premier tourist attraction in Cuba. “On January 15, Tropicana inaugurates its special service with Cubana de Aviación,” reported Show in its January 1956 issue. The flight, known as the Tropicana Special, was a weekly charter aboard a forty-six-seat Lockheed Constellation. It was part of a package deal offering the flight, dinner, and drinks at Tropicana, a room at the Hotel Nacional, and breakfast, all for $68.80 (around $500 today). The best part was the flight itself. The plane was outfitted with a tiny six-foot stage beneath an Arcos de Cristal-style proscenium arch at the front, and the seat covers bore the Tropicana name and ballerina emblem. It was a miniature version of the cabaret, a cabaret-in-the-sky, with all the elements of Tropicana’s entertainment except gambling. As soon as they were airborne, the passengers were served frozen pink daiquiris. A row of lights came up from underneath the arch and a gold lamé curtain opened to reveal a quintet of musicians in ruffled-sleeved shirts. The pilot throttled back to lower the noise of the engines as the conjunto launched into a blazing cha-cha-cha on trumpet, drums, guitar, maracas, and a sixty-six-key piano specially designed to fit in the confines of the cabin.

What days those were! Like Paris in the 1890s, Berlin in the 1930s, New York in the Studio 54 days, Cuba was an endless party, and Tropicana was its epicenter. Marlon Brando, Liberace, Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, Ernest Hemingway, Debbie Reynolds, Dianne Carroll, Edith Piaf, Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, Mamie van Doren, Cesar Romero—everyone who came to Cuba, every performer who worked at other cabarets, every movie star who lunched in the outdoor patio of the Hotel Nacional or dove off the platform diving board at Lansky’s new Riviera Hotel, or swam in the saltwater swimming pool built into the rocky coastline of Trafficante’s seaside Comodoro, eventually spent a night under the stars at Tropicana, drinking rum, dancing the mambo, or playing roulette. The cast basked in the glory of it all. “Ava Gardner was there the night we did Luisa Fernanda en Chemise,” remembered Eddy Serra. “I did a modern dance interpretation of Peggy Lee’s hit song, ‘Fever.’ Afterward, many of the cast went to the Cabaret Nacional, and there was Ava with her entourage. We used to go down there all the time. We’d eat pan con bistec [steak sandwiches], or una rubia con ojos verdes [a blond with green eyes, referring to a dish consisting of rice with avocado], and keep partying until morning.”

It was during this same spate of shows, which were preceded, at nine, by bingo in “Lefty Clark’s Casino” and prizes of six 1957 model cars—Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Mercedes-Benz, Pontiac, and Chevrolet—that the Tropicana party came to a crashing halt. It happened on New Year’s Eve, the busiest night of the year at Tropicana. About an hour and a half after the cast had released the traditional doves into the air, after the champagne toasts, kisses, and the eating of twelve grapes for good luck, when the patrons were back on the dance floor, a bomb ripped through the bar of Bajo las Estrellas.

This was during the period when the anti-Machado political action groups had devolved into gun-wielding gangsters who settled scores from the windows of black sedans.

He was certain of his destiny as a great world leader. By the time he was in jail on the Isle of Pines, his letters were filled with references not only to José Martí, but to Napoleon and Julius Caesar.

He arrived in Guatemala in early 1954 to see what a revolutionary government could do for its people. When Arbenz was toppled, Guevara sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy in Guatemala City. Eventually he made his way to Mexico City, where in November 1955 he met Fidel Castro. Though it remains unclear whether Guevara was already a communist, the events in Guatemala solidified his commitment to revolution and his anti-American sentiments. As he was later to say, “I was born in Argentina, I fought in Cuba, and I became a revolutionary in Guatemala.”

“Pepe,” the hustler who came to Havana from Cienfuegos in mid-1957, had heard about these random detentions. “I had no political affiliation,

but when my bus approached Havana, I was scared to death,” he told me. “The driver let me out before we got to the station and gave me an address where I could stay until I found a place to live.”

One day when they were having lunch with Martín and Ofelia at La Bodeguita del Medio, a hole-in-the-wall Old Havana bar and restaurant that was one of Ernest Hemingway’s regular haunts (and where, according to Ofelia, Nat Cole loved to order the avocado salad with onions and olive oil), they asked their hosts what part of town would be best for them to buy their own apartment.

