Our taxi driver had been waiting for about an hour. Of course, we agreed to pay more. Supposedly few “ordinary Cubans”—meaning nearly all Cubans living in Cuba—ever go to the Tropicana to see the show because the ticket prices, which have provided the Cuban government with desperately needed tourist dollars, are too exorbitant. But our taxi driver had saved his money in order to bring his wife for their recent anniversary. Times are relatively good for Havana taxi drivers nowadays, with so many tourists from the United States and elsewhere pouring in, ever since Raúl Castro and Barack Obama respectively decided to open up the island and relax travel restrictions. For his wife, the taxi driver told us, it had been a dream come true to see in person the cabaret she’d heard of all her life and had glimpsed on television and in movies. “The bodies of those dancers,” he told us, “are a heart attack.”
I don’t remember anymore how it was that the invitation to go to Cuba and write about the Tropicana came about. In college I’d taken a translation course from the astonishingly young, already-celebrated translator Suzanne Jill Levine—I remember my crush on her as practically a sickness—and apart from her translation of those memorable opening pages of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres—“Showtime! Señores y señoras. Ladies and gentlemen. And a very good evening to you all, ladies and gentlemen. Muy buenas noches, damas y caballeros. Tropicana! the MOST fabulous nightclub in the WORLD . . .”—I don’t think I had any particular awareness of the Tropicana or had even wondered if it still existed, much less thought that I wanted to go there. I was living in Mexico City with my girlfriend, Tina, who was half Cuban, when, out of the blue, came the invitation to go to Havana and do a piece on the Tropicana for Harper’s Bazaar. The idea for the piece itself had come from Enrique Badulescu, a Mexican who was a rising star in fashion photography. I could easily fly from Mexico to Cuba and circumvent U.S. travel restrictions if I was sure to ask the Cubans not to stamp my passport. Tina’s mother, Margarita, along with her mother’s parents, older siblings, and some of their small children, had fled Cuba to the United States—to New York and New Jersey—after Fidel Castro’s revolution made its sharp turn toward communism. Her mother had married an Englishman she met in New York City, so Tina and her own siblings had been born and raised in London. I knew Tina was dying to visit Cuba for the first time in her life, and so it was for her, especially, that I seized this opportunity to go.
What ensued was really one of the strangest, most fun, and most utterly unexpected experiences of my life. For nearly two weeks, I became a sort of Toulouse-Lautrec of the Tropicana, granted the most improbable access to rehearsals, classes, and backstage during shows, even allowed to wander in and out of the dressing rooms. To this day I don’t understand how that actually happened. Tina, meanwhile, went off into Havana to have her own adventures. She would long cherish the experience, but it wasn’t always easy; she had the features of a dark-skinned young Cuban beauty at a time when Havana had become a destination for sex tourism from Europe. I remember her furious exasperation that she couldn’t even go down to the cafeteria in our hotel for a sandwich without some old German wrenching his lips into leering kisses aimed in her direction. Cuba was enduring the notorious hardships of the Special Period, when the Soviet Union’s collapse had left it isolated and without its main source of economic support. Things were so bad, I remember, that on Cuban television there were cooking shows that were teaching people how to bread grapefruit rinds in order to fry them like veal or chicken, assuming grapefruit rinds were even available. One day, as we stood on the muddy street behind the Tropicana complex, outside the staff and performers’ entrance during a break from classes and rehearsals, blond, curly-haired, very soft-spoken Toni Suárez, then the company’s regisseur, or dance master, asked me if I’d noticed that you never saw any cats in Havana anymore. Before, you used to see cats everywhere, he said, but now you didn’t see any, because people had eaten them