Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  Not far from Casa Marina, on the other side of the Prado in Central Havana, was the barrio of Colón. Here, prostitution was more of a street-level affair. Along the narrow streets of Trocadero, Ánimas, and Virtudes (Virtue Street), women beckoned from doorways and windows. Sex in the barrio of Colón was a down-and-dirty exchange, as little as a dollar for an assignation that might last five minutes. The district was primarily for sailors, brutes, and the poverty-ridden.

  There were other houses of prostitution around the city, including one out by the airport called the Mambo. A revolving-door establishment, the Mambo catered to arriving and departing tourists who wanted to have sex the minute they arrived or right before they left the island. At the Mambo, you could have sex with a so-called virgin for a flat fee of a hundred dollars.

  With such a thriving prostitution trade in Cuba, it is sometimes assumed that the Havana Mob must have presided over the business. There is no evidence to support this claim. Throughout the century, law enforcement had long sought to link prostitution to organized crime or the Mafia. But aside from the case that famously put away Lucky Luciano, in the history of the Mob in America there have been few prostitution prosecutions. The trade never was as lucrative as narcotics or gambling—businesses that tended to metastasize and create other businesses. Where prostitution was valuable to a criminal organization was as a source of bribery, payoffs, or patronage.

  In Havana, for instance, local and military police received a cut from the bordellos. Prostitution was their racket; it existed as a way to placate the lower rungs of the Havana Mob. As with narcotics and bolita, the sex trade in Cuba was left to the Cubans, while the U.S. mobsters concerned themselves with controlling the casinos, nightclubs, banks, political leaders, and gross national product of the island.

  It is a fact of human nature that in a sexual universe as varied and sophisticated as that in Havana, there were likely to be those who tested the boundaries. Beyond the city’s show palaces, burlesque theaters, and bordellos was a mundo secreto, a secret world. A highly varied homosexual scene existed, though this aspect of the city’s nightlife was certainly less well known than the heterosexual strip clubs and whorehouses.

  José “Pepe” Rodríguez was a male hustler who came to Havana from the town of Cienfuegos in mid-1957. Years later, Pepe, as he was known to his friends, remembered the era as a kind of glory period for homosexuality in Cuba: “It’s true you could not be openly maricón in the daylight, but at night everything was different.” In the shadow of every major cabaret, there were smaller clubs for homosexuals, with much overlap between the two worlds.

  Pepe often worked the bar at the Tropicana, where some of the city’s most distinguished citizens traversed both sides of the fence. “The one guy you had to watch out for was Papo Batista, the president’s son. If he took a liking to you—¡cuidado! [watch out!]. You never knew where that might lead.” Pepe also prowled many of the clubs near the Prado, especially Club 21, a small cabaret in Vedado across from the Hotel Capri, which opened for business in November 1957.

  It was not commonly known that a gay shadow world existed alongside the Mob’s most revered establishments, but given the city’s taste for sex, it was not surprising. According to Pepe, the city’s gay subculture was tolerated, and even encouraged, by Havana’s economic overseers, including the mobsters.

  Lesbians also had a role to play. At the Comodoro—the hotel where Senator Kennedy had his afternoon orgy—an exhibition was sometimes held for special guests. Attorney Frank Ragano remembered being taken there by Martín Fox, owner of the Tropicana. In a large suite at the hotel, a group of women danced and performed lesbian acts with one another, then offered to have sex with men in the audience. Fox told Ragano that, from his experience, many men found lesbian sex more stimulating than the heterosexual shows. This observation was revealing, coming from Fox, whose matrimonial bond to his attractive twenty-two-year-old wife, Ofelia, was one of convenience. Although few people knew it at the time, Ofelia Fox was a closet lesbian.

