Cuba on the Verge

by Leila Guerriero

  That is one of the ways in which Armando Pérez, El Jimagua, had renovated and put his own stamp on the show. After all, he told Jovi and me, that number is a part of a cabaret dance spectacular, so why should it be sad? Why shouldn’t love triumph? “Sadness, I decided, was not invited.”

  It was the next afternoon, and we were watching the rehearsal being run by Lourdes on the Tropicana stage while we sat with Armando at a table. While the young dancers onstage, wearing sweats and shorts and T-shirts and workout leotards, were led by Lourdes through their paces, others sat in the front rows watching, quietly talking, or immersed in the small screens of their phones.

  Armando is a lanky, cheerful, handsome man who really does look at least a decade younger than his sixty-four years. As the director of the Tropicana cabaret, he sits atop a rich line of predecessors and tradition that he clearly reveres and feels deeply connected to. Back in 1941, only two years after the Brazilian Victor de Correa had purchased the six-acre tropical garden to establish his Tropicana casino and cabaret, he’d hired the Russian-born American ballet dancer and choreographer of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, David Lichine, to collaborate with the Cuban choreographer Julio Richards to create an Afro-Cuban ballet, Congo Pantera, featuring singers Rita Montaner and Bola de Nieve, and introducing drummers on platforms in the trees, mixed with a Busby Berkeley sense of spectacle. It was Montaner who brought the legendary Rodney (Roderico Neyra)—Cabrera Infante gives him a shout-out on the first page of Tres tristes tigres—a small man from an impoverished background who was afflicted with leprosy, into the company after saving him from being sent to a leprosarium. Rodney would be the Tropicana choreographer for years, after the nightclub’s ownership had passed in 1949 from de Correa to the also-revered Martin Fox, its last capitalist owner. Rodney can be understood as the personification of what Ned Sublette meant when, in his landmark book The Music of Cuba, he wrote that “whatever happened on stage happened better in the barrio”—he was a master of bringing the latter to the former. Rodney founded the satellite dance company of young, mostly unschooled female performers that became known as “Las Mulatas de Rodney” and later as “Las Mulatas de Fuego,” who, after he sent them to Mexico, became an international sensation, shattering racial and sexual taboos, brown-skinned women dancing mambos in bikinis—in photographs they are jaw-droppingly gorgeous, sassy looking, and sexy—and featuring the young guaracha singer Celia Cruz. When, as a young boy, Armando Pérez saw Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, he knew wanted to be a dancer. He and his twin brother studied at the Vocational School of Modern Dance, beginning their careers as dancers on television. Once they joined the Tropicana, they trained and performed under the guidance of Santiago Alfonso, whom Armando describes as “touched by God.” Studying under Santiago, he said, instilled “demanding discipline and rigor, and he formed you as an artist.”

  More than once Armando abruptly paused in our conversation to call out instructions to Lourdes and the dancers on the stage, now rehearsing in the velvety shadows of the giant trees and of twilight. “The new one is separating her feet too much,” he shouted, and a moment later, “She’s doing it wrong, have her open up so that the heel turns outward!”

  I kept stealing glances at the rehearsal, finding, just as I had twenty-four years before, that the young dancers’ lithe athleticism was even more apparent, and that the grace with which they executed even the simplest arm and hand gestures, the light, quick, and precise synchronicity of their steps, was even more beautiful and transfixing to watch in the intimacy and simplicity of a rehearsal than amid the full-blown show.

  “When she does her demi-plié,” Armando called out, “turn the heel, so you can see the line of the foot better.” Returning to the subject of his own years as a Tropicana dancer, he said, “All I had to do was dance and the people would applaud me, and that was my thing. And then I’d wake up the next day and come here and I wouldn’t leave. It absorbs your whole life. You lose your friends, your relationships.” He remembers with special fondness the preparations for the inauguration of a new show, the intense rehearsals conducted before that night’s show and after it that continued until dawn. He and his twin brother were dancers for seventeen years, and famously performed with a pair of female dancers who were also twins, Mery and Ketty, who now live in Tampa. “It abuses your body, the muscles and bones wear out,” said Armando of his long dancing career. In the mornings all his joints ache (mine do, too, I told him). “Movement makes you live,” he said. He never wanted to stop dancing, but now he channels his own desire to dance into the dances he choreographs and directs. He is always thinking of new moves and dances, and of tweaking and perfecting the existing ones.

