Posted on Sun, Nov. 06, 2005
MEMOIR | TROPICANA NIGHTS
TROPICANA'S TORRID TIMES
TWO NARRATIVES TELL THE STORY OF HAVANA'S FAMOUS NIGHTCLUB AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF ITS POLITICAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY
The widow of the owner of Cuba's and perhaps the world's greatest nightclub looks back, with a mix of street smarts and naiveté, at the raffish days when Havana was the capital of hedonism.
Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub. Rosa Lewinger and Ofelia Fox. Harcourt. 448 pages. $26.
BY ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ
efernandez@herald.com
Into the crowded field of Cuban-American memoirs comes this book about someone who really lived. Ofelia Fox was the wife of the last owner of the famed Tropicana nightclub, today still one of Havana's main attractions. Cuban-American Rosa Lowinger tells the widow's memoirs in this serious yet entertaining book, although Fox gets full credit as co-author.
The book interweaves two narratives. One follows the life of Martin Fox, a smalltown numbers-game kingpin who moved to the capital in 1939 and rose to the top of the heap in La Habana, La Habana (the province and the city bear the same name). That same year a nightclub entrepeneur moved his operation from the center to the outskirts of the city, where Tropicana, as the club would eventually be called, still stands, with the intention of opening the biggest and the best.
Fox entered that scene, which, from the beginning, was a mixed bag because different interests controlled the nightclub and the casino. And he wound up owning it, surviving Cuba's ups and downs, including anti-gambling governments and attempts by American mobsters to take it over completely, until the Castro government finally got the upper hand and Fox, like so many of his compatriots, went into exile.
The other narrative is Ofelia Fox's memoir, a curious mix of street wisdom and naiveté. On the one hand, she knew she had married a man who lived off the illegal economy of the numbers racket, which Fox never stopped running. On the other, she turns a deaf ear to Lowinger's insistence of the nightclub's complicity with the American mob, as if such matters were not a woman's concern. In the meantime, she relates the story of her new life and new personal identity in the United States.
Lowinger sets the story of the Tropicana and its denizens against the background of Cuba's political and cultural history. She has done her homework. From following the island's economic and political roller coaster ride to identifying the major players in Cuba's hyperactive, glamorous and influential showbiz scene -- la farándula, as Latin showbiz is still called in the States -- she places the fabulous show palace in a meticulously researched context.
On the question of the current regime, she remains objective. She certainly does not place whatever happened after 1959 out of historical context, like the Miami exile community often does in its demonizing of Castro. Instead, she traces the long line of failure -- inability to disengage from U.S. control, popular rulers who turned into dictators, constitutionally elected administrations that were disgustingly corrupt -- that has been and is the Cuban Republic.
But it's obvious that the history of the Tropicana is the history of hot times in Cuba's culture of hedonism. Even in its current state of shabbiness, Havana is a pleasure destination. In its heyday, regardless of how much was going wrong with the country, it was ''the Paris of the Caribbean'', as the saying goes. Certainly those of us who knew it then, even as children, knew Havana glittered. And nothing glittered like the Tropicana.
Big as a theme park, the Tropicana was and is a faux tropical forest where showgirls appear on what looks like the horizon, doing song-and-dance numbers worthy of Hollywood. It always boasted a top-notch dance band, and in Cuba that is saying a lot.
The club's repertoire ranges from classic chanteuses as well as booty-shaking, tourist-pleasing numbers and everything in between. That its showgirls are light-skinned Afro-Cuban beauties while most of the clientele is white -- á la the old Cotton Club -- is a politically incorrect feature that is no longer touted, but continues to this day.
Is the Tropicana the world's greatest nightclub? Undoubtedly, since, really, there are no others. Nightclubs are an extinct species, something one watches in old movies. The Tropicana, with its Las Vegas twist, was always over the top.
Thus, the pleasure of Tropicana Nights hinges on the reader's affection for too much. In Miami, where such esthetics rule, we have the architecture of Morris Lapidus -- the Fontainebleu and Eden Roc hotels -- once considered the pit of tackiness, now celebrated by revisionist architecture critics.
Today the oversized Tropicana looks and feels pretty much like it did back in the good old days. I have been there a couple of times and, like my trips to Vegas, I find it interesting but not wonderful. I love nightlife, but not at a scale of Napoleonic grandeur. There were smaller, funkier nightspots back then, some in less respectable neighborhoods, that held more intrigue. When Marlon Brando came to Havana in 1956, he visited the Tropicana but gravitated to joints like El Chori's raffish club. I was a kid then, but, boy, had I been older, that was one posse I would have gladly joined.
