Dangerous Rhythms, page 30
Pozo was from the streets, a difficult character who spoke little English and often found himself in the midst of confrontations.
On the night of December 3, 1948, just months after his debut performance at Carnegie Hall with Chico O’Farrill, Machito, and Gillespie, Pozo was excited. It was the eve of the celebration of Santa Barbara, whose affiliated orisha, or “saint,” was Chango, the god of the drum. Few doubted that the spirit of Chango lived in Chano Pozo, arguably the greatest living conguero, or conga player. He left his apartment in Harlem on a cold winter night to celebrate at the River Café on Lenox Avenue between 111th and 112th Streets. Chano liked the River Café because on the jukebox was “Manteca,” his own masterful Latin jazz composition, which he had recorded live with Dizzy, Chico, and Machito at Carnegie Hall. That night, according to witnesses, Pozo slipped a coin in the machine (likely owned by Meyer Lansky’s jukebox company), and, upon hearing his own opening conga playing, and then Dizzy’s trumpet, a smile came to his face.
Later, a local weed dealer named Cabito entered the bar. A few days earlier, Pozo had purchased weed from Cabito and felt that it was bogus. Pozo accused Cabito of ripping him off. Cabito told Pozo to “fuck off,” or words to that effect. So Pozo slapped Cabito across the face.
Had no one else been in the bar, it might have ended there. But there were a dozen or so patrons in the bar who saw Pozo slap Cabito. As a matter of honor, Cabito demanded that Pozo apologize. Now it was Pozo who uttered the words “fuck off.”
Cabito rushed out of the bar and came back only minutes later with a gun. He fired a shot that hit Chano Pozo in the chest. Pozo fell. As he squirmed on the floor, Cabito shot him five more times.
By the time police arrived, Cabito had fled and Pozo was declared dead. His body was wrapped in two red tablecloths and taken away. It was ten minutes before midnight, ten minutes before the Feast of Santa Barbara and the celebration of Chango.
Chano Pozo was thirty-three years old when he was murdered. His passing was a big loss for Latin jazz, but his spirit and contributions to the music continued to energize the Latin jazz scene from Manhattan to Havana.
In the decade following El Maestro’s death, American jazz musicians flooded into Cuba. Gillespie, George Shearing, Stan Getz, Buddy Rich, and many others played gigs in Havana but also came just to soak up the vibes. Vocalists were especially popular. Eartha Kitt opened at the Club Parisién, a gorgeously designed new lounge inside the Hotel Nacional. Italian American crooner Tony Martin headlined the Sans Souci. The biggest act of them all was Nat King Cole, who performed at the Parisién and enjoyed a weeklong engagement at the Tropicana.
Like all the great jazz eras and districts that evolved under the auspices of the mob, Havana in the 1950s was characterized by sex, cocktails, dancing, gambling, and more sex. Tourists from all over the world came to Havana to let themselves go in a way they could not back home. Businessmen on junkets, political groups of congressmen and governors, gambling addicts, jazz fans, and sexual tourists filled the hotels during the fall and winter. Gangsters from around the United States visited Havana with the notion that they were part owners. Most of the mob bosses who attended the 1946 conference controlled some percentage of one or more of the hotel/casinos. Lansky was the organizing force, hosting weekly meetings of the Havana mob, and making sure that Presidente Batista received his payment of the casino skim, which was rumored to be $1.25 million in cash on a weekly basis.
Light and Shadows
Nat King Cole had been front and center for all the major mobster-enhanced jazz eras of the century. As a teenager in Chicago, raised in Bronzeville, he snuck in a side door at the Grand Terrace nightclub to hear Earl “Fatha” Hines on piano. Cole was an aspiring piano player at the time, not yet a singer, and he worshipped Hines the same way horn players worshipped Louis Armstrong. The Terrace was a Capone club, which meant that you might catch sight of not only Big Al himself but also many of the rank-and-file hoodlums who populated the era as if they were knights at the Round Table.