  Of all the locales where kinky sex exhibitions were performed in Havana, the most notorious remained the Shanghai Theater. This venerable establishment, located in Havana’s Barrio Chino, or Chinatown, had been around since the early 1930s. Originally designed as a legitimate theater for Oriental dramas, it changed hands and through the ages became known as a showcase for bump-and-grind. Tropicana choreographer Rodney Neyra got his start there in the 1940s as a producer of burlesque shows and nude theater. By the mid-1950s, its performances had become raunchier—they were described in Cabaret magazine as the “world’s rawest burlesque show.” Dirty movies were then added to the mix. Between acts, explicit 8-millimeter films were shown on a screen above the stage. But the primary draw was the theatrical skits themselves.

  There were three shows a night, running from 9:30 P.M. to the wee hours of the morning. Prices ranged from 65 cents for a bench in the balcony to $1.25 for a chair in front of the stage. The place was surprisingly big, with seats for approximately five hundred on the main floor and three hundred in the balcony. A red velvet curtain was a holdover from the club’s days as a legitimate theater.

  A typical opening act featured the dance team of López and Romero. To a hot mambo rhythm, Alfred Romero and Conchita López negotiated an “apache dance,” with Alfred stripping off pieces of Conchita’s clothing as they went. Eventually the female would be dancing completely naked. Later came the main act, which usually involved some form of live sex. The headliner shows were better if you spoke Spanish because much of the dialogue involved vulgar street language and sexual innuendo.

  One typical skit that played for weeks at the Shanghai depicted a man and woman at a restaurant. They are seated at a bare table. A waiter approaches with menus. The man asks the waiter, “Where is the tableware?” Without a word, the waiter produces forks, spoons, knives, and napkins from his pockets and sets the table. After some discussion of the menu, the woman says, “I’ll have coffee.” Out comes a cup and a pot, and black coffee is poured. Salt and pepper? “Sí, señor,” right here in the hip pocket. Sugar? “Claro”—of course—in a bottle from the breast pocket. “Where, then, is the cream?” the woman asks. The waiter smiles, and then pulls out his penis. The woman fondles the waiter’s pinga and proceeds with fellatio until, seemingly on cue, the waiter ejaculates into the coffee.

  Of all the live sex acts at the Shanghai, by far the most memorable were those involving Superman, the name given to a famously well-endowed performer. Superman was a tall, lean Cuban of African descent who often came onstage wearing a cape. Various skits and scenarios were created to introduce what was the main attraction: Superman’s 14-inch member. Sometimes Superman appeared onstage on a trapezelike swing high above the audience, his prodigious prod flapping in the wind. Other times he had sex onstage with two or three women consecutively. Decades after the fact, his act was immortalized in The Godfather Part II, in a scene where Don Michael Corleone, his brother Fredo, and a group of visiting American “dignitaries” take in a show at the Shanghai.

  Like so many others who made their living in Havana during the era of the Mob, Superman was not what he appeared to be. According to the male hustler Pepe and others, this unassuming man, famous throughout Cuba for his heterosexual prowess, was, in fact, gay. “I know because he [Superman] many times had sex with a male friend of mine who worked at the theater,” alleged Pepe.

  Throughout the late 1950s, Superman’s appearances at the Shanghai filled the theater with tourists. Ralph Rubio, who worked as a trainer at Lansky’s croupier school and would later serve as his credit manager at the Riviera hotel-casino, saw Superman’s act on numerous occasions. It was sometimes Rubio’s job to serve as “entertainment director” and show high rollers, visiting political figures, and other important associates of Lansky a good time. Nearly everyone wanted to be taken to the infamous Shanghai Theater to see Superman.

  On one occasion, Rubio accompanied a group that included Irving “Niggy�
�� Devine, a gambling impresario, silent co-owner of the Fremont Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, and a partner of Eddie Levinson, whom Lansky had imported to manage the casino at the Riviera. Devine could hardly contain himself when he saw Superman onstage. Part of the performer’s act often involved audience participation: patrons were allowed to choose from among a group of women onstage which ones they wanted to see Superman penetrate with his enormous shaft. Remembered Rubio: “Nig Devine was a sexual degenerate. He put up three hundred dollars extra to see Superman have anal sex with a woman.”

  Devine handed over the cash to a representative of the theater; onstage, Superman did his thing. As Rubio remembered it, he turned his head when the famous sex performer entered the woman from behind. Rubio couldn’t watch. It was too painful.

