Festival De La Palabra Of Puerto Rico In New York - Lehman College

Juan Moreno-Velázquez
Excerpt from Demystifying a Diva:
The Truth Behind the Myth of La Lupe
I t was early 1959 and Cuba was experiencing astonishing political
turmoil. The news was filled with reports of a war being fought in
the Sierra Maestra, where three revolutionary leaders, an Argentine
doctor by the name Ernesto “Che” Guevara and two Cubans, Camilo
Cienfuegos and an attorney named Fidel Castro, were fighting and
defeating the armed forces of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Somehow,
back in Havana, nightlife continued more or less unaffected.
La Red (The Net) was a cabaret where tourists and Cubans would
carry on, regardless of the fighting that was advancing dangerously
close to Havana. It was a picturesque club decorated in a scenic
maritime motif. The club had fisherman’s nets hanging all around,
lending the feeling that one was inside a fishing vessel.
Located on Avenue L and 19th Street in a district known as El
Vedado, the club attracted an interesting array of nightlife seekers.
Actors, musicians, businessmen, politicians, and even tourists found
in La Red an exciting place where everything was possible, as night
often carried on way into the next morning.
Although a rather small club, La Red was a very popular cabaret,
considered in those days, the mecca of Cuban cabaretism. It was
where some of the best Cuban entertainers and prominent personalities
of the time celebrated night after night. It was a hotspot, a
place to be and be seen by all.
On any given evening one would not be surprised to find writers
and intellectuals such as Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir,
Tennessee Williams or artist Pablo Picasso, as well as the many
organized crime figures that frequented Cuba in those days, in the
audience. In La Red, Lupe Yolí’s star rose and almost immediately
became the talk around all corners of Havana.
Festival de la Palabra 27