A few years later, having begun his own career as a jazzman, young Nat Cole moved to Los Angeles and played many of the clubs on Central Avenue at a time when that scene was at its pinnacle. Cole didn’t make much money on the Avenue, but he played nearly every night and honed his craft to perfection. The Jewish mobster Mickey Cohen haunted the Avenue; he and his minions genuinely appreciated the music, but they also treated the clubs as if they were subsidiaries in their gangster portfolio. Mostly, if you kept your head down and played your music, everything was copacetic.
In 1941, Cole traveled to New York and settled in for a residency at Kelly’s Stable on 52nd Street in Manhattan. His group, the King Cole Trio, backed the great Billie Holiday. Cole learned much from Holiday’s vocal stylings, lessons he would eventually apply to his own breakout career as a singer. He also once again absorbed the lessons of working in an environment where the business side of things was controlled by organized crime and the sight of gangsters on the premises was as common as a bare butt in a strip club.
Cole had seen and experienced it all. And now, here he was in Havana as the local entertainment scene assumed its role amongst the great musical eras in the ongoing gangster narrative of the Americas.
Even if you had witnessed the lavish floor shows at the Sunset Cafe or the Cotton Club; even if you had experienced the intimacy of a smoky club in Storyville, on the Hill, the Avenue, or the Street; even if you had seen it all, Havana was something to behold. Partly, it was the excitement of the mob now doing its thing in an “exotic” foreign land. The great jazz scenes had always strived for a certain kind of exotica, with floor shows and interior design elements based on the primitive world—or at least an ersatz version of the primitive world: jungle motifs and skimpy outfits tricked out and dolled up in Hollywood or, later, Vegas style.
Havana had its own version of this, only it wasn’t artificial. It was an expression of an organic Afro-Cuban culture, to be found in the music, the dance styles at the clubs, the décor, and a reverence for entertainment that had put Havana on the map since the days of conquistadors, pirates, and international profiteers.
Few habaneros viewed the involvement of American mobsters in the city’s nightlife as a problem. The casinos were patronized mostly by gringo tourists and rich Cuban socialites. The entertainment scene, however, was a tremendous source of employment for local dancers and musicians. The island was exceptionally rich in this regard, with a culture that embraced music and dance as a high calling and near sacred form of expression.
The crown jewel of the city’s nightlife was the Tropicana nightclub. Located in the outer reaches of Havana, in the middle of a lush six-acre tropical garden, the club was owned by Martín Fox. A bolita impresario who had funneled his winnings into the nightclub business, Fox was a country bumpkin who would become the unlikely avatar of “class” in Havana nightlife in the 1950s.
The Tropicana opened December 30, 1939, long before U.S. mobsters had launched their incursion into Havana. The club included an outdoor cabaret and a casino. Originally, Fox merely rented a table inside the casino as part of his gambling business. In 1950, he took over the club’s lease and hired famed Cuban architect Max Borges Jr. to design an expansion. Los Arcos de Cristal (“Arches of Glass”), a Borges creation, was an indoor cabaret with glass walls and concrete arches that made it possible to have performances in any kind of weather while still preserving the impression that the shows were being held outdoors. The seating capacity was 1,700, the largest of any nightclub in the city.
The Tropicana’s success was immediate and unprecedented. Fox spared no expense in hiring the best choreographers, dancers, and musicians for the fabulous floor shows at the club. Even with all the money generated by the entertainment, Fox often noted to friends and associates, “If it wasn’t for the casino, we would be broke.”
The casino concession was owned by both Lansky and Santo Trafficante, in a special arrangement with Fox. To run the casino, the mobsters brought in Lefty Clark, a veteran casino manager from Las Vegas whose mobster affiliations went back to the Purple Gang in Detroit.
At the Tropicana, the casino generated hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, on a weekly basis. The proceeds were skimmed and divided among the mobsters, club management, and various figures in the Batista government who were on the take. The rest was reinvested back into the club’s operations and floor shows, which were so famous that they drew tourists from all around the globe.