  “Life is constant learning,” he said. From the new generations, he learns new rhythms, many that come from the United States, and incorporates them. Armando also spoke about that Cuban idiosyncrasy that he finds at the heart of Cuban cabaret, which he defines as joy, dance, rhythm, the cultural catharsis of Caribbean carnival wedded to a kind of vaudeville. You take a bel canto “ ’O Sole Mio,” he explained, and arrange it to bachata, and it becomes universal in a new way. “The Cuban woman,” he said, “is still the symbol of the spectacle, the sensuality of Cuban women, down to the rhythm and musicality of the way they walk.” He tells the story of how close this Cuban world of the lavish cabaret came to disappearing in the early years after the Revolution. Two of the great casino cabarets, the San Souci and the Montmartre, had already been razed when the bulldozers came for the Tropicana. But the Tropicana was saved, Armando recounted, by a young militant named Miliki, who like his mother before him worked at the nightclub, in the kitchen: Miliki went out to confront the bulldozers wearing his milicia uniform. It wasn’t only his understanding of what the cabaret meant to Cuban popular culture, but his own sense of belonging that Miliki was defending, said Armando. He got a chance to give his arguments to Raúl Castro. For many years after, Miliki was the Tropicana’s administrator.

  It’s that sense of belonging, said Armando, that the young dancers most lack now, and that it is his greatest challenge to try to instill in them and make them commit to. Every dancer, he said, is a distinct individual, of course, but they’ve been affected by the way the times have changed. Most were born in the Special Period. They grew up in an era of great uncertainty on the island—just as so much remains uncertain now—and of “lost values.” Armando said that “the idea of the Revolution shaping el hombre nuevo o la mujer nueva [the new man or the new woman]” had lost the meaning it held before.

  Was he saying that he tried to reawaken in them a sense of belonging to the Revolution? I asked.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” said Armando. “I want to make them love this place, and to give themselves over to this life. Getting them to love this place, and to feel that they belong to it, that’s the hardest challenge, but we do manage to achieve it.”

  The show is soon to begin. But before we leave, we return to say good-bye to Lourdes in her office, where she is sitting at her desk going over the cast roster for the night’s show. One of the young dancers, Anaelys Martin, happens to be there, and we get a chance to talk to her for a moment. She tells us about the stages of her long education in dance, the first classes when she was four, her early schooling in the Casa de Cultura, entering the Escuela Nacional de Art when she was twelve, the Vocational School of Modern Dance at fifteen, three more years in the School of Stage Arts, studying dance and ballet.

  Lourdes interjects to explain that Anaelys’s finishing training in that last school was in the repertoire and techniques of what we’d talked about the other day, Cubanidad, those idiosyncrasies that are expressed, she said, “so gesturally.” Lourdes said that back then, “I could see her talent. It doesn’t take a lot of work to notice somebody who lives to dance.”

  Anaelys auditioned for all the companies, for television, for the Tropicana and the other cabarets. She was accepted into the Tropicana’s school. It was her dream to one day be a Tropicana
dancer, but she didn’t feel ready. “I was still just a big girl,” she said. She spent six years dancing at the Havana Parisien cabaret as a soloist before entering the Tropicana over a year ago. Now she’s twenty-five. “This place steals your life,” she says. “Your social life is here.” She said, “I thought I’d learned everything,” but in the daily classes at the Tropicana, whether in ballet or contemporary or folkloric dance, she finds herself constantly learning. “It’s technique, it’s a way of feeling; here you have to dance in a way that’s larger.”

