Graciela, La Libertadora

At the La Conga nightclub in 1945, Graciela Perez broke the restraints of propriety and virtuousness the night she sang “Sí Sí No No.” The band fell silent, the waiters froze, the dancing stopped, and the bartender turned to witness her daring performance.

Beginning off to the side, she slowly edged center-stage under brighter lighting. She personified womankind facing an eternal seductive, copulative proposition. Her agile voice nursed a suspenseful scenario that gradually submitted to normal desire. Within this framework, Graciela reached a melodic dénouement, an artful pseudo-orgasmic celebration ending in an ecstatic climactic scream. This was music to the ears of every male present.

Her startling melodramatics had no encore. Here was a breakthrough similar to Sally Rand’s very daring fan dance, Josephine Baker’s nudity, and Miguelito Valdez’s “Babalu” number at the uptight, Anglo-centric Waldorf Astoria. She hit us the way Valentino’s tango did, then Isadora Duncan and Madonna, but without their universal celebrity. We had been presented with a revolutionary event, like a morality play vocalized. It was one that lyrically mimicked a Shakespearean dueling scene between rival moral principles. Her act liberated a stale, sexually correct post–WWII America at a time when Club El Morocco denied entry to women wearing sunglasses. Graciela taunted a tight-laced society wherein any indelicate intimacy was taboo, except in crass vaudevillian skits on red-light Forty-Second Street.

The patrons at La Conga’s rumba matinees were dancers and their “pupils,” garment-center “cloak-and-suiters” with their models, and gigolettes. The dance floor was a smoldering tinderbox of erotic performances, with groins riveted to groins. This was reminiscent of the old Park Plaza where, during slow, grinding selections such as “El Negro Simón,” the lyrics described a girl becoming arrebata, or sexually uncontrollable. With Yoruba language working, i.e., arrullendole caguá, lusty interpretations were left to the inflamed imaginations of the dancers. These odd, throaty sounds seemed to imply foreplay. Since the messages in these unintelligible lyrics were decoded by each dancer according to his or her level of arousal, there was sufficient amplitude for each individual to respond physically, blaming the Afro music for their suggestive behavior on the floor. The musicians, as well as the outnumbered Latino dance couples, encouraged the Anglos to interpolate the feral sensuality surrounding them, while clownish antics of frustrated beginners were perceived with good humor by everyone.

When a Latino danced with an Anglo girl, she would perform with exaggerated responses in dances that glorified femininity and the macho man. The result was a greater abandonment with newfound freedom of movement. The male Anglo, his heretofore secure role threatened, eschewed the Afro-Cuban dance world, whereas his partner now saw it as part of her overall liberation—and would again during the 1970s, when disco dancing meant less male control. The Stonewall historical event is a good example of a revolution beginning on the dance floor.

Graciela’s substantial voice that night in 1944 ignited an overheated environment. Unless you had witnessed her, you would not have realized what it all meant. Her coquettish, beguiling, pantomime with needless lyrics nevertheless left us with a climactic, playful portrayal of a female’s victory over a manipulated male, despite their mutually responsive libidos. She gracefully and cleverly flaunted her newly liberalized instinct, using “Si Si No No” as a musical vehicle for freedom of greater expression without vulgarity.

Graciela came from a background where a 1930s rumba, “El Plato Roto,” spoke of a broken hymen. It was one of many risqué numbers that, like spice, were welcome ingredients in Cuba’s everyday life and torrid musical climate. It recalls a more restrained, delightful combination of feminine musical beauty, the eleven-piece Retunda All-Girl Orchestra, whose redolence infused Havana in the forties, as did that of Orquesta Anacaona, which of course featured Graciela.

In an alley behind one Havana nightclub, El Pasaje, a well-worn upright piano was stored during the day, available to anyone who might wish to play it. It was known by everyone and was often found encircled by Habaneros, like fraternity boys singing their alma mater. At night it was rolled out on wheels to the narrow sidewalk in front of the brightly lit club. Passersby clustered there, enjoying free concerts under the open sky. That piano seemed to belong to everyone, like the remarkable music that one heard throughout the city. The people of Havana, like those in Washington Heights, fell asleep with late-night radios playing sexy love songs.

