Over the period of the last thirty days, Havana, Cuba has been foremost on my mind, as I finished up the final edits of the latest Wolfsonian Library installation, Caricaturas;
…sat for an interview and gave a guided tour of Cuban Caricature and Culture: The Art of Massaguer and Caricaturas for Public Television’s Art Loft crew;
…provided a VIP tour of the installations for Emilio Cueto, a leading collector of Cuba ephemera and lender to the Massaguer exhibition;
…promoted the publication of Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure, American Seduction with a talk at Books & Books in Coral Gables;
…provided a public tour of the two installations and a display of Cuban film related posters, lobby cards, and other movie memorabilia in the library, before attending a director-introduced, packed screening of Errol Flynn’s Ghost across the street at O Cinema;
…hosted The Wolf on Wax event for Miami’s Vinyl Social Club and other audiophiles and vintage vinyl enthusiasts, featuring a display of portable record players, vintage record jackets, sheet music covers, photographs, and other ephemera documenting the Cuban music craze from the 1920s through the 1950s;
…and provided a visiting scholar from Italy with access to the Vicki Gold Levi Cuba Collection for her book project focused on Art Deco architecture and design in Havana.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection
The latest library installation, Caricaturas, was designed to complement the exhibition in the galleries of the work of Cuban publisher, art director, and world-renowned caricaturist, Conrado Walter Massaguer.
While Caricaturas includes some additional works by Massaguer, it especially celebrates several of his contemporaries in Cuba and Mexico, featuring cartoons by David, Arroyito, Hercar, Xavier Cugat, Covarrubias, and Arias Bernal.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
The confluence of so many Cuba-related events caused me to reflect on the connections between Hollywood film, the promotion of Havana as a tourist destination, and the cultural exchanges between the U.S. and Cuba that so influenced the direction of American music and dance culture during the first half of the twentieth century, the subject of today’s post.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
While one should not forget the important influence played by the transmission of African American jazz to the island of Cuba, this post will begin by tracing the movement of Cuban music and dance culture in the opposite direction. While a few intrepid American investors traveled to the island in the aftermath of Cuban independence, (humorously captured in a caricature illustration by Massaguer for the 1909 cover of El Figaro), the first major wave of tourists arrived after the end of the First World War.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
The first wave of tourists were attracted to the island by policies at home and by a tourist promotion bill passed by Cuban legislators. Americans with money and leisure time who regularly traveled to Europe were looking for new vacation destinations in the wake of the destruction wrought by the First World War. At the same time, concerns over the precipitous decline in sugar prices caused Cuban politicians to seek to diversify the economy by promoting the development of gambling casinos and concessions as a means of attracting wealthy American tourists to the island. The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provided an added impetus, as the prohibition of the production, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages encouraged American barmen (and their thirsty customers) to relocate to Cuba.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
Numerous sheet music cover illustrations and popular song lyrics from 1919 and 1920 encouraged thirsty Americans to travel to the island where the rum still flowed like water.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection
By the mid-1920s, travel writers noted the proliferation of bars, saloons, bodeguitas (corner grocery stores setting up stools and selling drinks), and restaurants serving frozen daiquiris, with one travel writer estimating a staggering 7,000 drinking establishments operating in Havana!
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gifts
Hollywood filmmakers documented (and helped promote) the seasonal swell of American socialites heading to Cuba for the winter season. If anyone is curious to know just how much of an incentive that the free flow of alcohol had in encouraging the floodtide of tourists, I would encourage them to see the hilarious Warner Bros. pre-code comedy, Havana Widows. The film stars Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell as a couple of New York chorus girls who travel to the Cuban capital with the aim of getting rich by seducing and suing a rich American millionaire. Not only is their married target a heavy drinker, but their shady lawyer is also either completely inebriated or passed out drunk for the duration of the film!
