Performing Tropicality: The Tropicana Cabaret in Havana

Abstract

The Tropicana cabaret was one of the most famous sites of Cuban nightlife in the 1940s and 1950s. Located in the residential district of Havana, it brought a new type of venue to the city famous for its musical culture and nightlife. The promotion of the club was professionalized in the early 1950s, by means of a spectacular new building and the development of a corporate design. Although the club flourished mostly, thanks to tourists from the United States and the money they lost on gambling, the networks of its architectural, musical, and performative program go beyond an U.S. American influence and are both decisively bound to the local sphere and entangled with transnational cultures. The Tropicana is thus a venue that uses its picturesqueness to market Havana as a “place”—and a meeting point for artistic and creative culture.