Everyone owned Graciela in their hearts, especially in Havana. Alongside Anacaona in popularity was a second all-girl orchestra. At times, both bands played the number-one hit in unison. This all took place opposite El Capitolio, and was a nightly happy spectacle symbolizing and celebrating a country where rumba was Cuba and Cuba was rumba. Music was like a second government.

But it was Graciela who helped make us, here in the States, a bit more liberal.

Bruca Manigua

Vince, Robert Farris Thompson (r), and an admirer.

Note: Last year, Vince met for an interview with Robert Thompson, the distinguished Yale professor who is writing his highly anticipated history of mambo. A lively correspondence has ensued.

Below is an excerpt, discussing Vince’s early passion for Casino de la Playa’s classic “Bruca Manigua.” The first Arsenio Rodriguez tune ever recorded, “Bruca” was “a landmark in the development of Cuban popular music,” as Ned Sublette details in his book, Cuba and Its Music. Xavier Cugat had recorded the track within half a year of the Casino de la Playa original, and Vince was under its enduring spell in his teens.

RF Thompson:

26 December, 2008

One thing that amazes me about your career is how you picked up on “Bruca Manigua” back in 1939 and started playing it on harmonica. What pulled you into this song? Lyrical feel? Afro-Cuban savor? All of the above and more? What I want to know is how the lyrics hit you. They were in an intricate mixture of bozal (slave idiom in creolized Spanish) and creolized Ki-Kongo, flaunting words like fwiri and mundele. Beyond the Afro-Atlantic complexity, did you dig “Bruca” mainly because of the melody?

You had to be one of the hippest men in New York that year simply by virtue of playing that song on a harmonica. Been listening to Noro Morales’ mambo, “110^th Street and Fifth Avenue,” and thinking of you boarding the bus in Washington Square and riding to the end of the line, right at the Park Plaza corner.

Have a brilliant New Year,

Bob

Part One:

“Bruca Manigua”

Indiambo congori, omelenko, la-di-o-de, coro mi yare—where do these sounds come from that they drown out the music and the culture I was born into? They forever forbid my disloyalty to them—they made me a religious person even though I knew nothing of their meaning. How did they capture me so gently, using their very concealed implications to control me?

From early childhood, as a special-education candidate due to lead poisoning that profoundly affected my hearing, my efforts to understand my world led me to become fascinated with the unknown—with what was escaping me in life. I sought shelter in the mysterious shadows that both hid me and comforted me as an adopted outcast. I grew up further and further from the path that others took. This attitude that was part of my formation set me aside from a society that I could handle easily as long as an odd quality and mystery remained a part of me. I neither belonged entirely to Africa or to America in the sense that my hearing evolved on a different level from normal—which in turn placed me astride a larger world that I balanced myself on like a circus bareback rider holding two galloping horses under his control, with one foot on each.

This effective bipolarity assisted rather than hindered my learning in that it demanded twice the effort—not to conform, but to understand, to balance my intellectual equilibrium. Thus, while I could not understand or speak Africa, I went on to conquer six languages of the Western world.

The sounds and vocabulary of Africa were the source eventually of a sweet mystery—the essential ingredient in the formation of an artist. This was even more induced in me since prior to the poisoning, my early teachers, as well as strangers, had used the word “genius” in my presence. There was, it was discovered, a musical genius who had died in childhood, my cousin who played piano sitting on phone books. Geneological investigation showed an above-normal number of family members engaged in the field of music. With no musical ability or training of my own, I had to satisfy myself with only the appreciation of what music was all about. Talented musicians could express it, interpret it, whereas I had to absorb it with no escape valve.