When Joan Blondell returned to Havana with her husband, Dick Powell, on their honeymoon, Massaguer would be on hand to greet them and to scribble down an instantaneous caricature of the Hollywood celebrities.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
If rum and roulette were two of the draws attracting Americans to Cuba in the 1920s, it was the local music and dance that kept them entranced, and which returned with them to the American mainland. The American craze for Cuban music began with the wildly popular song, El Manisero (The Peanut Vendor), which had its American debut on Broadway at the Palace Theatre on Forty-seventh Street, performed by the house orchestra of Havana’s Gran Casino Nacional. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) capitalized on the popularity of The Peanut Vendor by providing a fanciful story of the song’s supposed origins in the musical film The Cuban Love Song, released in December 1931. The film featured a duet version of the song performed by Lupe Velez and Lawrence Tibbett.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
Although the rhythm of El Manisero was a son pregón, it became known in the U.S. as rhumba. The rumba actually began as an urban, Afro-Cuban phenomenon, in which couples danced to percussion in a fast-paced rhythmic frenzy described by outsiders as scandalously seductive. In his 1931 exhibition at the Delphic Studios in New York City, Massaguer paid tribute to the origins of the dance with his pastel and watercolor/gouache drawing, After the Rumba, depicting a half-nude mulata rumbera.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
The rumba’s popularity was boosted by two Cuban dancers, René and Estela, who not only performed at the Cuban pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, but who also lent their suave moves and shimmies to a nightclub scene in the popular film, Another Thin Man (1939).
The American appetite for rumba was also whet by the aptly named Hollywood film, Rumba, starring Carol Lombard, George Raft, and Margo.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
Released in 1935, it introduced movie audiences to a tamer, Americanized version of the rumba—(a fox trot set to Latin music)—through the story of a dancer (played by Raft) with ambitions of opening his own nightclub in Havana and his romantic encounter with a rich American socialite (played by Lombard).
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
Dance studios like Arthur Murray took up the challenge of teaching American audiences the basic steps of the Americanized rhumba, (often spelled with an added “h” to lend it some sophistication), and in later decades did the same for those trying to learn the impossibly complex mambo, and the cha-cha-cha.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gifts
The first tidal wave of American tourism to Havana dried up by 1933 because of the repeal of Prohibition, the worsening of the Great Depression, the violent overthrow of Cuban president Gerardo Machado’s regime, and growing world tensions. Hollywood films of the thirties and forties, however, continued to present an exoticized and glamorized version of the island paradise in a spate of musical comedy films including Havana somewhere in the title.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection
The post-WWII musical film, Pan-Americana, built on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policies to promote renewed trade and cultural exchange with our Caribbean and South American neighbors.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
The Cuban singer (and original Señor Babalu), Miguelito Valdes made his Hollywood debut in that movie musical, but ultimately lost his title to another Cuban band leader and Hollywood and television star, Desi Arnaz.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection
Despite the popularity of Cuba-themed Hollywood films and musicals in the forties, the next flood of American tourists did not take place until after the end of the Korean War and the usurpation of the Cuban presidency by Fulgencio Batista. Many of the films of the fifties set in or about Cuba continued to promote Cuban dance and music, moving from rumba to mambo and the cha-cha-cha. The mambo became so popular in the United States, that it was taken up by Italian American singers, Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney in songs that made the dance charts in 1954.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
The director of Rock Around the Clock, Fred F. Sears, also made the film, Cha-Cha-Cha Boom! This low-budget, music-driven film released in 1956 told the fictitious story of an American talent scout discovering and introducing Cuban band leader, Pérez Prado and his mambo musical stylings to the sophisticated New York audience.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
The film noir thriller, Affair in Havana (1957), is remembered less for its dark murder plot, than for a scene in which a young Celia Cruz made her Hollywood debut.
https://youtu.be/BJtD2RipM9c
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection
The American films made towards the close of the decade tended to reflect growing American anxiety and disillusionment with the corruption of the Batista kleptocracy. Actor Errol Flynn, famed for his early swashbuckler and Robin Hood roles, tried to resurrect his flagging career by starring in a gritty film noir set in Havana. In The Big Boodle, Flynn plays an innocent American casino croupier caught up in political intrigue and corruption.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
Fortunately, Flynn’s final flop, an Exploit Films production titled Cuban Rebel Girls, is not one for which he is remembered. This low budget cross between a documentary and exploitation film, starred Flynn as himself and introduced his underaged lover as an American girl drawn into support of the cause of Castro’s guerrillas. Partially filmed in the revolutionaries Sierra Nevada mountain encampment, Flynn tried to champion the cause of the underdog revolutionaries and simultaneously to recapture the romanticism of his own Robin Hood roles in real life.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
Gaspar Gonzalez’s documentary, Errol Flynn’s Ghost, examines the important cultural role played by Hollywood movies and cinema in the lives of the Habaneros, featuring original interviews, film footage of the city’s many famous movie palaces, while recalling Flynn’s exploits and intrigues with the Cuban revolutionaries. While I would never recommend wasting time watching Flynn’s Cuban Rebel Girls, I would encourage my local readers and film buffs to be sure to catch a screening of Errol Flynn’s Ghost: Hollywood in Havana at the Key West Film Festival in November 2019.
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