Enrique Fernandez is The Herald's critic at large.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/books/13104404.htm?source=rss&channel=miamiherald_books
MEMOIR | TROPICANA NIGHTS
TROPICANA'S TORRID TIMES
TWO NARRATIVES TELL THE STORY OF HAVANA'S FAMOUS NIGHTCLUB AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF ITS POLITICAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY
The widow of the owner of Cuba's and perhaps the world's greatest nightclub looks back, with a mix of street smarts and naiveté, at the raffish days when Havana was the capital of hedonism.
Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub. Rosa Lewinger and Ofelia Fox. Harcourt. 448 pages. $26.
BY ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ
efernandez@herald.com
Into the crowded field of Cuban-American memoirs comes this book about someone who really lived. Ofelia Fox was the wife of the last owner of the famed Tropicana nightclub, today still one of Havana's main attractions. Cuban-American Rosa Lowinger tells the widow's memoirs in this serious yet entertaining book, although Fox gets full credit as co-author.
The book interweaves two narratives. One follows the life of Martin Fox, a smalltown numbers-game kingpin who moved to the capital in 1939 and rose to the top of the heap in La Habana, La Habana (the province and the city bear the same name). That same year a nightclub entrepeneur moved his operation from the center to the outskirts of the city, where Tropicana, as the club would eventually be called, still stands, with the intention of opening the biggest and the best.
Fox entered that scene, which, from the beginning, was a mixed bag because different interests controlled the nightclub and the casino. And he wound up owning it, surviving Cuba's ups and downs, including anti-gambling governments and attempts by American mobsters to take it over completely, until the Castro government finally got the upper hand and Fox, like so many of his compatriots, went into exile.
The other narrative is Ofelia Fox's memoir, a curious mix of street wisdom and naiveté. On the one hand, she knew she had married a man who lived off the illegal economy of the numbers racket, which Fox never stopped running. On the other, she turns a deaf ear to Lowinger's insistence of the nightclub's complicity with the American mob, as if such matters were not a woman's concern. In the meantime, she relates the story of her new life and new personal identity in the United States.
Lowinger sets the story of the Tropicana and its denizens against the background of Cuba's political and cultural history. She has done her homework. From following the island's economic and political roller coaster ride to identifying the major players in Cuba's hyperactive, glamorous and influential showbiz scene -- la farándula, as Latin showbiz is still called in the States -- she places the fabulous show palace in a meticulously researched context.
On the question of the current regime, she remains objective. She certainly does not place whatever happened after 1959 out of historical context, like the Miami exile community often does in its demonizing of Castro. Instead, she traces the long line of failure -- inability to disengage from U.S. control, popular rulers who turned into dictators, constitutionally elected administrations that were disgustingly corrupt -- that has been and is the Cuban Republic.
But it's obvious that the history of the Tropicana is the history of hot times in Cuba's culture of hedonism. Even in its current state of shabbiness, Havana is a pleasure destination. In its heyday, regardless of how much was going wrong with the country, it was ''the Paris of the Caribbean'', as the saying goes. Certainly those of us who knew it then, even as children, knew Havana glittered. And nothing glittered like the Tropicana.
Big as a theme park, the Tropicana was and is a faux tropical forest where showgirls appear on what looks like the horizon, doing song-and-dance numbers worthy of Hollywood. It always boasted a top-notch dance band, and in Cuba that is saying a lot.
The club's repertoire ranges from classic chanteuses as well as booty-shaking, tourist-pleasing numbers and everything in between. That its showgirls are light-skinned Afro-Cuban beauties while most of the clientele is white -- á la the old Cotton Club -- is a politically incorrect feature that is no longer touted, but continues to this day.
Is the Tropicana the world's greatest nightclub? Undoubtedly, since, really, there are no others. Nightclubs are an extinct species, something one watches in old movies. The Tropicana, with its Las Vegas twist, was always over the top.
Thus, the pleasure of Tropicana Nights hinges on the reader's affection for too much. In Miami, where such esthetics rule, we have the architecture of Morris Lapidus -- the Fontainebleu and Eden Roc hotels -- once considered the pit of tackiness, now celebrated by revisionist architecture critics.
Today the oversized Tropicana looks and feels pretty much like it did back in the good old days. I have been there a couple of times and, like my trips to Vegas, I find it interesting but not wonderful. I love nightlife, but not at a scale of Napoleonic grandeur. There were smaller, funkier nightspots back then, some in less respectable neighborhoods, that held more intrigue. When Marlon Brando came to Havana in 1956, he visited the Tropicana but gravitated to joints like El Chori's raffish club. I was a kid then, but, boy, had I been older, that was one posse I would have gladly joined.
Enrique Fernandez is The Herald's critic at large.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/books/13104404.htm?source=rss&channel=miamiherald_books
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