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, Camagüey 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 deaclass="underline" 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’état 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 kept her, saw to all her wants, paid for the flat and gave her a car, although Louis appeared as the legal owner of everything in order to avoid nasty gossip.
The person responsible for looking after Lina’s needs and expenses was Alcides’s personal secretary, an awesome woman by the name of Nemesia Moré. She saw to all his commercial and political paperwork, as well as being something like the administrator of his household, but with more power, because since Alcides became a widower, Nemesia had assumed the role of lady of the house. She was in her forties, had retained her good figure, and had a real gift: she was always able to anticipate Alcides’s thoughts and satisfy them before he’d even asked for anything. Consequently Alcides would say, half jokingly, half seriously, that the most important woman in his life was Nemesia Moré: he couldn’t live without her.
In the meantime, Lina had started singing and the owner of the Las Vegas only imposed one condition before contracting her: a change of name. Just imagine a compère announcing: “And now ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Catalina Basterrrrrechea!” After a moment’s thought Alcides said: “Violeta del Río”, as if he’d already got the name in his head, and so Catalina Basterrechea, Lina Beautiful Eyes died, and Violeta del Río the bolerista was born. She immediately got a big reputation and sang in the best places, even made the Parisién, by which time Havana knew her as the Lady of the Night, and she had countless men chasing after her to hear her sing and, naturally, trying to seduce her, because the country-girl had transformed herself into a spectacular woman, wearing clothes from New York, perfumes from France and with her hair styled by the best hairdressers in Havana… Was this the woman your father fell in love with? Poor man, how he must have suffered…