protesting. I say this quite brazenly: the least of it was my fantastic body; what decided it was the fact I was more intelligent than most whores. I had a wild animal’s natural intelligence, and realized there were two very dangerous things in this trade: one is to fall in love with a bastard who’ll pimp you for all the money you’ve earned and the other is not to know your limitations, because you need to know that however well you look after yourself, by the age of thirty you’ll be in decline, and what you don’t get by that age you’ll never get. Like most things in life. That was why I started to look for a way to be more than a common whore: I decided to speak to the impresarios who ran the Shanghai and told them I wanted to dance in their shows. The Shanghai had a bad reputation as a clip joint, people said, but the key thing was that every night guys with money went there, high society guys, some on a binge, others who liked to get their thrills looking at naked girls, and I felt I’d catch a good fish there if I worked on it. When the theatre people saw me dance naked, they saw I’d be a star and for a few pesos bought me a birth certificate in the name of Elsa Contreras, that said I was twenty-one, and not just sweet seventeen.
I was dancing within a fortnight and men went crazy: they packed out the theatre to see me, and I met Louis Mallet, a fortyyear old Frenchman, the representative of Panama Pacific, a big shipping line in New Orleans, who also ran a business in Cuba importing wood from Honduras and Guatemala, in partnership with a Cuban, Alcides Montes de Oca. And my life changed, just as my name had changed. Louis and I started seeing each other and within the month he’d rented me a flat near the university, so we had a nice place together. Louis was a good man, affectionate even and never banned me from dancing at the Shanghai. He’d say: you’re an artiste. As he spent three or four months in Cuba and the rest of the time in New Orleans or Guatemala, I used that time and worked extra, but only with people who paid over the odds, and I started to save money, wear expensive clothes, use classy perfumes and my customers got even classier.
But my life really changed in 1955 and I was able to give up the theatre and all that. Louis was in Havana around that time and told me to ask for a week off from the Shanghai, we were going to go to Varadero, because he wanted a rest and to introduce me to some friends who were going to make me a really profitable offer. When we reached Varadero we checked in at a beautiful sea-front hotel, a wooden building straight out of an American movie. During the day we swam on the beach, like a honeymoon couple, and swanned around in a convertible. That night we went for dinner in a big house on the banks of the canal, near the spot where they built the Hotel Kawama, soon after. Alcides Montes de Oca, Louis’s partner, was there, who I’d seen a couple of times before, and a very elegant man with a clown’s face who spoke softly although he never laughed, and turned out to be Meyer Lansky. When it was time to eat, another man, Joe Stasi came along. It was a really boring dinner, because Louis, Alcides, Stasi and Lansky spent the whole time talking about imports and exports, and as Lansky only drank a couple of glasses of Pernod and hated drunks, we hardly saw a drop of wine. Then, when they offered us cognac and coffee on the terrace, opposite the canal, Alcides Montes de Oca finally told me what they wanted me for. They were organizing a scheme to attract millions of American tourists to Cuba and these tourists required four essential items: good hotels, casinos, readily available high quality drugs and young, healthy, elegant, dissolute women. If I accepted, my responsibility would be to work with those women. They were planning special journeys to Havana for extremely wealthy people, celebrities, artists, journalists, and so on, and would treat them all so they felt they’d been to paradise, so they’d spread the good news about holidays in Havana. I had to create the kind of agency with only top-notch girls – none of your average, unsophisticated whores. I’d to choose the best and create a quality service. Sometimes these women wouldn’t only go to bed with their men, they’d also have to accompany them in Havana and needed to know how to behave in a restaurant, cabaret, casino or even at the theatre. The women would be paid a fixed wage, a high wage, whether they had lots or little work, so they weren’t soliciting all over the place. If I accepted, one of Stasi’s men would set up the whole structure: he’d be a kind of accountant- administrator, working with hotels and casinos, and I’d look for the women and be responsible for training them, together with an etiquette expert who’d teach them to behave and dress well. Then I’d deal directly with the girls, be like a manager and get a three per cent cut of whatever the rich and famous lost gambling in casinos, which might be quite a lot… Initially, in the three or four months necessary to get the agency up and running, I’d be paid a salary of 500 pesos. 500 pesos! Do you know what 500 pesos meant back then! A small fortune.