This esoteric burden manifested itself in the release I found in response, in the physical expression encompassed in dancing. Not American-style dancing or classical footwork, but in the dancing that is African. This came about guided by the music that I came in contact with. Initially, my family preferred opera to popular music but for me opera represented a musical establishment that at the same time jived with the everyday music.

When in 1936 and onward I caught bits of African music coming from abroad, from the islands and Cuba, I sensed that there was a jinni in what I was now hearing. New, unfamiliar sounds that sounded familiar to me even though I didn’t know why. The reason, I now understand, was the fact that, like language, they had to be listened to with a different part of me, one that evoked more than passing interest. They spoke to me in a seventh language, literally and figuratively, using the sounds of the drum that compelled me to follow more obediently.

The drum began to be something I needed biologically, it seemed. It filled the empty quality of deafness the way the gigantic Wurlitzer organ at the Paramount Theater filled the house. To the rafters.

Part Two:

“Bruca Manigua” and Mother

“El Manisero”… What is this manisero, this repetitious melody that is heard everywhere and where did it come from, everyone wondered back in 1937? “…un cucuruchu de mani…” What is a “cucuruchu”? By the time I learned that the song was what we today call a singing commercial, the “Peanut Vendor” passed on, only to be replaced by “La Cucaracha.” “Ya no puede caminar…,” another odd “Spanish” song, this one about a roach. When “La Cucaracha” crawled away, we were ready for a Latin tune called “Siboney” whose more sublime lyrics spoke plaintively of a black slave’s ordeal. Its melodic beauty was like a schoolgirl’s lament, lacking the basic ugliness of the horrors of slavery.

As “Spanish music” became more popular, we heard, for example, “El Plato Roto.” “Pancho tuvo que pagar / lo que rompio Rafael”…songs with sexual implications like double-entendre meanings wherein Pancho pays for what Rafael broke. El plato (plate, dish) and roto (broken) being a girl’s hymen. “El Bastidor” was another sly device, that sang of the hardness of a mattress as well as the durability of the male organ.

But these playful or sugary reflections did not have the blood and guts power of a song that spoke out the truth, loud and clear. They seemed to conceal, to hesitate or only hint at the slaves’ oppression. Just as the iron chains that restricted movement to just the four steps of la conga, there was no room in the lyrics to encourage rebellion, that is, until “Bruca Manigua. “Sin la libertad no puedo vivir / siempre tan maltrata”! This song touched and alerted a sensitive nerve that lay dormant in me, even having heard the sadness in the impoverished peanut vendor’s cry.

“Bruca” had sounded the key note and was followed soon by other brazen messages: “Yo Soy Karabali,” “Negro Nananboro,” Chano Pozo’s “Guaguina Yerabo,” Piniero’s “Yambo,” “Yambu” and “Lamento Borincano”… The ponderous quality of “Bruca” and the others, with all the drama that they exposed, still had more to follow even while holding me in vicarious empathy. Instead of doing my math, I played and replayed those records on my old phonograph, chained to it.

The full result of my original exposure and consequent entrancement with Afro-Latin music did not hit me until “Juan Fue Pa’ La Guerra,” with Daniel Santos singing “Quehago si vuelvo / y no encuentro a mi mama?” The composer was Pedro Flores. Here was a demoralizing song that ran counter to the US Army’s policy of allowing only militarized motivation for the sake of patriotic encouragement. This very touching song ended with the sad words, “What will I do should I return (from the war) and not find my mother (alive)?”

Since I was about to leave for the army, these sharp words were suddenly pertinent, more personal even those Miguelito Valdes sang in Arsenio Rodriguez’s “Bruca.” These words that included one’s mother hit home in two ways: the universal and the personal…the love that Latin sons in particular have for their mothers, and the son speaking not of his likely death in the army, but of his mother’s pain in not seeing her son again…his mother’s own dolorous ending…not his own pain over her death.

Such gut-wrenching lyrics exposed the quality of the culture that was behind the music. It being a sentimental blessing that produced such love, whether black or not.