  Lupe Guzmán turned out to be easy to find. Armando hadn’t known how to contact her, either, and had suggested I ask Santiago Alfonso, but even if I’d wanted to try that, our time in Havana was up. But it turns out that all you have to do is type in Lupe Guzmán and Tropicana on Facebook, and she pops right up. Once I’d returned to Mexico City, I went to see Lupe in the apartment she shares with her daughter Lianette and her four-year-old granddaughter, Mimi—she’s already a model, too, featured in Mexican advertisements for Huggies—in Colonia Napoles. She said that she and her daughter have an apartment in Miami, too; she also still has her apartment in Havana and returns whenever she can, but now, she said, it is her devotion to her granddaughter that rules her life.

  Her hair is still blond; she may no longer be as lithe as she used to be, her face a bit more lined—whose isn’t?—but she’s still very recognizably Lupe, both high strung and effusively warm at the same time. Lupe performed until she was forty-eight. It wasn’t until one night in 2001, when she went out onstage to dance and suddenly found that she couldn’t move, her sciatic pain was so strong, that her career ended. She would never perform her signature dive or even dance onstage again; she was forced to retire. She begins to cry, nearly to sob, as she recounts those days when she had to accept that her legendary dancing career was finally over. She’s had two operations for herniated discs. After she stopped dancing, she told me, she fell into a long and severe depression. “I was very sad, for a year I did nothing, I was always crying.” But Santiago Alfonso—Lupe refers to him as “a luminous being”—never left her alone. He’d told her that she could still have a career as a teacher, that she’d be a wonderful dance teacher. “But I didn’t want to be a teacher,” said Lupe. “I wanted to be a dancer.” She credits him with pulling her out of her depression, doting on her—if anyone knew how to nurture a true diva, Santiago did—and convincing her that she could have a wonderful life as a dance teacher in his own dance company, where she soon became the regisseur. And she enjoyed it. “Fue bien bonita la experiencia” (It was a lovely experience). Until she held the newborn Mimi in her arms for the first time and thought, Here it all ends; from now on I’m going to go wherever my daughter goes, and I’m going to be the super abuela.

  The Tropicana was her life, though. “If I could die and be born again,” said Lupe, “I’d want to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change anything.” She was a ballerina in the ballet company of Camagüey when she heard that the Tropicana was looking for a classically trained dancer. It had been the dream of her life to dance there, and she entered the company as a soloist in 1973. She made friends for life, lived through beautiful and sometimes trying times with them. “We were a big family. You always spent more time in the Tropicana than in your own home. When we’d go out, we’d all go out together, to see the other shows.” Once Lupe recalled a hurricane closed down the Tropicana for a week, and what a special time that was, when the whole company, including directors and kitchen staff, came to work every day anyway to help repair the damage, cleaning away downed trees and branches. She told me about the time when Fidel came to a show, and how she got to stand next to him onstage, and how she took hold of his beard, which she says was as soft as the hair on a baby’s head, and held his hand, the softest, finest hand, she effused, that she’s ever held. She showed me an extraordinary photo that she keeps in her phone, of Tropicana dancers in lamé costumes and shiny bathing-cap-like headpieces, all tightly crowded around Fidel, Lupe standing the closest, her large dark eyes beaming up at him.

  At one point Lupe asked me if I was going to pay her for our interview. I was again struck by what a sensible request that is and by a sense of surprise that I don’t hear it more often. Leave it to a culture new to capitalism to realize that time should be economically valued, too. But what will happen to journalism and all the other interview-driven forms if it catches on? Well, at least I had brought Lupe a little box of chocolates.

  And, of course, we talked about her famous leap, which was called el vuelo del pájaro (the flight of the bird). “I’d always been a dancer who took risks, and who was in the air all the time.” But no leap was more memorable than one she performed in Italy once, on television. The traveling Tropicana company was performing in a circus tent there. A long pole with a ladder on the side held the tent up at its highest point. Santiago suggested that during the show she perform the leap from midway up. But one day a crew from Italy’s RAI television came to the show, along with some Italian ballet dancers, and Lupe began to climb the pole for her leap and just kept climbing, past the four-meter mark where she was supposed to stop. She heard Santiago shouting below, “Lupe, stop!” but she kept going. She’d nearly reached the top when she stopped and looked down and saw that everyone looked very small. “Díos mio,” she said to herself, “what did I do?” She’d climbed nearly seven meters, some twenty-two feet. She heard the drums and the music and threw herself into the air, and then she heard the applause.

