!Que linda es Cuba!: Issues of Gender, Color, and Nationalism in Cuba's Tropicana Nightclub Performance

The Tropicana Nightclub was a youngster of twenty in 1959 when Fidel Castro rolled into Havana with his triumphant army and turned the Batista dictatorship on its head. Already well established as one of the premier nightspots in the hemisphere for international playboys, Tropicana landed like a cat on its feet. The Tropicana show has thrived for more than 36 years in revolutionary Cuba without apologizing for its ambiance of sensual license. The casinos are no more, but the Tropicana aesthetic has changed little since the days when organized-crime bosses from New York flew their girlfriends to Havana for a night of dinner, dancing, and adventure. Tropicana is still one of the most lavish nightclub spectacles in the world and retains from prerevolutionary days the suggestion of wealth and leisure, the glittering excess, the colonial-inflected costumes revealing yards of bare skin, and the idealization of the mulata.'