This all surfaced and came together as a conscious awareness that I correlate with whenever I am in the physical presence of the people and their Afro-Latin music, or when alone with my conscience.

What Music Is About

Among the ten top artistic directors and orchestral conductors is Daniel Barenboim, earning two million dollars a year, or should we say a season. In fact, these ten lucky individuals take in over ten million dollars in salaries! Not bad for a clique of sophisticated elitists in the symphonic and operatic establishments. Fundraising gala performances could use some housecleaning. Charity begins at home and should end in the street, where it will do the most good. To the people!

Are the complexities of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony any more challenging than a salsa montuno performed by Rene Lopez’s twelve-piece orchestra, where a close listener can catch experimental, classical, serial, modern and postmodern influences?

Music should serve to spread the maximum good the greatest audience. It should best be out of Lincoln Center’s grasp and out in the street for the people, by the people and of the people…a birthright. For every black tie fan attending the annual Mostly Mozart festival, a thousand Latinos are enjoying Marc Anthony’s latest hit.

A worldwide survey found Puerto Rico to be No. 1, the happiest place on earth. Is it because many poor families harbor at least one musician or more? More than an evening’s gala is present night and day in the Latin music that is in the air one breathes…out in the streets of P.R. It is not in the snooty confines of academic strongholds that are constantly begging for donations to stay alive while attendance dwindles. Is this not a good example of snobbism, where unknown names perform unknown opuses to a restricted, mostly tax-sheltered “select” audience?

When the average music teacher struggles to secure pupils that struggle to afford lessons themselves, this in itself restricts not only the appreciation of music but also its influence. Money should not only go into offering scholarships but also into making musical instruments available like library books to students who cannot afford to buy them, like giving them chances to learn how to fish, instead of giving a handout.

In an alley alongside a nightclub opposite El Capitolo in Havana once stood an old beat-up piano. It was placed there during the day and rolled out front at night where the Anacaona all-girl orchestra played on the sidewalk as people passed by. We could call it, today, a free concert. During the afternoon, anyone who wished to play that piano (while standing) could do so. Strangers would crowd around it and sing along as though they were fraternity boys joining in. They would continue singing as they left to continue their day. This is what music is really all about. It is our global anthem.

An Ear for Music

Even before the Great Depression of the 1930s, many hungry children in New York without supervision would eat their crayons, swallow white paste, chew tar like gum, and ingest lead paint for salt. It was this lead, not decibels, that damaged my hearing. However, this unfortunate handicap served to introduce me to the exquisite sounds of Latin music.

The vibrating chords of a solo organ playing “Siboney” awoke a withdrawn child. The penetrating sounds of this grand orchestral device came from thousands of miles away, from the Hotel Nacional in Havana. “Siboney,” the theme song of the Lecuona Cuban Boys, came in via shortwave radio, full of static, fading in and out, at times completely silent, clearer in summer than winter and very late at night. “Turn off that radio!” my dad would shout from the other room. Turning down the volume a wee bit, I would bring the radio under the sheets with me, married as it were, to the music. Next day, I would fall asleep in class.

Between my family’s understandable protests, the poor reception in the early days of radio, and my troubled hearing, I could only remain frustrated by this foreign music. These novel sounds were unknown in this country during the 1930s, except for one magical tune that was heard around the world: “El Manisero.” I became determined to someday track down this elusive, enticing music to its source.

Today, some seventy years later, I still bring my radio up to my ear by using earphones, and while my hearing has worsened, the technology has improved. In 1941, the composer of “Siboney” invited me into his dressing room. He sat down at a small piano and, looking directly into my eyes, began to play “Estas Siempre en Mi Corazon.” “You are the first one to hear this song,” he said. This is where the music has been all these years, I thought…always in my heart

My Greenwich Village: Walking With Ghosts

From an Interview with Vincent Livelli by Judy Samuels

Vincent Livelli first “awoke from infancy” at 117 Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. It was when his mother took him to the window to see his first snow. She picked up a handful of snow from the window sill and put it in his hand. She taught him about fire the same way, but much more gingerly.

