The latest installment of my book Cuba on Record takes place in Harlem in the 1930s. Down on his luck in the Depression, things look up when the future Panart Records owner Ramón Sabat gets a job at a Spanish theater in Harlem, then takes over the floor show at a low-rent Cuban fantasy called the Cubanacan club. Latin music percolates in New York as the Caribbean population explodes. Sabat works with Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians and meets a cast of characters that include Xavier Cugat, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Rita Hayworth and members of the New York underworld; he even gets his Hollywood break.
It was, New York Daily News columnist Danton Walker pronounced, “the first Cuban nightclub in New York.” For another entertainment reporter who found his way to 75 Lenox Avenue at 114th Street in Harlem, the Cubanacan was a “strange enchanting dive.” As the end of Prohibition coincided with the growing arrival of Caribbean immigrants who percolated Latin music in New York in the early 1930s, it was a place where in-the-know “sophisticates” could “find something to soothe their jaded spirits.”
“Many who are tired of scat singers and tap dancers find fun at the Cubanacan, where food, music and dances are provided by native Cubans,” enthused another writer, who made the trek to uptown Manhattan for Pennsylvania’s Shamokin News Dispatch in March 1934 to check out the intriguing new spot that people were talking about.