  THE SEXUAL DEGRADATION of Cuban citizens for the entertainment of North American and European tourists was the dirty little secret of the Havana Mob. Although U.S. mobsters were not the controlling force behind prostitution and pornography in Cuba (the Shanghai was owned by José Orozco García, an independent operator), commercial sex in all its many permutations was a major draw of the entire era. As Ralph Rubio put it, “Everything was geared towards sex.” The cabarets with their goddesses of flesh were an extension of the casinos, which fueled everything in Havana. The whores and sex performers were the underbelly of the casinos and show palaces: it was all part and parcel of the same universe.

  Fidel Castro and other members of the Revolution understood the true nature of Good Times in the capital city. It was not lost on the 26th of July Movement that at Havana’s Martí Theater, named after the “spiritual architect” of the Revolution and Fidel’s personal hero, burlesque star Betty Howard was shaking her posterior and twirling her bosoms at three shows a night. To the enemies of the Batista regime, a moral rot had taken hold in Havana that was a natural consequence of the president’s unholy relationship with what Castro referred to as desfalcadores (embezzlers), his term of choice for those behind the economic plundering of the island.

  By early 1957, the 26th of July Movement had begun to gather strength. In a number of initial skirmishes with the Rural Guard in the Sierra Maestra, Castro’s rebels had acquitted themselves well, with no casualties and substantial gains in terms of arms and supplies. They kept moving and adapted to their surroundings. Remembered Fidel:

  We identified so completely with the natural surroundings of the mountains. We adapted so well that we felt as if we were in our natural habitat. It was not easy, but I think we identified with the forest as much as the wild animals that live there. We were constantly on the move. We always slept in the forest. At first, we slept on the ground. We had nothing with which to cover ourselves. Later, we had hammocks, and nylon…and we used plastic for covers to protect ourselves from the rain. We organized kitchen duty by teams. Each team would carry the cooking equipment and the food up the hill…We did not know the region well…We studied the terrain as we fought.

  Until now, the movement had been dominated by urban intellectuals and students, but as the rebels were forced to live off the land in the most drastic of situations, priorities shifted. Castro’s followers bonded with Cuba’s most dispossessed people—a group that could not have been further removed from those in the capital city, who frolicked late into the night courtesy of the Havana Mob. As Castro put it:

  Batista was carrying on a fierce repressive campaign, and there were many houses burned, and many murdered peasants. We dealt with the peasants in a very different manner from the Batista soldiers, and we slowly gained the support of the rural population—until that support became absolute. Our soldiers came from that rural population.

  Castro’s second-in-command, Che Guevara, felt as though this convergence between rebel and peasant marked the true beginning of the Revolution:

  The guerrilla and the peasant became joined into a single mass, so that (and no one could say at which moment precisely of the long march it occurred) we became part of the peasants…The idea of agrarian reform was born and that of communion with the people ceased to be a theory, being converted into a definite part of our being.

  In May, the movement got another boost from the U.S. media when CBS aired a television documentary entitled The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters. Four weeks earlier, a CBS producer and cameraman had trekked into the Sierra Maestra to interview Castro and his followers—on camera. This time Fidel would be seen in the flesh, showing the interviewer around his rebel campsite. In clear, crisp English, Castro proclaimed, “Batista thinks he can obtain by lying what he cannot win with force of arms…When one of his soldiers is killed in battle, he says they died in an accident. Well, there have been a great deal of accidents here in Sierra Maestra in the last months.”

  The appearance on television was tremendous for public relations: Fidel solidified his status as a kind of tropical Robin Hood. Disgruntled Cubans flocked to the 26th of July Movement. By summer the Ejército Rebelde, or rebel army, had grown from its initial twelve surviving members to somewhere around three hundred. They divided up into columns and spread out around the mountains and surrounding llano (lowlands).

