Superman was the main attraction at the notorious Teatro Shanghai, in Barrio Chino (Chinatown). Listen to this story on episode 3 of The Trip, a Roads & Kingdoms podcast. “The idea that this man was around in the neighborhood, it was mind-boggling in a way.” That’s what the kids talked about,” the mayor’s son said.
“Like when you’re coming of age, reading your dad’s Playboy s. The mayor’s son never met the legendary performer, but everybody knew about him. Outside Cuba, from Miami to New York to Hollywood, he was known simply as Superman. The mayor’s son once got blind drunk with Benny Moré, the famous Cuban crooner who had a regular gig at the Guadalajara.īut more revered than all the rest was the man of many names. His dad loved mingling with the stars that flocked to the capital, and he sometimes took his boy to meet them: Brando, Nat King Cole, and that old borrachón Hemingway.
He thought back to his father as a young man, a lotto-numbers runner who rose to the mayoralty of the gritty barrio de Los Sitios, in Centro Habana. The mayor’s son is in his 70s now, but he was a teenager back then, during the years of Havana’s original sin. The mayor’s son drew on his cigarette, thought back 60 years, paused, and made a chopping motion on his lower thigh-15 inches, give or take, from his groin to just above his knee.
