Tropicana update

The Tropicana: Seventy and still clubbing

by Guy Adams, Friday 01 January 2010

Since it opened in 1940, Cuba's legendary nightspot has hosted Mafia dons, Hollywood stars and Soviet leaders

No matter how severe your hangover, you'll almost certainly be feeling brighter and breezier this morning than the patrons of The Tropicana, the legendary Havana nightspot which has now been a hotbed of Cuban culture, music, and hedonism for precisely 70 years.

On 1 January 1940, workers at the suburban mansion set in six acres of tropical garden were busy sweeping up sequins and feathers, emptying cigar butts from ashtrays, and throwing out empty rum bottles, on the morning after the club's glamorous opening night.

Today, exactly seven decades later, they're mounting a similar clean-up operation after a week-long party to celebrate the anniversary of a venue that can claim to be the only outpost of capitalist decadence in the world to have survived decades of puritanical communist rule not only unscathed but with its reputation enhanced.

The Trop, as it is fondly known, first popularised the showgirl. It has been responsible for exporting Latin music to the clubs of America and Europe for generations. Everyone from Paul Robeson to Nat King Cole to Liberace has sashayed across its tree-lined stage.

Patrons during its "Golden Age" in the 1950s included Hemingway, Brando, Sinatra, and Edith Piaf. Sharing the bar, on any given night, were some of the world's most notorious gangsters. Later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel and Raul Castro were rumored to have entertained Russian dignitaries there.

Whatever has changed, The Tropicana's "vibe" remains broadly the same: it provides willing punters with an intoxicating glimpse back into the Guys and Dolls era, where Cuba was America's racy "pleasure island" and pretty much anything went.

The club celebrated its big birthday this week with a gala showcasing all the glitz, kitsch, and razzle-dazzle you'd expect. It included tributes to Nat King Cole and Rita Montaner, a big band, acrobats, contortionists in leotards, and a chorus line singing "The Banana Boat Song."

Cuba's relations with the US will inevitably shape the club's future. Talk of a thaw following the election of President Obama, who loosened some Bush-era policies, making it easier for Cuban-Americans to travel and send money home, has recently quietened. Until the age-old US trade embargo with Havana is lifted, the club's clientele will remain predominantly European tourists.

The Tropicana story began at the end of the Great Depression, when a Havana socialite who'd fallen on hard times decided to rent her home, The Villa Mina, to Rafael Mascaro and Luis Bula, two would-be casino owners who hoped to attract gamblers to their tables by staging a colorful revue in its garden.

They hired Victor de Correa, a Brazilian-born choreographer, to run the entertainment. He dreamed up a spectacle that combined Latin music with dancing ladies, inspired by his native country's Mardi Gras carnival. Adored by wealthy US tourists and the local gentry, The Tropicana swiftly became the nation's most popular nightclub.

During the Second World War, ownership passed into the hands of Martin Fox, who capitalized on the explosion of international tourism during the 1950s to turn the club into a centerpiece of one of the world's most decadent and glamorous destinations.

But Havana's success came at a price. Many casinos and nightclubs fell into the hands of the Mob. Whether The Tropicana was a Mafia property has been hotly debated. Most historians believe that Fox became a frontman for the club's real owners, Santo "Louie Santos" Trafficante Jr and Meyer Lansky, Mafia dons who controlled organized crime on the East Coast of the US.

But the Mafia link is far from confirmed. "There's a difference between having underworld connections and having the underworld run your club," said Rosa Lowinger, author of the club's history, this week. "Martin Fox had connections, but he wasn't a gangster. Some want to paint Cuba, pre-revolution, as an extravagant country that got what was coming to it. But it wasn't quite that simple."

Either way, The Tropicana was eventually targeted by Communist revolutionaries, who detonated a bomb there in 1956 in an unsuccessful attempt at killing some of the Mafia leaders they believed were corrupting the country. And the venue was shut down when Castro seized power in 1959. Trafficante was interned, and Martin Fox fled.

The Tropicana also seemed doomed. But it was eventually allowed to endure, minus the gambling, as a venue to entertain Cuba's new political elite (who were never averse to a bit of champagne socialism) and Castro's foreign guests from the Soviet block.

"It hung on by the skin of its teeth," says Lowinger. "At one point, Raul Castro wanted to turn it into a military facility. But his next-door neighbor, who was one of the caretakers at The Tropicana and a good revolutionary, went to see him and argued that it could be a potential goldmine for the revolution."

Since then, it has prospered. An estimated 200,000 people visited in 2008 and 150,000 this year, paying roughly $80 (£50) a head to get in – a sum far beyond the reach of ordinary Cubans, who can only usually gain access by working for the Government or being invited as a reward for excelling at work.

Tropicana Las Vegas Closure

This property is scheduled to close April 2, 2024. (AP Photo/John Locher)ASSOCIATED PRESS

LAS VEGAS (AP) — In the 1971 film “Diamonds are Forever,” James Bond stays in a swanky suite at the Tropicana Las Vegas.