  In July the movement released its first public statement of principles. The “Sierra Manifesto” was composed by Castro and two prominent opposition leaders from Havana, who met the rebel leader in the mountains. Among the principles set forth was the demand that, after Batista was overthrown and a revolutionary government was installed, gambling and corruption would be eradicated. For the first time, the movement declared on paper that it was an irrefutable enemy of the Havana Mob. From here on out, it would be war to the death.

  PRESIDENT BATISTA BECAME agitated every time Castro’s name was mentioned. His inner circle knew the symptoms: lack of focus, compulsive eating, a tendency toward self-pity. Most of all, Batista could not understand how, in a country that was experiencing its best economic climate in decades, there could be political unrest. His response to the news that Fidel was expanding his revolt in the countryside was to bomb indiscriminately. Repression and revenge became the rule of the day. When a contingent of the Cuban Navy attempted to capitalize on the general mood of discord and stage a mutiny at a base in Cienfuegos, they weren’t just defeated, they were crushed. Many were killed in a shoot-out. Forty soldiers surrendered; they were taken out and summarily executed. All told, three hundred soldiers and civilians were killed during the siege at Cienfuegos.

  In Oriente, much of the government-sanctioned terrorism was handled by Los Tigres de Masferrer. Senator Masferrer’s gang adopted a new technique of displaying the bodies of their torture and murder victims. In July, four youths suspected of involvement in the civic resistance were killed, their bodies strung up on telephone poles outside of Santiago. The incident was eerily similar to the murder of William Soler and three other teenagers the previous January. For every four youths killed by the Batista regime, ten more joined the Revolution.

  The secret police scored some successes. On July 30, twenty-three-year-old Frank País, the 26th of July Movement’s popular leader in Oriente, was hunted down and assassinated by the government. A massive funeral procession was held for the fallen rebel and a crippling strike was organized by the labor unions. Cuba was now engulfed in a low-grade civil war.

  All of this activity took place outside the capital city, and the Havana Mob remained blissfully unaware of the unrest around them. Though the attack on the presidential palace should have alerted the mobsters that their world was changing, they put their faith in the strong arm of the government. Besides, they had their own problems to deal with. As the 1957–58 tourist season approached, a dark cloud passed over the Mob’s domain. It was a phenomenon that a meteorologist might have dubbed Hurricane Albert.

  As promised, Albert Anastasia arrived in Havana to check on his investments. For five days in late September, he made the rounds, wearing a felt fedora as if he were still back in chilly New York. He appeared at many of the Mob’s most noteworthy establishments, inclu
ding Oriental Park Racetrack, where he owned a percentage of the take, the Sans Souci casino, and the Tropicana nightclub. At the Tropicana, he was given a special table and treated like a king by Martín Fox. Days later, Anastasia was seen at a business meeting at the Copacabana Hotel in Miramar. At the meeting and in the lobby of the hotel, Anastasia was loud; he made threats and gestures designed to intimidate others in attendance.

  Lansky was not at this meeting. As his underling Ralph Rubio remembered: “We were warned about Anastasia. We were told to treat him with respect, but Mr. Lansky made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, Anastasia was not welcome in Havana.”

  The Lord High Executioner of the Mob had a beef with his associates in Cuba. His beef had to do with the Hilton Hotel. Anastasia learned that his piece of the hotel and casino was to be divided among no fewer than fifteen owners, including Cuba’s hotel workers’ union, the Sindicato Gastronómico. Money from the union’s pension fund had been used to finance the building of the place, making the workers—at least symbolically—investors in the hotel. Anastasia didn’t like the arrangement. Trafficante had his own establishments (the Comodoro, Deauville, and Capri) and Lansky had his (the Nacional and Riviera). Why should he, Albert Anastasia, have to share his piece of the action with a consortium of owners that included everyone from Cuban dishwashers to Kenneth Johnson, a junior senator from the state of Nevada?

  After the Mad Hatter left Havana, there was an eerie calm. Lansky’s driver, Jaime Casielles, noticed a palpable change in his boss. Anastasia was still a topic of discussion among the mobsters who gathered for the weekly meeting at Joe Stassi’s house, but Lansky no longer seemed concerned to the point of distraction. The Anastasia contretemps had given way to a more deeply embedded principle.