The Tropicana Nightclub and How Cuban Women Fared Before, During, and After Fidel
As the curator of two Cuba-themed exhibitions, Promising Paradise and Cuban Caricature and Culture, at The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, I had been contacted by a team of Cuban-American documentary filmmakers. Working on a film about performers at the Tropicana Night Club in Havana, they were interested in securing images and impressions of Cuba before, during, and after the 1959 revolution.
Photographed by Lynton Gardiner
After providing them with high resolution images of vintage photographs and ephemera from the Vicki Gold Levi Cuba Collection, I was invited to meet the filmmakers at the JFK Library in Hialeah to be interviewed for their production.
They provided me with a list of questions about Cuban politics and culture related to their focus on Cuban vedettes, dancers, and performers at the Tropicana.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Vicki Gold Levi
The premiere nightclub venue in Havana’s suburbs in the 1950s, the Tropicana had its origins in impresario Victor de Correa’s Edén Concert, an open-air cabaret established in the heart of the city in the late 1920s. Located in a vacant lot on Zulueta Street, (between Sloppy Joe’s Bar and the Hotel Plaza), Correa’s cabaret featured top-notch singers such as Rita Montaner and Miguelito Valdés and dancers performing on a raised stage under a red-tiled roof. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Edén Concert provided Havana residents and tourists with great music, food, entertainment, and an opportunity to dance under the stars among palms strewn with colored lights.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
A vintage souvenir postcard from the Edén Concert pictures a dancer in a skimpy costume with die cut holes through which a person could insert two fingers to provide her with dancing legs!
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Vicki Gold Levi
In 1939, Correa was enticed by underground gambling entrepreneurs to shift operations to a villa and small garden estate in the Marianao suburbs of the capital city, and the Tropicana was born. In the 1950s, Martín Fox began operating the Tropicana casino and eventually took over the entire operation of the nightclub. Under Fox’s stewardship, a young Cuban architect was hired to construct the famous Arcos de Cristal (providing an indoor venue for rainy nights), and the infamous choreographer, Roderico (“Rodney”) Neyra was contracted to create and direct the cabaret productions.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Vicki Gold Levi
The filmmakers were most interested in providing some cultural and historical context to their interviews with a few surviving Tropicana vedettes and dancers. As a professor of history at FIU and affiliate faculty member of the Cuban Research Institute, I was asked to describe the role of Cuban women before, during, and after the 1959 revolution, and outline what opportunities existed for them in Havana. It was an important question, and one which I struggled to answer briefly, given that more competent historians than myself have written entire books about gender roles and relations in Cuba. I did my best to summarize women’s changing roles and opportunities in answer to their query but found myself ruminating long after the interview on how I might better have addressed the subject using images from The Wolfsonian’s Cuban collections to illustrate my points. Here’s what I came up with.
During the era of the Cuban Republic, women’s opportunities and experiences were most affected by their class, social status, and race or ethnicity. Women of Hispanic heritage and middle or upper-class origin were expected to behave conservatively, with single women going out only with a proper male chaperone. This began to change in the “roaring twenties” as the flapper culture of their neighbors to the North was imported to the island by Conrado Walter Massaguer, an active participant in Cuba’s tourism campaigns from the 1920s to the 1950s. In the 1920s, Massaguer was invited to illustrate the cover of a Havana-themed issue of the popular American magazine, Life. He did so by depicting a smiling Hispanic beauty in a hoop skirt with a modern print, coquettishly hiding her charms behind a fan with silhouettes of tourist activities in Cuba.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Vicki Gold Levi
As someone educated in his youth the United States before becoming one of Cuba’s most successful art directors and publishers, Massaguer became instrumental in fostering the adoption and dissemination of the “flapper” ideal to his native Cuba. Inspired by Charles Gibson’s success at making a name for himself with his illustrations of late Victorian debutantes, Massaguer resolved to promote the “new woman” ideal in his portraits of young Cuban women gracing the covers and inside pages of his magazines.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Vicki Gold Levi
