“Superman was by far one of the main attractions for Cuba,” he began. Superman, it turned out, was a fascination of Prieto’s as well. When we met in his office in Vedado, he seemed bemused by our quest. Prieto was 60 years old, a heavy smoker with black hair and a laid-back demeanor. In New York, we met a few Cubans from the diaspora looking for leads, but we had nothing concrete by the time we boarded the plane from Havana, via Cancun, other than a short list of names of people who might know someone who knows something.Ī contact had referred us to a man named Alfredo Prieto, an editor at a publishing house who was working on a book about 1950s Havana, and we paid him a visit on our first day in the city. Unfortunately, clues about who Superman was and what happened to him were virtually nonexistent. What better place to start looking than with the legend of Superman? It’s a question that naturally calls for a clear-eyed look at the kind of country it once was. Cuba, with profound changes afoot a year after Washington reopened relations with Havana, is having to think about what kind of country it wants to be. Here was a man with a supposedly 18-inch unit who starred in live sex shows, celebrated in Cuba and beyond, and yet virtually nothing was known about him. We had discovered Superman in a brief mention in a Vanity Fair oral history of the Tropicana Club. It had begun as a curiosity for us but eventually evolved into a strange obsession. I had come with photographer Mike Magers to trace the story of Superman, or whatever we could find of it. The apartment overlooked the Riviera hotel, built in 1957 by the mobster Meyer Lansky beyond that was the Malecón, the seaside highway and the city’s hub of social activity. The chilly sea breeze fluttered the flimsy curtains covering the windows. We stayed in the city’s Vedado neighborhood in a casa particular, a musty rental apartment owned by an aging former diplomat. It was late January, weeks after President Obama announced normalized relations with Cuba. The Riviera hotel, built in 1957 by mobster Meyer Lansky, overlooks the Malecon. It was like Year Zero.”Īnd into that void, the story of Superman disappeared. It was like everything didn’t exist before. “You didn’t want to make problems with the government,” the mayor’s son said. In the difficult years that followed, people didn’t talk about those times, as if they never happened at all. A man who was once famous well beyond Cuba’s shores-who was later fictionalized in The Godfather Part II and Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana-was largely forgotten, a footnote in a sordid history. “If you’re a decent guy from Omaha, showing his best girl the sights of Havana, and you make the mistake of entering the Shanghai, you’ll curse Garcia and will want to wring his neck for corrupting the morals of your sweet baby,” Suppressed, a tabloid magazine, wrote in its 1957 review of the club.Īfter the revolution, the Shanghai shuttered. According to local lore, the Shanghai featured live sex shows. Superman was the main attraction at the notorious Teatro Shanghai, in Barrio Chino-Chinatown. “The idea that this man was around in the neighborhood, it was mind-boggling in a way.” That’s what the kids talked about,” he said. “Like when you’re coming of age, reading your dad’s Playboys. 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 seventies 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 sixty years, paused, and made a chopping motion on his lower thigh-fifteen inches, give or take, from his groin to just above his knee.