Despite the escalating violence, my father expected the political situation to stabilize as soon as Batista was out. “The consensus at that time was that one government comes in, steals enough to get rich, then leaves when another one takes over. Then that one gets rich and moves on. It’s the Latin American way, and we’d seen it with Grau, with Prío. Ever since Cuba was liberated from Spain it had been like that. We figured Batista had made enough money with the gambling that he’d go soon and then Fidel or whoever took over would make a deal with the Americans and let the rest of us keep living our lives.”

The important thing, of course, was for the conflict to end before tourism became seriously affected. The hotels had been crowded throughout the holidays (both the heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and Senator John F. Kennedy had been to Cuba in December 1957); but in early 1958, Martín had seen a drop in attendance at the cabaret. Normally it was practically impossible to get a table during the winter season without a reservation. Now some nights there were empty tables. The Cubans were the ones staying home, but if the violence did not end soon, Martín knew, the Americans would stop coming.

Like the good gamblers that they were, other Cubans also speculated. As the bombs exploded and the jails filled, people hedged their bets, made donations, and worked actively to support the insurgents. By late 1958, only those Cubans with ties to the government supported Batista.

Tropicana, however, remained unmatched in its entertainment offerings. To the shock of some, including Ofelia, Ardura arranged for the hiring of the first transsexual, singer Christine Jorgensen, for a two-week performance that sold out every night.

But Cuba had an endless supply of guitar-shaped women, so that by the time Rodney mounted his seventh anniversary show, Su Majestad la Prensa, “Your Majesty the Press,” he had no problem filling the catwalks.

The cabaret was now heavily guarded by police and infiltrated by government informants (these ubiquitous snitches came to be called “thirty-three” because their salary was thirty-three pesos and thirty-three centavos a month).

Jenny León: It was a total shock that Batista left, as much as if Fidel Castro suddenly left Cuba now. And he did it only because things got out of control for him. But the people of Cuba were sick of Batista. We were sick of the government, the thieves, the violence, the relajo [joke] that Cuba had become in those years. Caballero, make no mistake about it—the people were with Fidel!

Santo [Trafficante] was in jail at Trescornia [immigration and detention center], where later we went to the wedding of his daughter. Claro, no one said anything to me about what was happening during the first days.

There were dozens of barbudos [bearded ones, the popular term for the 26th of July fighters] with him, all in uniform.

“China, don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s settling down and getting back to normal.” Now I realize he was pretending, but at the time it didn’t occur to me to question it.

Leonardo Lowinger: I think every single person in Cuba was watching Fidel Castro that day. Our whole family was gathered together in the living room. We were all pretty excited. The only one not too excited was my aunt Fanny. She had survived the Holocaust by running from country to country until she got to France, and a Catholic priest hid her in a convent. After the war she returned to Hungary. Then in 1956, she fled when the Russians marched into Budapest with their tanks. She also told us that they came with rosaries and crucifixes hanging from

their necks, and white doves flying. When we were watching Fidel on television that day, someone released some doves—there were two or six, I can’t remember—and a pair of them landed on his shoulders as he talked. My aunt stood up and pointed to the television: “Those men are communists!” We all laughed at her. “Ah, come on, what do you know?” My father—her brother—called her a silly old maid. But she insisted. “You don’t know. I saw this before. Communists act like they’re holy people, but watch out,” she said. She and my father argued in Hungarian for a long time. Ofelia Fox: I don’t think anyone was worrying about communism that day. There was nothing but joy in Cuba. It was like the day Hitl...

“I think you guys need another drink,” said Rosa as she turned to me. “Nobody wanted to worry Ofelia, so she never got any details of what happened at Tropicana during the first days.” “Yes, tell me what I missed,” added Ofelia.

That was also the day that Manuel Urrutia, Fidel Castro’s handpicked choice for interim president, arrived in Havana by airplane from Santiago de Cuba and took up residence in the presidential palace. A somber judge who had presided in Santiago at the trial of the Granma survivors, Urrutia had been chosen because he had called for the acquittal of the captured men. He had little platform other than a vehement opposition to gambling and prostitution, which he linked and vowed to abolish.

George Raft was long gone. So were Norman Rothman, Lefty Clark, and Meyer Lansky. Santo Trafficante, Dino Cellini, and Jake Lansky were still in custody at the Trescornia detention center on the Malecón. Trafficante’s name was on the executions list and he was trying frantically to use any influence he had to get out of the country. After months of back-and-forth negotiations and visits from his lawyer, Frank Ragano, to Havana, Trafficante was released, and he left for Tampa. Meanwhile, for the first time in five years, Show did not report on “the magic of Rodney”

Indeed, agrarian reform’s chief proponent and administrator, Che Guevara, had already made public his commitment to implementing Marxist principles in Cuba. So had Raúl Castro, the commander of the armed forces. Castro himself remained deliberately vague on the matter.

santero.