In the first year of publishing Social, Massaguer introduced an illustrated feature, captioned “Massa‐Girls,” a play on both the sound of his surname and on the term “masa”—a crude slang word referring to women’s bodies. The portraits scandalously celebrated these young society girls who smoked, played sports, “bobbed” their hair, and discarded constraining corsets and traditional values.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Vicki Gold Levi
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Loan
Massaguer both celebrated and frowned over women’s social and sexual liberation, and his illustrations reflect that ambivalence. One can only speculate how much of the social and sexual freedom experienced by Cuba’s society girls filtered down to working class girls and women of color whose lives were more economically and racially determined. But these women, too, would be celebrated in the 1930s when avant-garde artists embraced afrocubanismo. Thereinafter, the “mulatta,” with its connotations of voluptuousness and sensuality, became the dominant Venus trope in Cuba. Massaguer helped perpetuate the mulatta trope with his Despues de la rumba, [After the rumba dance], a drawing featuring a sensual, half-nude dancer that he exhibited in an art exhibition held at New York Delphic Studios in 1931. But images of voluptuous and sensual mulattas also graced the covers of two of Cuba’s most popular (and populist) magazines, Carteles, and Bohemia.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Vicki Gold Levi
But it was during the ousting of President-turned-dictator, Gerardo Machado, and the establishment of the short-lived 100-day government of Ramón Grau that Cuban women flirted with political activism.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Vicki Gold Levi
The protest movement that developed in opposition to Machado between 1930 and his deposition in 1933 included middle-class and elite feminists who demanded (and eventually won) the right to vote. The all-girl orchestra, Anacaona—named for the Taino Indian heroine and cacica (or chieftainess) of Haiti murdered by the Spanish conquerors—was founded by Concepción (“Cuchito”) Castro Zaldarriaga in 1932. Cuchito reinvented herself when the worsening political and social strife forced her to abandon her studies and plans to become a dentist after the university was closed down. Eventually she incorporated all (eleven!) of her sisters into the band.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Vicki Gold Levi
The success of Anacaona inspired a generation of female musicians and girl bands that proliferated in the next two decades.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Vicki Gold Levi
Other young women were driven to political radicalism by the economic strife of the Great Depression and the political repression of the Machado regime. Some joined the ranks of various leftist groups, including the Ala Izquierda Estudiantil, the reformist Auténtico, or far-left Communist parties demanding full participation by women and the underprivileged. After the overthrow of Machado, some newly enfranchised women were drawn into the Auténtico and left-of-center Ortodoxo parties in the 1940s and 1950s as the Cold War grew colder and a more conservative atmosphere prevailed.
But no matter how cold the Cold War climate grew, Cuba remained a tropical paradise where even young women could temporarily mask their identities and escape their chaperones to participate in carnival celebrations.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Vicki Gold Levi
Nor was it unheard of for beautiful girls to run away to Havana in the hope of earning a living as a vedette, donning costumes, and parading around the catwalks of the Tropicana or other nightclub stages.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Vicki Gold Levi
Not long after Fulgencio Batista took power via military coup in 1952, women again became involved in the political struggle. Some formed the Federación Democrática de Mujeres Cubanas and the Hermandad de Madres de Marta Abreu. Others who came to political consciousness during the revolution of 1933 took on leadership roles in the urban struggle against Batista in the more radical Frente Cívico de Mujeres Martianas (FCMM) founded in 1953 and the Mujeres Oposicionistas Unidas (M.O.U.) founded in 1956). Even as these groups urged women to follow the example of their female forebears who participated in the Wars of Independence and the revolution of 1933, they were driven less by a feminist agenda as by the feminine agency of supporting their husbands, brothers, and sons in opposing the dictatorship. Many were involved in organizing demonstrations and protests, making funeral arrangements for “martyred” insurgents, and supporting their families. Motion picture star Errol Flynn even tried to capitalize on the romanticization of the rebels, producing and starring in an embarrassingly bad documentary drama focused on the women who joined the “barbudos” in the fight against Batista.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
