Legendary Cuban Hot Spot Is Newly Hot

Mist rolls across the six-level stage, light blazes, and a salsa rhythm blares from the orchestra hidden behind the setting’s tree branches.

For the next two hours, dancers topped with candelabra rumba through the aisles, a maiden dives from a 30-foot platform, and the chorus appears and reappears in dizzying configurations of ruffles, beads and sequins. The scores of feet never miss a beat of the syncopated rhythms played under the stars.

The Tropicana lives.

A new generation of entertainers carries on a tradition that has endured 57 years of dictatorships, revolution, embargo and economic crisis.

The epitome of lavish glamour when Havana was the United States’ tropical playground, the nightclub--minus the U.S. tourists and entertainers who once sustained it--has become a symbol of national pride as well as an annual source of $7 million in badly needed hard currency.

“We are obliged to make sure that Cubans feel proud that we are here,” said creative director Santiago Alfonso, a former dancer who took a summer job backstage at the Tropicana in 1964 and never left. “We have the privilege in a country with so many needs to have ours fulfilled. . . . We have to work hard to justify the money invested in us.”

The crisis brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union, once Cuba’s main political and economic ally, restored the Tropicana’s status in the government-controlled economy. It is an essential element in the tourist trade that Cuba has rediscovered as partial replacement for the subsidized commerce it once had with the Soviet Bloc.

“Unless tourists go to the Tropicana, they don’t feel as if they have been to Havana,” claimed Juan Carlos Aguilar, the nightclub’s spokesman. Even President Fidel Castro has accompanied visiting heads of state to the club in recent years.

Alfonso pegs the cost of the current production at $1 million. Called “Tropicana, You Are Glory,” the show clearly hopes to restore the sparkle to the legendary club and banish memories of the more recent, seedy days when runs were visible in dancers’ stockings.

The two-hour performance features 96 dancers, 10 singers, acrobats and an orchestra--264 performers in all. Balancing yard-high headdresses, dozens of them shimmy and cha-cha up, down and across the U-shaped stage and into the audience.

Prima ballerina Olga Lidia Morena appears in a cloud, rising onto the stage. Dressed in a classic white ballet costume, she becomes a living replica of the statue at the club’s entrance. Later, during a duet, she throws herself from the highest of the stage’s half a dozen tiers into the arms of the male lead.

The effect can be slightly campy, a cross between Las Vegas and the Laguna Beach “Pageant of the Masters.” But it is what the audience expects.

Visitors, some in shorts, sit at tables of six, sipping Cuba libres--rum and cola--and glance eagerly from one stage platform to another, as if at a three-ring circus. But a modern jazz number featuring lasers and Lycra costumes receives only sporadic, confused applause.

*

While the audience is getting what it paid $30 to $50 a seat for, some who remember the old days say that is not enough.

“I have been there twice since I retired, and I suffer when I go,” said Ana Gloria Varona, who was the star dancer at the club for most of a decade, starting in 1947. “It’s not that Tropicana. It has become old.”

She remembers when the nightclub was merely a casino in an old plantation house outside Havana. Then, in 1949, Martin Fox--who made his fortune in the Cuban numbers racket--took charge.

Fox created an ice rink in the tropical climate and brought in skating stars. He hired architect Max Borges to design a tubular salon with eight glass arches and called it the Crystal Rainbows Room.

His greatest achievement was the Salon Under the Stars, the 1,000-seat open-air theater where Tropicana dancers still perform. The first entertainer to sell out the salon was Nat King Cole, who sang there in 1956.

In those days, Varona, her dance partner and a dance band left every Thursday for Miami on the Tropicana’s plane, picked up a load of passengers, plied them with daiquiris and taught them to dance in a conga line.

The passengers were driven to the Tropicana from the airport. They took in the show, practiced their dance steps, slept a few hours at a five-star hotel and flew back to Miami in the morning.

“It was a crazy, one-night adventure,” Varona said.

On the Tropicana’s stage, the visitors saw top international performers--from Carmen Miranda to Johnny Mathis--in productions choreographed by Roderico Neyra, known as Rodney, the Florenz Ziegfeld of the 1950s.

Not all memories of the 1950s at the Tropicana are glowing. Parking valet Policarpo Fajardo Suarez recalled a night in 1957 when a group of African Americans pulled up to the door.

“When they got to the lobby, the owner refused to let them in,” he said.

Fox was finally convinced that because they were guests of a large corporation, he should make an exception to the nightclub’s whites-only policy.

“For the first and last time, he let them in,” recalled Fajardo Suarez--but they were seated where no one could see them.

Like Havana’s other nightclub-casinos, the Tropicana was shut down in 1967. Unlike the others, it reopened two years later.

“They realized that the Tropicana is part of Havana,” Aguilar said.

But Alfonso noted: “Circumstances have changed. Today we cannot bring internationally known artists because of antagonism with the United States.”

Besides American entertainers, who cannot perform in Cuba because of the U.S. embargo against the country, some performers from other countries avoid Cuba for fear of repercussions from the community of Cuban exiles in Miami.

In addition, said Alfonso, “any [big-name] entertainer would charge $100,000 a week, and we do not have enough money.”

The Tropicana’s top dancers earn about 400 pesos a month--less than the $30 that buys the cheapest ticket to one of the club’s shows.

Asked about that contrast, Aguilar replied, “I do not like to mix the Tropicana with the reality of Cuba.”

But at an outdoor theater, reality does intrude at times.

One night, Castro brought in Raul Alfonsin, then president of Argentina, and it started to rain.

“Fidel sent someone to tell me not to stop the show,” Alfonso recalled. A waiter tried to cover the two presidents with an umbrella, but Castro, ever the old guerrilla commander, declined the shelter.

As the rain got heavier, Castro’s security chief ordered Alfonso to terminate the performance.

When the frazzled creative director replied that he had a contradictory order from the president, the bodyguard said, “If the commander gets sick, what’s going to be terminated is me.”

With no real choice, Alfonso said, “I stopped the show.”