According to Aileen Mehle, a syndicated society columnist based in the United States whose pen name was Suzy Knickerbocker:
Tropicana was heaven. You couldn’t keep me away. Everything was yayaya: smoking and drinking champagne and laughing, having fun. And all those fabulous dances and songs. It was the acme every night, the height of glamor, up there with the Ziegfeld Follies. It was the only place to go. Cuba was wonderful because it was sexy, especially if you’re young and you’re a girl and you have friends who’ll take you to clubs with music all night long. It never stopped. I remember this little Black piano player . . . he was a bit rotund, and always dapper in a dinner jacket. His name was Bola de Nieve, meaning snowball, and I recall him sitting at the piano like a little king singing, “Yo soy negro social, soy intellectual y chic . . .” (“I am a high-society negro, I am intellectual and chic . . .”)
Beginning in 1956, the King Cole Trio performed three times at the Tropicana. Each time, Los Arcos de Cristal was filled to capacity. Though the club had the most renowned house orchestra in Havana (led by pianist Bebo Valdés, whose son Chucho Valdés would later move to the United States and become one of the biggest names in Latin jazz), Nat King Cole preferred to perform along with his trio, as he did in the States. The audience was enraptured, including well-off Cubans who could afford the entrance fee. Locals especially loved it when Cole sang in Spanish. Though he didn’t speak the language, he sang the lyrics phonetically in a manner that was clearly not his native tongue. It could have been interpreted as an awkward kind of cultural appropriation; instead, Cubans were flattered by Cole’s romanticism, his smooth voice, charm, and sincerity. The singer even stayed over to record two Spanish-language albums at San Miguel Studios in Central Havana, including songs such as “Besame Mucho” and “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas,” which became major hits in the United States.
Cole was also invited to perform for Presidente Batista. The private show was arranged by Lansky and the mob.
Cole was accustomed to performing in mob-controlled venues and before hoodlums of all varieties, in clubs from Central Avenue to 52nd Street, but even he was unnerved by the Batista show. He had specifically requested that the audience, which he was told would consist of soldiers from the Cuban military, not be armed. And yet they were anyway. Throughout the show, the soldiers sat with rifles in their laps. Cole was annoyed. Though he was not a political creature, and he would later receive criticism for his lack of commitment to the civil rights movement, he had a strong sense of decorum. Though gangsters undoubtedly brought concealed weapons to his shows in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, an audience brazenly armed to the teeth was something new.
To the seasonal gamblers and revelers who came to Havana, Cole was the epitome of class, and his shows at the Tropicana became legendary. Cole’s opening act was singer Omara Portuondo, who decades later would find musical rebirth, and further acclaim, as a member of the Buena Vista Social Club.
For the gangsters, the entertainment choices in Havana were sometimes more lowbrow. High art was appreciated by the likes of Lansky, whose preferred musical style was danzón, a kind of Afro-Cuban waltz. Other gangsters eschewed music altogether and sought out entertainment in the city’s notorious sexual marketplace.
The Shanghai Theater, located in what had once been Havana’s Chinatown, was a burlesque and live sex emporium that attracted the daring and the curious. The star draw at the club was a performer who called himself Superman and was notorious for his fourteen-inch pinga, or “penis.” Among his many acts were public masturbation, live sex, and swinging on a trapeze over the audience, naked, with his pinga flapping in the wind. Santo Trafficante routinely brought visiting gangsters—and others—to the shows at the Shanghai. Though raunchy sex shows had been a staple of jazz districts from Storyville to Kansas City and beyond, Superman doing his thing at the Shanghai was a must-see for anyone looking to experience Havana’s decadent underbelly.
Revolution
Fidel Castro did not dance, nor was he known to be much of a jazz fan. Castro viewed the kind of frivolity taking place in the island’s capital city as a symptom of a larger problem. In a letter to a friend on January 1, 1955, he could hardly hide his contempt for the kind of Cuban nightlife that was then attracting tourists from around the globe: “What do our homeland’s pain and people’s mourning matter to the rich and fatuous who fill the dance halls? For them, we are unthinking young people, disturbers of the existing social paradise. There will be no lack of idiots who think we envy them and aspire to the same miserable idle and reptilian existence they enjoy today.”