all. (At least now, in 2017, Havana is a city of cats again.) Toni had explained to me that the Tropicana’s iconic headpieces, known simply as gorros, or hats—as in the “star gorro” or the “rooster gorro” or the twenty-three-pound “chandelier gorro”—were so big because of the trees. “The hats are bigger here than at any other cabaret because there’s no roof, and so there’s no limit,” he told me. “If the hats were smaller, the women would look smaller; you wouldn’t see their splendor. So the hats have grown immense as we’ve looked for ways to make the women complement, or compete with, this setting.” It was Toni who told me that he considered Lupe Guzmán, then forty, whom he’d known for thirty-four years, the “most charismatic” dancer the Tropicana had ever had. I’d become pretty friendly with Lupe back then, enough so that she’d invited me back to her home, which, despite her star status, was a modest apartment in a fairly utilitarian apartment block. Probably the woman I’d been friendliest with was Maria Elena, a willowy mulata with a warm and tender demeanor whose husband, Miguel, a handsome, slight man who worked as a welder, had encountered her on the street one day and invited her for an ice cream at Coppelia. At her audition for the Tropicana, Santiago Alfonso had noticed her among the hundreds of girls trying out to be selected as a potential figurante—the company is divided into a few soloists and larger contingents of dancers and figurantes, as the statuesque women who wear the gorros are called—and told her to go and try on a tanga; it was the first time she’d ever worn a bikini in her life. Alfonso put her through dance steps and flexibility tests, and told her she had fifteen days to lose twenty pounds. She succeeded, and was thrown immediately into dance classes and rehearsals. Now she’d even traveled to Europe to perform with the company. Every day she bicycled back from her small bungalow, where she lived with her mother-in-law and Miguel, and every night when she returned Miguel, without fail, had a warm bath waiting for her.
My favorite memories include attending the daily dance classes, Santiago Alfonso prowling the hot, sweaty room, constantly taking drags from his cigarettes, shouting instructions, while in a corner drummers banged furiously on their drums. I loved being backstage during the shows, amid the dingy warren of dressing and costume rooms. I even went out onto the catwalks, though, of course, not far enough so that the audience would have seen me. I remember waiting on one of those catwalks with one of the figurantes, slightly older, more womanly than my still-girlish friend Maria Elena. She was in her sparse spangled costume, her enormous gorro set down alongside her, sitting in a crouch as both of us smoked and quietly talked. When it was time for her to go on, I remember with what spectacular grace and strength her body unfolded upward and towered over me as she lifted her gorro onto her head, and the rhythmic, queenly walk with which her long beautiful legs and hips propelled her farther out onto the catwalk, out through tree branches above the illuminated stage.
We had trouble hailing a taxi from Playa, where we were staying in a friend’s apartment, and arrived a little late at the backstage entrance, on that muddy, residence-lined, unlit street which, as soon as we arrived and I saw it again after so many years, looked so familiar and unchanged. It turned out that Armando Pérez hadn’t arrived yet. He was at a benefit performance in a Havana theater with some of his dancers. He’d either forgotten about our appointment or had forgotten about the benefit when he’d made it. We had no choice but to wait, which was in its own way enjoyable and, for me, a bit nostalgic. Sporadically, young dancers filed in out of the dark as if out of the past, only now some of them wore hoodies, along with sweaters, sweatpants, and jeans, some eating ice cream cones from the little parlor just around the corner. But most of the troupe was already inside, preparing for the show after their long day of classes and rehearsals. A few musicians arrived, too, and other performers, singers, and acrobats. Everyone had to open their bags and musical instrument cases atop the table inside the entrance to be inspected by the guard.