While some women found their voice in urban politics and protest movements, others were more concerned with personal fulfillment or family finances. Beautiful and talented women of all creeds and colors flocked to Havana as a second and much larger wave of tourists rediscovered the Cuban capital and made it the premiere American honeymoon and vacation destination. The proliferation of new hotels and casinos, and the booming tourist trade created lots of opportunities for vedettes, singers, dancers, performers, and sex workers to ply their trade.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Vicki Gold Levi
The Tropicana was perfectly poised to capitalize on the new wave of American pleasure-seekers.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Vicki Gold Levi
On clear nights, guitar-shaped women walked the catwalks of the outdoor sculpture, while singers and dancers performed on the “under the stars” stage.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Vicki Gold Levi
When tropical downpours threatened, audiences could stay out of the rain, eat, drink, dance, and enjoy brilliantly choreographed cabarets in the arcos de crystal.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
After the revolution which thrust Fidel Castro into power in 1959, male and female employees of the Tropicana alike were threatened with unemployment as the regime cracked down on gangster-run casinos formerly patronized by American tourists. Castro-appointed president, Manuel Urrutia sought to deal with such corruption and vice by shutting down all casinos and brothels. Facing the loss of their livelihoods, casino employees, sex workers, and the entertainers at the Tropicana took their grievance directly to Fidel, marching to the Palacio de los Deportes with music and drums to vent their frustration. The Tropicana and other casinos subsequently reopened in March, and the vedettes, dancers, singers, performers, seamstresses, and other women working at the Tropicana won, at least temporarily, a reprieve and some breathing space.
In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the Castro regime wanted to make explicit the connection between American imperialism, gangsters, gambling, corruption, and vice. In the propaganda film, Soy Cuba (1964), the pre-revolutionary scenes feature vignettes of American sailors as drunken rowdies and American hotels as dens of voyeurism and the objectification of the female body. A particularly powerful scene focuses on María, a desperately poor young mulatta woman drawn to the nightclubs frequented by rich American tourists. Ultimately the girl is reluctantly pushed into prostitution—symbolizing the revolutionaries’ view of Cuba’s status under U.S. capitalism and imperialism.
Under the auspices of the Castro regime’s Department of Social Ills, policies were devised to rescue, reeducate, and rehabilitate 30-40,000 “victims” of the sex trade between 1959 and 1965. Government officials acted in concert with members of the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas founded in 1960 by Vilma Espin, who had fought with Fidel in the Sierra Maestras and married Raul Castro in 1959. Prostitution was not a new social ill. Like many port cities, Havana notoriously harbored a red-light district from colonial times, when the sex trade (like slavery) was legal but regulated. In the era of the Republic, reformers in the government at times attempted to close-down brothels and arrest pimps and prostitutes; however, they were hardly successful in eliminating the “oldest profession.” In the 1920s, when the first major wave of North American tourists washed up on Cuban shores, thrill-seeking visitors could visit burlesque and striptease acts at the Folies Bergere or the infamous Teatro Shanghai, or could seek out even more explicit entertainment where—according to a 1929 guidebook—the “salaciously inclined may witness startling scenes in the flesh or by means of moving pictures.”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Vicki Gold Levi
During the second great wave of American tourism in the 1950s, impoverished girls from the countryside continued to be enticed to Havana or Guantanamo by the promise of tourist dollars and domestic work. Many were tricked or forced into prostitution, as were Black and mulatta women who had fewer options for legitimate employment. In the immediate aftermath of the 1959 revolution, prostitutes profited by the departure of many high-class prostitutes and madams (who normally took fifty percent of their earnings) and the cessation of bribes paid to corrupt police. But soon enough, the new regime conducted censuses of red-light zones and undertook the eradication of prostitution. Early efforts focused on reeducating the “victims” rather than prosecuting and incarcerating them as “criminals,” though recalcitrant female offenders were later redefined as “counterrevolutionaries.” Ironically enough, under the desperate economic conditions that prevailed during the “special period” (1990s), the Castro regime again turned to tourism as an economic lifesaver and turned a blind eye when desperate women turned to prostitution, and “jineteras” were once again plying the trade and walking the streets.
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