I immediately dropped the dancing in the Shanghai and started on my new role. By the beginning of ’56 the elite agency, as Bruno Arpaia dubbed it, was up and running. He was Stasi’s man who was working alongside me. We recruited sixteen women, almost all from outside the brothel districts. I inspected cabarets and clubs in Havana and went on expeditions into the interior, as we described it, and to big cities like Cienfuegos, Camaguey and Matanzas. We selected girls to fit our business needs and taught them to eat, dress, speak softly, and I taught them how to behave with men and how they should let themselves be treated…
By the end of that year the agency worked so well we had to find more women. On one of our expeditions, I came across a girl who sang there three or four nights a week in a little cabaret in Cienfuegos, and apart from being one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, she had a special voice: I say it was a woman’s voice because that was the only way to describe it. Her only drawbacks were the what she was wearing and her name, Catalina Basterrechea, although people called her Lina or Lina Beautiful Eyes, to get round that.
As soon as I met her I realized Lina was a Cinderella: singing was her life and she spent the whole time dreaming someone would appear and give her the opportunity to put her glass slippers on, show off her talent and become famous into the bargain. The usual old story! Only as far as she was concerned singing was a pleasure, not just a means to an end. So, though Lina wasn’t a whore and had no such inclinations, she might be ready to do the necessary to attain her goal. I was delighted by the idea of signing her up, because the minute I saw her I knew I’d found a diamond in the mud and that with a little polishing she’d become the star of the agency, but after I’d talked to her for a while, I felt she had something different, something that moved me, and the fact is I was never usually one to be moved by stories of dead parents, lousy aunts and cousins that rape you at the age of ten, like the ones she told me. No… But I explained quite clearly what I was about and – I still don’t quite know why – offered her a special deal: if she wanted, she could come with me to Havana and help me in some way with my business, without having to whore, and I’d use my contacts to find her someone to help her find a place where she could sing. And, of course, she packed her cheap little suitcase and left with me, and didn’t say goodbye to the bastard of an aunt who’d made her life impossible… I’ve always thought that destiny meant for Lina and I to meet, for her life story to touch what remained of my heart, and for me to like whatever she sang. Lina and I were good friends from the start, and if I’d ever thought of suggesting she worked with my girls if she didn’t make it as a singer, I quickly gave up on that and decided to protect and help her any way I could. Was it a kind of maternal feeling? As if I could see myself in her and wanted to give myself a second chance? You tell me… but that’s how it turned out.
Within a month or month and a half of Lina being in Havana, Louis returned from New Orleans and told me we must go back to Varadero and meet Lansky, Alcides and two American entrepreneurs who were going to build hotels in there. I don’t know why but I persuaded Louis it would be a good idea to take Lina, because I thought she’d sing for his friends and make dinner a little less boring… That was how Alcides Montes de Oca and Lina Beautiful Eyes met up: he was almost fifty and she was under twenty, but when the business talk ended and Lina started to sing, Alcides fell madly in love with the girl, her looks and her voice.
Alcides Montes de Oca was a character with some strange baggage, I should tell you. He came from a high society family and was very wealthy, even more so since he’d inherited the fortune belonging to his wife who’d just died. He liked talking politics and was very proud to be a grandson of a general in the Army of Liberation; he loathed Batista. According to him, Batista was the worst disaster that had ever hit this country, and I’m sure that at the time he supported the rebels, because many had belonged to the Orthodox Party which Alcides had been a member of when Batista struck with his coup d’etat and suspended the elections the Orthodoxers were about to win. He was also a very cultured man who read a lot, and Louis told me he had books galore in his house. But at the same time he had a nose for business and although he didn’t appear to own anything, because he didn’t need to, he owned shares in all the big companies in Cuba. Through his business concerns he got on with Lansky like a house on fire, though this friendship was never reported in the newspapers, because everyone knew the Jew had been a drug-trafficker in the States, although here he only operated legal business and behaved, well, as I said, like a gentleman.
So Alcides and Lina became infatuated; they were crazy about each other, and, to please her, he got her a singing spot in the second show at the Las Vegas and quickly moved her from my place to a flat in Miramar, in a building that had just received its finishing touches. The only problem complicating their romance were Don Alcides’s political aspirations and his social situation. He’d been widowed only recently and couldn’t enter a formal relationship with a poor country-girl, who was thirty years his junior… If it had been nowadays! But in those days a scandal like that could have damaged Alcides’s position considerably and so they decided to keep things quiet: he