A few people were huddled outside in the darkness attending to a young man from Croatia. He wore eyeglasses and a wool sweater tucked
inside his belted pants. His voice was pleading and earnest. He’d met a Tropicana dancer, he said, the night before, and she’d told him to come here to the performers’ entrance and to ask for her before the show. He knew her name, but the two people attending to him, who did seem to want to help, perhaps a stagehand and a makeup or costume woman, didn’t recognize the name. The Croatian was unable to describe her any more specifically than to say that she was dark. “How dark?” the stagehand, beginning to sound annoyed, asked. “Black like I am, or lighter skinned?” “Black,” said the Croatian, sounding plaintive. I remembered, from 1993, frequently hearing that a common ruse among Cuban jineteras, women who sold sex to tourists in exchange for money or even in exchange for such coveted goods as Calvin Klein underwear or a night out in a restaurant or club, was to tell men that they were Tropicana dancers. It’s a reputation that has clung to the cabaret’s female dancers from the scandalous old pre-Revolution days and may even have been mythical back then; the Tropicana dancers I’d seen, who spent at least twelve hours a day at the cabaret complex, in classes, in rehearsals, in the shows, from early afternoon on, virtually every day and night of the week, didn’t have time to be out and about at night trying to meet men, never mind in order to solicit dates for money. It was obvious the ruse was still a staple of Havana sex tourism now. The Cubans finally grew impatient and lost interest in the Croatian; their voices, which had sounded kind before, turned curt, and they went back inside, and that Croatian, his romantic or erotic fantasy shattered, trudged off alone into the night, perhaps to try to meet another Tropicana dancer.
Finally somebody came out to get us, and we were led inside and up some stairs to a back office and handed over to the company’s current regisseur, Lourdes Hernández Domínguez, who told us to sit down. She was a bit frantic, though, because she didn’t know if Armando Pérez and the dancers he’d taken with him would make it back in time for that night’s opening number, in which case she was going to have to assemble a different corps of dancers; on her mobile phone, she was trying to keep up with their movements. It was going to be tight; they were just now, she told Jovi and me, receiving an encore ovation in the theater where the benefit was being held. Lourdes had spent twelve years of her life as a Tropicana dancer and had now risen to a position just beneath Pérez. She was, I guessed, in her fifties, a handsome, sturdy black woman, with syrupy dark eyes that were steady and attentive, who answered questions carefully and warmed to the conversation as it progressed. As had happened the day before with Sandra, Lourdes was especially taken with my stack of twenty-four-year-old snapshots. She recognized most of the dancers. This one was living in Italy now, she told me, and this one, too—she’d opened her own dance school in Italy; and this one was in Miami; this one, poor woman, had gone mad—I’m pretty sure it was the same woman I’d smoked a cigarette with on the catwalk that long-ago night. Tender Maria Elena, she thought, was in Monterrey, Mexico, where she’d also opened a dance school. A lot of former Tropicana dancers did that when they got settled abroad. Who better to teach any and all of the dance styles of the Latin American Caribbean? The male dancer standing next to her in my photograph had died of cancer, barely forty. I was in that snapshot too, in my midthirties and looking even younger than that, hair curly and totally black, my unlined face beaming with happiness. Lourdes’s dance master predecessor, Toni Suárez, so trim back when I’d known him, had grown obese, she told me, and had died of a heart attack. Lupe Guzmán, she thought, was living in Mexico now, though she often came back to Havana.
“They all leave,” said Lourdes gruffly. Though plenty, like herself, stay, too. Veteran Tropicana dancers, women in their forties and fifties, she told me, had recently formed a new dance troupe of their own that had been putting on well-received shows.
And she spoke of her own time as a dancer. “All the famous personalities who visit Cuba come here to the Tropicana,” she told me. She’d performed in front of Salvador Allende and Pinochet, at different times, of course; in front of Brezhnev, too, and, in 1974, for Fidel, when he brought the winners of the 1974 World Boxing Championships, which Cuba was hosting that year, up onstage with him.
“I was a jovencita, so young, when I began here,” Lourdes remembered. “Life just goes by; time went by; when you’re enjoying yourself you don’t even notice that it’s passing. I satisfied all my wishes here.” Lourdes married an athlete, a Cuban judo champ. After she retired as a Tropicana dancer, she worked as a dance teacher and choreographer for some of the other companies and cabarets and television dance shows in Havana. Cabaret hasn’t just been essential to Cuba’s tourist industry, but is a tradition-rich popular art form that expresses a part of Cuban identity. If Afro-Cuban dance and music are perhaps Cuba’s most glorious and influential contributions to the Americas and to the world, the Tropicana, since its founding in 1939, has been a major showcase and laboratory for both. Cuban sensuality and eroticism are essential expressions of that identity, of course, something perhaps missed or misunderstood by people who wonder how the otherwise often puritanical Communist ideology of the Revolution could have permitted such a supposedly licentious and seemingly superficial place as the Tropicana to survive. When Lourdes explained that the Tropicana was a part of Cuba’s “idiosyncrasy”—a word that always seems to come up when talking to Cubans about the Tropicana—that’s what she was referring to.