In the 1920s, European immigration was at its peak. The Village social parlor was the streets, which were arenas of volatile class tensions as well as communal mixing. The South Villagers, though mostly all Italian, were deeply divided by region and class — the Genoese looked down on the Sicilians; the Sicilians resented Genoese business success and adaptability (They called them the Jews of Italy). Vincent’s Genoese family owned the building they lived in, and their landlordly position stung the Sicilian tenants’ sense of pride.

Walking to school at P.S. 102 on Varick Street, Vincent would be bullied by kids on the street and sometimes spat on from a tenant’s window. He escaped this fate when he walked to Central Park with his older cousin Jimmy. Jimmy worked in the paper box industry in the manufacturing district now called Soho. Sometimes he carried his younger cousin on his shoulders. In Central Park, they would go skating on the frozen lake.

Vincent remembers, as do some of us, when the Jefferson Market Library, back then the Jefferson Market Courthouse, was of a piece with the Women’s House of Detention. The inmates would yell down through the barred windows to the street and throw messages to friends on Sixth Avenue. Around 1974, the Women’s House of “D” was torn down. Today its memory is blanketed under lush flowering plants in a lovingly-tended neighborhood garden.

Vincent was born in Brooklyn and at six months old moved to 117 Sullivan Street, which he shared with his mother, father, grandparents, Aunt Tessie and unmarried Uncle John. Just across the street was the stable where the teamsters’ horses were bedded down. Their carts were parked in the street right outside his window. Before there was window screening, flies from the horses would invade his room. He could look out his window on hot summer days and see the horses returning home tired from pulling the beer wagons through the city streets. He watched as they climbed slowly up the incline to their stalls, and as the impatient teamsters beat them to hurry them up. The misery of the overworked horses came through the window with the breeze that carried the smells of hay and horse urine. At three years old, Vincent saw policemen shoot horses that were foaming at the mouth from exhaustion. He saw them drag the bodies through the streets.

When excavation work began on the Sixth Avenue Subway, Vincent played in the mountains of sand that piled up. He lit the gas lamps in the hallways of 117, held aloft on his grandfather’s shoulders. The building had two communal toilets on each floor — the pull-chain kind — that served three families. The coolest places in the building, in summer they were a popular escape from the stifling apartments.

In the twenties, poisoning from lead paint didn’t recognize class differences. Many children suffered the effects of eating the flaked-off paint chips from apartment walls.

Vincent, despite being affected with permanent severe hearing loss, learned four languages, and learned to dance and love Latin music from his Sicilian mother. For his first lesson, she climbed up on the kitchen table and danced. She told him stories about the Black Cat, the cabaret on West Third Street, and Mori’s Restaurant on West Fourth, popular in the 40s, that had a fountain in its inner courtyard. But the San Remo Bar Vincent discovered on his own.

Located on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets in the heart of Italian Greenwich Village, it became home to the “Village nobility” of the 1940s and ‘50s. Anatole Broyard, who Vincent met at Brooklyn College, was at the center of a literary circle that included French diarist Anaïs Nin, poet Delmore Schwartz, writers Milton Klonsky and William Gaddis, and other artists and writers.

At Brooklyn College, Vincent was an outsider among the mostly Jewish, staunchly Leftist crowd. Anatole Broyard, the son of a New Orleans carpenter and a light-skinned black man, was equally set apart. They became close friends for the rest of their lives. Though neither of his parents had finished elementary school, their son became a writer and a book critic for the New York Times. In 1938, the two got an apartment together on West Third Street where the rent was ten dollars a month. In 1945, they opened a bookstore at 18 Cornelia Street, which became a literary nucleus in the Village, a favorite hangout for Maya Deren, the high priestess of experimental cinema, and writer Terry Southern, among others. Anatole’s Greenwich Village memoir, Kafka was the Rage, ignited an interest in European literature.