“I hear that the Hotel Tropicana is quite comfortable,” Agent 007 says.

It was the Tropicana's heyday, a frequent haunt of the legendary Rat Pack, while its past under the mob cemented its place in Vegas lore.

But after welcoming guests for 67 years, the Las Vegas Strip's third-oldest casino shut its doors for good on Tuesday. Employees crowded the main entrance, cheering and crying, while tourists and locals watched the historic moment from behind a yellow gate. A tissue box made its way through the crowd.

Then, just before 1 p.m., security guards began locking up the Tropicana. The thick chains clinked as they were wrapped around the casino's gold door handles.

Demolition is slated for October to make room for a $1.5 billion Major League Baseball stadium — part of the city's latest rebrand as a hub for sports entertainment.

Charlie Granado, a bartender at the Tropicana, said it's a bittersweet ending for the place he has called a second home for 38 years.

“It’s time. It’s ran its course,” Granado said. “It makes me sad. But on the other hand, it’s a happy ending.”

The population of Clark County had just surpassed 100,000 when the Tropicana opened on a Strip surrounded by a vast, open desert. It cost $15 million to build three stories with 300 rooms split into two wings.

Its manicured lawns and flashy showroom earned it the nickname “Tiffany of the Strip.” Near the entrance, There was a towering tulip-shaped fountain, mosaic tiles, and mahogany-paneled walls throughout.

Black-and-white photographs from that time give a view into what it was like inside the walls of the Tropicana at its height, playing host to A-list stars—from Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds to Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. Mel Tormé and Eddie Fisher performed at the Tropicana.

Decades later, New Jersey resident Joe Zappulla was among the final hotel guests to check out at the Tropicana before the locks went on the doors. He spent $600 for a room and fulfilled a Vegas fantasy: lying on top of a craps table on a casino floor.

“When else can I do this in Vegas?” he said.

Zappulla grew up hearing glamorous tales from his parents, who honeymooned in Las Vegas in 1961 and visited often, about their run-ins with the Rat Pack during the Tropicana's heyday. It's a version of Sin City that his parents loved.

“Old Vegas, it's going,” Zappulla said with tears sliding down his cheeks. “So I'm really clinging to a little piece of that.”

In a city known for reinvention, the Tropicana itself underwent major changes as Las Vegas evolved. Two hotel towers were added in later years. In 1979, the casino's now-beloved $1 million green-and-amber stained glass ceiling was installed above the casino floor.

Barbara Boggess was 26 when she started working at the Tropicana in the late 1970s as a linen room attendant.

Now 72, Boggess has seen the Tropicana through its many iterations. There was the 1980s rebrand as “the Island of Las Vegas,” with a swim-up blackjack table at the pool, and the South Beach-themed renovation completed in 2011.

Today, only the low-rise hotel room wings remain of the original Tropicana structure. Yet the casino still conjures up vintage Vegas nostalgia.

“When you first walk in, you see the stained glass and the low ceilings," JT Seumala, a Las Vegas resident staying at the casino in March, said. "It does feel like you step back in time for a moment.”

Seumala and his husband roamed the sprawling property during their visit, turning down random hallways and taking pictures of the purple-and-orange carpet, the wallpaper and the ceiling. They tried their luck at blackjack and roulette and made conversation with a cocktail server who had worked there for 25 years. They saved a few red $5 poker chips to remember the mob-era casino.

Behind the scenes of the casino’s opening decades ago, the Tropicana had ties to organized crime, largely through reputed mobster Frank Costello.

Costello was shot in the head in New York weeks after the Tropicana's debut. He survived, but the investigation led police to a piece of paper in his coat pocket with the Tropicana’s exact earnings figure and mention of “money to be skimmed” for Costello’s associates, according to The Mob Museum.

By the 1970s, federal authorities investigating mobsters in Kansas City charged more than a dozen operatives with conspiring to skim $2 million in gambling revenue from Las Vegas casinos, including the Tropicana. Charges connected to the Tropicana alone resulted in five convictions.

But there were many years of mob-free success at the Tropicana. It was home to the city's longest-running show, “Folies Bergere.” The topless revue, imported from Paris, had a nearly 50-year run and helped make the feathered showgirl one of the most recognizable Las Vegas icons.

Today, the casino, once surrounded by wide-open desert, intersects with a major street named for it at the south end of the Strip, dwarfed by towering megaresorts that Las Vegas is now known for. Nearby are the homes of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders, who left Oakland, California, in 2020, and the city’s first major league professional team, the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights.

The ballpark planned for the land beneath the Tropicana is expected to open in 2028.

“There’s a lot of controversy about whether it should stay or go,” Seumala said. But the thing that I love about Vegas is that it’s always reinventing itself.”