Now Lourdes was in charge of training and rehearsing Tropicana dancers who are as young as she was when she joined the company. Students from Cuba’s elite ballet, modern, and folkloric dance schools, from its schools for gymnasts and acrobats, increasingly even from its athletic academies, audition for the school, in which the Tropicana prepares its own revolving companies—the one that performs at the cabaret, which includes over a hundred dancers and performers, and other, smaller companies that tour the world. That course lasts ten months; after the first three months, though, many are cut. The Tropicana in Havana puts on a show every night, 365 shows a year. The dancers come in around two in the afternoon for their first classes, which are followed by rehearsals, and the show goes on at ten at night. The Tropicana becomes a dancer’s life. It has to, there’s no other way.
Lourdes said that it’s harder now with young dancers. So much in Cuba has changed and is changing. “They’re looking for other things. Sometimes they’re less devoted to the art than we were.” It’s her job to teach them to be “disciplined artists, and to be ready to put on a show every night. You’ve got to be ready to bring it every day. It’s our food, after all. Whether it rains, or if there are winds, we have to maintain our quality. You have to give yourself to it completely.”
Backstage, in one of the open-air corridors between the dressing rooms, the twenty-three-pound chandelier gorros are set out in a long rack. Twenty-four years after I last saw them, they’ve kept their featured role in the show, which will be beginning in minutes. Seeing those enormous hats of glittering crystals, I smile as if running into an old friend.
“Señores y señoras . . . Welcome to PARADISE under the STARS . . .” and the show begins. Jovi and I have a guest table to ourselves, overlooking the stage and the packed audience, with one of the small platforms on which dancers and singers perform positioned right in front of us. The stage is now even more brightly and colorfully illuminated, more high tech, inevitably, than it was when I was last here. But now, as then, there’s the opening act, one of the show’s most spectacular, as the flanks of the stage and towering trees fill with women dazzlingly costumed, and for the next two hours or so, the spectacle overloads your perceptions with beauty, movement, music, color, exuberant eroticism, and dance dance dance, with spangled bikinis, gold lamé boots, flowing and ruffled Caribbean dresses, bikinis and long gauzy capes, perfectly toned smooth torsos and limbs, long thighs, rounded backsides, all those different styles of glowing gorros climbing toward the stars; the chandelier gorros worn by women in black minituxes for an elegant number that evokes Gershwin or Ellington; singers in evening gown
s; mambos, cha cha chas, guarachas, boleros; Afro-Cuban modern dance. An older male singer in a loose white suit climbs onto the platform in front of us to perform, and afterward, as he steps off it, the beads of sweat on his brow shining in the lights, he gives us the loveliest Louis Armstrong smile. There are several astonishing acrobatic numbers, too; the young husband of one of the female acrobats arrives to sit at our table only for the duration of her number; during our brief conversation, he tells us that he’s a university professor. What impresses me most is how fresh and joyful the show feels, a product not just of the beauty of the dancers and of their costumes and the music, but also of their precision and skill, all those exuberant steps and gestures perfectly in sync, nothing wasted. The crowd seems to absolutely love it. The Afro-Cuban centerpiece of the show, with its rousing drumming, depicts a slave rebellion and a love triangle; at the climax, the light-skinned soloist flees the slave master who desires to possess her by taking her famous swan dive off the top of the stage’s sculpture of twisting arcs, which, back when Lupe Guzmán used to do it, was a symbolic suicidal leap into the void. Now it ends differently, with that night’s soloist—her name is Sojuila—leaping into the arms of her beautiful and muscular slave lover, so that they can escape together.
Cuba on the Verge Page 20