In 1948, after serving in the army in World War II, a cold day job-seeking on Wall Street made Vincent dive into a steamship office to warm up. Destiny must have had a hand because the world suddenly opened up with that steamship office, and, instead of Wall Street, he picked up a job as cruise director on a ship to the Caribbean, a career which would take him to sixty-five countries. Back in New York City, in the midst of the Depression he learned Latin dance at the Park Plaza on 110^th Street off Fifth Avenue, where poor Puerto Rican and Cuban families went to reclaim their lost cultures.

In a letter to Anatole’s daughter, Bliss, Vincent told her how her father had “refereed a certain decorum” when engaged in heated literary discussions with others at the San Remo Bar. “Nimble with words, his sentences skipped along, churning the air with words never heard before. . . . “ Tempers raged in this bar atmosphere as people argued their literary opinions. “There were days when they would cross the street to avoid each other because of Proust.”

Late in the 1940s and into the ‘50s, the elegant iron grillwork began to disappear from many Village balconies. NYU began its expansion, and with it the historic streets of the Village were rearranged or broken up. For Vincent this was the time “Anaïs Nin opened her diaries [to the world], Sartre’s ‘Huit-Clos’ opened on Broadway, and the Mob controlled Saints’ Days.” The intimate romance of the Village was disappearing.

The building at 117 Sullivan Street is today a condominium. An apartment in this building with no super rents for $1,300 a month. Vincent Livelli spent the decades of the sixties and seventies traveling the world on cruise ships, a Latin-music missionary. “Is it not better,” he wrote to Bliss, “to follow the way of the self-forgiving solitary traveler?”

Vincent and Anatole were sharers in the post-World War II Village where friendship and love were bound together by love of poetry and literature. “Everyone was writing.” One afternoon, Vincent met James Baldwin coming out of the bar at the Carlton in Cannes, France. “He gave me his number, and when I called, he said he would do a portrait of me, in the style of Matisse or Van Gogh. He once sang for me to keep the cold at bay in his wind-swept loft.”

In 1954, Anatole’s first published story, “What the Cystoscope Said,” gained him status in the world beyond the Village, but strangely prefigured his death from cancer years later in 1990. From his experience as a patient, he wrote the collection of stories Intoxicated by My Illness; it was Anatole’s posthumous gift to the world. In it, he gave a literary voice to illness, suffering, sex, and death. "I’m not interested in the irony of my position,” he wrote. “Cancer cures you of irony. Perhaps my irony was in my prostate.”

Vincent, who “walks the Village with his friend’s ghost, knows this is where his heart still resides, among the landscapes of our happy youth. Thus, we are joined together not in sadness but in the feeling that we were so close to a miracle that we could have saved the world.”

Hot and Cold Memories

Vincent Livelli, far right, in 1948 at the Embassy Club, Plaza San Martin, Buenos Aires

Unless one arrives in a foreign country with letters of introduction, it is necessary to form new friendships and new experiences on your own.

In 1948, I showed up in Buenos Aires with plenty of friends whom I had met aboard the SS Argentina. Furthermore, these new friends were all high society. For example, Luiz Herrera, the world polo champion and race-car driver, who was the Maradona of his day, when polo was what soccer is today in Argentina. Also Samuel Jankelovitch, Evita’s impresario, and the Urquiza family, like our Kennedy clan. These folks met me at the dock in their Cadillacs when I would return to Buenos Aires, at a time when importing foreign cars was illegal. It was also a time when, since the British had built the nation’s railroads, the sight of British tweed jackets, cravats and English Leather cologne was in evidence everywhere. Within this circle of companions, in a hospitable country, I felt comfortably ensconced…that is, until I recently read the book Tango: The Art History of Love, by Robert Farris Thompson.

Where I had always received a warm Buenos Aires welcome, had I arrived cold, my present memories of those days would be quite different.