Washington responded by breaking off diplomatic relations on January 3, 1961.

Ofelia scrambled to get another set of exit papers. On January 11, 1961, she left Cuba for the last time.

That night they checked in at the University Inn, U.S. Route 441 South, in Gainesville. The next morning Martín was admitted to the J. Hillis Miller Health Center of the University Hospital at Gainesville. His patient number was 047190. After a number of tests, Dr. García Bengochea told him that the only way to get a conclusive diagnosis was by having a myelogram [an X-ray examination that involves injecting fluid to detect abnormalities of the nervous system]. He didn’t recommend that Martín go through it because there was a danger of stroke. Ofelia tried to dissuade him also, but when Martín made up his mind that was it. The myelogram took place the next day—September 24. Ofelia was at Martín’s side and she saw one of his eyelids droop and he began to speak nonsense. She knew immediately that something was wrong. The doctors acted quickly, but Martín had suffered a debilitating stroke.

Everywhere she turned the answer was the same. But it simply wasn’t possible for $900,000 [the amount Ofelia and Rosa calculated had been deposited during Martín and Ofelia’s travels] to disappear in an instant. Clearly they weren’t spending that much on their lives. What’s more, no one came forth to tell her about the bolita income. And you know that note from Miguel Angel Cano? When Pedro became Martín’s guardian, he got Cano to pay it, in full, in two payments! In my book the way Pedro treated her was criminal. She wanted the money to take care of Martín. He had helped everyone all his life, and now that his wife needed them—vaya, he was the one who needed them!—nobody came to their aid. The saddest part is that so many people thought she had the money! She just couldn’t convince them of her incredible situation.

OFELIA CONTACTED all of the people Mack suggested. She spoke with Valentín in Las Vegas and Johnny Williams in Boston. None had any further information about what could have happened to Martín’s money, though many helped her out. Santo Trafficante came to visit Martín and gave her $1,000. Others gave her $50 here, $200 there. Even Evaristo García of the bounced check came through with $300. “Ofelia later tried to pay him back, but he refused,” said Rosa Sanchez. “Every nickel she received was properly recorded. She was scrupulous in her accounting of her guardianship.”

Meanwhile, as Martín languished in his pitiful

state, unable to speak or recognize anyone, Ofelia tried to awaken his memory. She invited people to the house to see him, especially friends who would evoke the cabaret. On one occasion, it worked ever so briefly. Ofelia had picked up Olga Guillot and brought her to the house. Guillot was crushed to see the man who, in her opinion, had built Havana’s most spectacular entertainment empire looking so diminished. “I took his hand and said, ‘Martín, Martín…’” Guillot recalled. “And that man, who was in another world, had ...

ON MARCH 27, 1964, Ofelia, broke and disconsolate, asked Judge Clark to transfer custody of Martín to his brother. The action was filed and recorded on April 5, 1964 by County Court Clerk Melba C. Dick. Prior to that, Lita told Ofelia that she could stay in the house on Beacom Boulevard if she wanted to, but it would be best if she moved into the maid’s quarters, which had a separate entrance. “There was no way she could do that,” said Rosa Sanchez. “If Martín had at least recognized her, it would have been different. But since he didn’t—Vaya, she was even afraid that if he fell, if anything happened to him—they’d accuse her of negligence.” But Martín’s niece and nephews scoff at that notion: “What the hell could cause someone to dump her husband after he becomes incapacitated?” said Emilio Fox, expressing the opinion of his relatives. Ofelia made a detailed schedule for administering Martín’s medications and gave it to his family. Then she kissed him, told him she’d be back soon, and left for California with Rosa Sanchez.

The girls were tall

and curvaceous, but much leaner than the diosas of the past.

brujería

Witchcraft

She nodded and folded her hands. “Okay. Rosa and I are a couple.” The three of us began to laugh, out of relief and nervousness. Then Ofelia asked, “Don’t you want to know if I’m gay?” “Does it really matter?” I asked. “Come on,” Rosa insisted. “Just ask her if she’s gay.” I was used to their subtle manipulation around this matter, so I decided to play along. “Okay. Ofelia, are you gay?” Ofelia smiled at me coquettishly. “I suppose you could say I’m a late-bloomer bisexual. I married Martín without having ever been with anyone. While we were married, I lived with Martín and Martín alone. People always tried to say things about me—that I had been with this