Inequities in Cuban society had fueled revolutionary movements on the island going back at least a century. Through a series of dramatic events—including the failed July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba, and Castro’s imprisonment and later release by Batista—the bearded firebrand had emerged as a leader of the resistance. But in fact, by the mid-1950s political and armed rebellion was spread throughout Cuban society, among labor groups, student organizations, and even the mothers of young men who had been incarcerated or murdered by Batista’s increasingly ruthless dictatorship. Mobsters like Lansky, Trafficante, and others were slow to recognize the extent of disenchantment; they were in so deep with the fraudulent president that they could not see the forest from the trees.
Much of the anger in Cuba had to do with U.S. industrialization on the island, how megacorporations like United Fruit Inc. had monopolized land and industry. Utilities on the island were owned by AT&T and other foreign corporations. In the area of tourism, Pan Am and the Hilton hotel chain were given sweetheart deals to exploit the economy to their benefit. It was the proverbial unholy alliance, with U.S. corporate industrialists, the mobsters, and the American government seemingly operating as a unified conglomerate. This reality, combined with the island’s rural poverty, underdevelopment, lack of political freedom, and violent repression on the part of Batista’s secret police, had fomented a powerful underground insurgency. The 26th of July movement led by Castro was in the hills, and revolution was brewing—mostly on the eastern part of the island, far from Havana.
Lansky and the others did not see it coming. Since Batista controlled the island’s media, dictating how the revolution was portrayed on the radio and television news, the mobsters—like much of the island’s wealthy elite—believed that the regime was beyond reproach. To them, Castro was a joke. All that really mattered was that in Havana money from the casinos continued to flow and the music played on.
By the tourist season of 1956, there were signs that could not be ignored. At the Montmartre nightclub and casino, one of Lansky’s most esteemed properties, Colonel Manuel Blanco Rico, chief of Batista’s secret police, was exiting the club’s main casino with a group of associates. Onstage at the Montmartre, Italian opera singer and budding movie star Mario Lanza was singing an encore of his signature song, “Arrivederci, Roma.” As Blanco Rico waited in the lobby for an elevator, two men entered the club and whipped out weapons—one a pistol and the other a submachine gun. They opened fire, spraying the lobby with gunfire. Two of Blanco Rico’s people, including the wife of an army colonel, ran headlong into a glass mirror. By the time the two gunmen ran out of the club, the chief of military intelligence was dead.
It was a daring political assassination conducted in the lair of the mobsters’ operations in Havana.
Two months later, on New Year’s Eve, 1956, an even more auspicious act took place. It occurred at, of all places, the Tropicana nightclub.
Headlining the show that night was Beny Moré, a singer referred to by many as the Nat King Cole of Cuba. Moré—silky smooth and elegant, just like Cole—was the preeminent practitioner of a type of singing known as “feeling,” a romanticized interpretation of boleros, or “ballads,” sung in a smoky jazz style. Moré and another popular Cuban singer, Francisco Fellove, had been influenced by Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Sinatra, and other American jazz singers to the point where it was—despite the differences in language—difficult to discern the origins of this style or determine who was flattering whom.
At the Tropicana, about an hour and a half into the New Year, a bomb exploded near the bar area, rocking the entire club. Glass shattered and tables were upended. Pandemonium ensued. Screams and shouts for help rang out. Fearing there might be a follow-up explosion, patrons fled the club. A young woman, seventeen years old, stumbled from the rubble. Her arm had been blown off. It turned out she was the rebel who had planted the bomb.
The Batista government and the city’s tourism czars tried to give the appearance that it was a one-time event, but clearly the momentum had shifted. Bomb scares, and actual bombings, became a semi-regular occurrence all over Havana. By the season of 1958, the sense was that Batista’s grip was slipping, and the revolution was imminent. Ironically, this did not affect activity in the clubs and casinos. As with the presence of American mobsters in Havana, the thought of an approaching revolution only seemed to add to the excitement. The 1958 season was the most profitable to date.