  SODOM’S BOOKSTORE

  BY RUBÉN GALLO

  TRANSLATED BY LISA CARTER

  Eliezer was one of the first people I met in Cuba. It was 2002, and a Princeton professor by the name of Peter Johnston—the epitome of a WASP: very white, tall, thin, serious, with blue eyes that stared intently ahead, expressionless—had invited me to accompany a group of students to the island. Peter had been traveling to Havana for years and knew many of its writers. He took me to Antón Arrufat’s house; to Reina María Rodríguez’s rooftop; to visit a young novelist who had just won a prize for his novel El paseante cándido. “That Peter knows everyone. Word has it he’s CIA,” a friend would later confess.

  “You’ve got to meet Eliezer—he’s the best bookseller in Havana,” Peter Johnston said one day.

  We took a taxi to El Vedado, got out in front of the Coppelia ice cream parlor, and walked until we reached an entrance on L Street bordered by four simple pillars. We knocked, and a voice from inside shouted: “It’s open!”

  Upon entering, we found ourselves in someone’s living room: there were lace curtains, dusty and lit up by a neon sign; porcelain figurines—angels and shepherds; and, in the middle of the room, an older couple sitting in rocking chairs, watching one of those big old cabinet television sets. They must have been about sixty. She was in a bathrobe; he was wearing shorts and a muscle shirt that rose up to show his hairy belly.

  “Eliezer?” Peter asked, getting straight to the point as always, wasting no time on useless pleasantries.

  We must have come to the wrong place, I thought. Weren’t we coming to see a bookseller? This was an old couple’s home, and it smelled musty.

  The man paid no attention to us and remained fixed on the TV, but his wife replied without looking at us: “In the back, down there, see,” pointing to a door at the far end of the room. The image on-screen was blurry, in black and white, of a news anchor.

  We crossed the living room, passing between the old couple and the television, came to the door, and walked into a bedroom. There, sitting on a chair, surrounded by piles of books stacked on the floor—some of the heaps reached as high as the ceiling—was Eliezer, a very handsome young man, about thirty years old, with thin, dark eyes and classic Arab features. Must be of Lebanese descent, like so many Cubans, I thought. His gaze was intense, his smile mischievous.

  “Peter,” Eliezer said, as if he had been expecting us. “I got a first edition of Paradiso for you.”

  “We already have
it,” Peter replied drily.

  “I also got a real gem for you,” Eliezer went on as he rummaged through one of the piles. “Wait until you see this.”

  He pulled out a book seemingly at random and passed it to Peter. I was amazed the tower of books hadn’t come down with it.

  “Look at this gem. You won’t find another copy in Cuba, or anywhere else in the world most likely. It’s the album from Saddam Hussein’s visit to Havana in 1979. Wait until you see this picture. Look: Saddam with Fidel and Raúl. Can you imagine? Take it . . .”

  Eliezer was asthmatic and would run out of breath halfway through a sentence: he paused to inhale, and the constant interruptions lent a breathy, mysterious quality to the conversation: “Look at this . . . eeegh . . . Can you imagine . . . eeegh . . . that dictator . . . eeegh . . . here in Havana?”

  “How much?” Peter asked.

  “For you . . . fifty dollars. I’m giving it away.”

  “Fine,” Peter said. “And have you got any material on churches? I’m interested in documents about Protestant churches in Cuba—pamphlets, fliers—for the Ephemera Collection at Princeton.”

  “Not right now, but I’ll get some for you. What I do have is this. Look: Los siete contra Tebas, the banned book by Antón Arrufat. An autographed copy.”