Gay club habana cuba

Cabaret Las Vegas opened in the s, when Havana was teeming with cabarets, casinos, and American tourists. Mobsters like Santo Trafficante and Meyer Lansky were living the city life and making millions from gambling. El Tropicana and the Hotel Nacional were packed with Americans, but Las Vegas, from the beginning, was a space for Cubans indifferent to glitz.

But who created this most unusual cabaret? In Three Trapped TigersCabrera Infante mentions that one night, the police descended on Las Vegas, arrested the owner—identified in the novel as Lalo Vegas—and charged him with drug trafficking. The novelist got the name slightly wrong, but the story about the arrest holds up.

The cabaret was only one of the many adventures, wild projects, and mad schemes he came up with during what appears to be a very long life. In his late teens he moved to the capital to attend the University of Havana, where he befriended Fidel Castro, who was enrolled in law school. They both opposed dictatorships in Latin America—there were many at the time —and inwhen Vega was 22, they joined a few hundred Cuban adventurers in an ill-fated military expedition to the Dominican Republic meant to bring down dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Havana Gay Bars

Castro and Vega escaped unharmed. After Fulgencio Batista seized power inCastro and Vega worked to bring down the dictator by violent means. InCastro launched a failed attack against the Moncada military barracks in Santiago and spent the following years in prison and later in Mexican exile, before returning to the island in to lead the guerilla movement in the Sierra Maestra.

During the same time, Vega shuttled between Miami and Havana until in he was arrested in the Florida Keys, along with 29 other young Cubans on the verge of setting sail on a boat loaded with automatic weapons in what was to be a coup against Batista. Around the same time, he participated in another failed expedition to conquer Cayo Sal, an isle in the Bahamas long disputed by Cuba.

This obsession with islands won him the nickname Kid Cayo. These three groups never mixed, except at Cabaret Las Vegas. Batista had fled the island the night before. The new government closed casinos and cabarets but, after the workers protested the loss of their livelihood, Castro ordered owners—including Vega—to reopen them.

Though Las Vegas reopened, Vega seemed more interested in pursuing his revolutionary activities. In Novemberhe led another revolutionary maritime expedition, this time to Panama. The incident provoked a diplomatic crisis: the United States and nineteen Latin American countries offered aid to Panama to put down the rebellion.

This last adventure seems to have provoked a rift between Castro and Vega, who left Cuba in the early s. I have found no traces of him since the early sixties, except for a few census records which listed his various addresses in Miami. Apparently, Cuba married in Puerto Rico in the sixties before moving to Miami where he founded his own gay.

He had six children with habana club women and was arrested sixteen times over the course of his lifetime. I have not found an obituary for him, so he could still be alive: if he is, he would be ninety-seven years old. I was last in Havana in March Las Vegas is still going strong, offering drag shows three times a week.

He is the author of many books, most recently the novel Muerte en La Habana Vanilla Planifolia,