I was hanging out with the wrong crowd, listening to white (chongo) tangos of Carlos Gardel and frequenting clubs with the aristocratic atmosphere of the 1940s tango del salon. Forever in the upper-crust company of politicos and shifty club owners, I stayed at fancy hotels such as the Plaza, across from the Embassy Club on Plaza San Martin, owned by a Señor Kootcher. His elegant club was where we danced and dined, dressed tenue de soiree, on my nightclub tour of Buenos Aires that included a stop at the La Querencia club for some gaucho entertainment (malambo zapateado) and ending at the Gong for Americanized Argentine jazz. After the tour, I would finish off the evening at Cabaret Tabaris. This club was balconied and had a telephone at each table, which allowed you to connect with attractive unescorted ladies—and idea borrowed from European clubs.

Until I read Prof. Thompson’s Tango, I was unaware that there was another Argentina, where tango is to its citizens what rumba is to Cubans. During the time I lived in Havana, Cuban society was already beginning to more openly accept Afro-Cuban talent, whereas Argentina during that era of more British-influenced mores, was hiding the African origins of its national dance—its beating heart.

True, there were districts in Buenos Aires that were equivalent to the solares, patios and bateys of Havana, but I never knew of them. Never did I see Afro-influenced canyengue tango, where the male partner’s knees are bent with his torso pushed forward (this style is similar to Killer Joe’s hot rumba as he showed it to us at the Palladium). Nor did I enjoy black malambo, a dance of ritual purification that, like teeza maza, features explicit foot stomping as part of the tango. I never knew the ki-kongo power that drives the tango. I would not have feared entering the La Boca district, the city’s inner port with its bars and brothels, where tango was born.

Like being in love, faithful to one woman all my life, I only knew Afro-Cuban cultures, until I read that tango was born of the same mother: Mother Africa. Now my vocabulary includes yumba (“God’s command”), mufa (“bad luck”), mayembo (“trembling shoulders”) and other words added to my Afro-Cuban abrecuto quri dinga and babarabatibi coibi, etc.

Where I easily found Africa in Belize, not to mention Haiti or Boriqua, I feel I was cheated of memories that would today take me, like those I have of Cuba, to darkest Africa—the darker and hotter, the better.

Refugees in Havana

Havana in 1941 was one of the gayest cities on earth. With pristine beaches, lively music, tobacco, rum and beautiful women in abundance, it was a tropical paradise in the sun. Who could choose a better location to wait out the war in Europe?

In the upper-class sector of Havana, Vedado, about thirty families were living, not as Cuban refugees, but Jewish refugees. They had managed to escape the Nazi persecution but they lived from day to day in despair, with no means of support other than donations from Jewish charities. Many had endangered relatives in Europe. With little chance of returning to the ruins of their former homes, they survived as best they could. Not permitted to hold jobs in Cuba, they were desperate people.

Among the professionals, artists and businessmen, were many tailors whose wives took needle and thread in hand and made neckties for sale. During the Great Depression, this strategy had earned poverty stricken Jewish families money for food. The gift of a necktie for father at Christmastime arose then, during the birthdays and holidays, as a result of this activity.

Since Christmastime encouraged the greater display of decoration, these Christmas ties enlivened the male wardrobe, adding cheer to a sad time in America, and helped to break the somber style of dress in general in America.

In Cuba, however, the tropical climate and the absence of air-conditioning meant a need for loose clothing. An example is found in the typical Cubavera, a shirt with an unbuttoned neckline and no tuck-in at the waist. Even today, neckties are being abandoned in greater numbers around the world.*

When the Jewish refugees saw me passing by daily, they became more and more curious, and more suspicious of me. Could I also be a refugee, they wondered? I was approached by the salesman one afternoon, who had at last spotted a likely customer. Here was a gentleman who actually was wearing a tie in Havana!

It was an easy sale. I bought a tie since I could not only use one, but because the price was cheap. Besides, it was practical souvenir of Cuba to take with me when I returned home, to remind me of those who had lost theirs.

* Climate change?