Spy in a Little Black Dress

V


Havana, Cuba, March 1952


Buenas noches,” Miguel greeted Gabriela Ortiz in a voice that sounded like truck tires crunching thick gravel. The owner of La Europa had a prizefighter’s barrel chest and hands like boxing gloves, and the jacket of his expensive-looking linen suit was open enough for Gabriela to see a gun tucked in the waistband.

Gabriela’s hands shook like maracas while she told Miguel how pleased she was to meet him. When he asked her to dance for him, she performed a few well-practiced ballet steps, and he cut her off quickly with a wave of his hand.

“Basta,” Miguel said, “you’ll do fine for the chorus.” He told her the pay, and Gabriela couldn’t conceal her disappointment at how low it was.

“If you want to make more money,” Miguel said, “you can give private dances to customers. And to make a lot more money, there are rooms upstairs. Of course, I get a percentage of everything you earn.”

Gabriela gasped when she realized what he was talking about: prostitution. That was out of the question. She was determined to stay a virgin until she met someone she loved, and Gabriela was in no hurry to get married. She’d seen how marrying at seventeen had shattered her mother’s dream of becoming a ballerina, and it was not going to happen to her.

“Look, you don’t have to sleep with the men you give private dances to,” Miguel said. “Just sit on their laps with your bra off and tease them—rub your body against them, breathe in their ear—and they’ll pay you.” He looked at her closely. “You could probably charge a hundred pesos a song. The rich businessmen who come here like a young, innocent-looking girl like you. You’re who they dream of when they’re in bed with their wives.”

A hundred pesos a song? That was tempting, but the thought of sitting on strange men’s laps and rubbing her naked breasts against them repulsed her.

“I just want to be in the show,” she said.

Miguel shrugged. “We’re short a girl, so you can go on in the chorus tomorrow tonight. It’ll be two hours of rehearsal a day and one show a night.”

That sounded heavenly to Gabriela. La Europa was a far cry from the magnificent clubs like the Tropicana or the Sans Souci, but she was immensely grateful to have any job as a dancer. As she walked out of the dingy club into the sunlight, she felt that the long, dark night of her soul that had begun eight years ago was finally beginning to lift.

On the way back to her apartment, Gabriela couldn’t help thinking about how long and dark that ordeal had been. It had started when she was a nine-year-old girl riding a bus to the Home for Children Without Parents and Family, as the Americans called it. The bus was filled with other United Fruit Company workers’ children who had been orphaned by the sugar cane fire that destroyed hundreds of acres of the plantation. Before that, Gabriela’s childhood had been a happy one. Her father had a good job as a stoker for the company railway line, and her mother, who could not have more children after Gabriela was born, brought in extra money teaching dance at a school.

The rumor was that someone had deliberately burned the cane to protest how the workers were being exploited, even if innocent lives had to be lost putting out the fire. No matter who had caused it, the fire had left Gabriela feeling like an only child in the most desolate sense of the word. She had no idea of her ancestry—all of her relatives had died or moved far away long ago. And now her parents were gone. Most of her possessions were gone too, but not the half of a silver locket that her mother had given her as she lay dying from her burns. Gabriela had no idea what had happened to the other half, but she loved the remaining piece with all her heart. She wore it on a chain around her neck and swore that she would never take it off.

Gabriela felt a pang of that old desolation as she recalled how day after day of her years in the orphanage had dragged by in the same bleak routine of classroom lessons, household chores, and cafeteria meals. She didn’t know how she would have survived if Sister Evelina hadn’t found Gabriela holed up in the kitchen one night, dancing around in the darkened room while she listened to a classical musical station on the Haitian cook’s radio. After that, whenever she could steal time from running the orphanage, the kindly nun had sat down at the rickety piano and played melodies from the classics while Gabriela danced to her heart’s content.

At seventeen, Gabriela had left the orphanage and struck out on her own. Her plan was to enroll in ballet school after making enough money as a showgirl at the Tropicana, the Sans Souci, or some other elegant place known for putting on fabulous nightclub extravaganzas. But after a long string of humiliating auditions, Gabriela was at her wit’s end. She was almost out of money. She didn’t want to become a maid or a dishwasher—she’d had enough of those chores to last a lifetime—or worse, a waif on the street. And God help her, she would rather jump off her balcony than go back to the orphanage. But how could she stay in Havana with no job and no money?

That’s when Luis, the sixtyish native habanero who was the desk clerk in her building, came to Gabriela’s rescue. “I know the man who owns La Europa,” he told her yesterday when she came home crying from her last audition. “Miguel, the owner, is a tough hombre, but he has a lot of connections. Everyone hangs out at his place—gamblers, gangsters, spies, rebels, gunrunners, drug smugglers, and even movie stars and presidents when they’re looking for something different. I’ll call and tell him you’ll be coming to see him tomorrow. Here’s the address.”

Movie stars and presidents had sounded good enough to Gabriela to make her overlook the scary part. She took the slip of paper with the address scribbled on it and said with a big smile, “Gracias, Luis. You’ve saved my life.”


Her first night as a chorus girl was a rite of passage. After the rehearsal in street clothes, Gabriela walked into the dressing room crowded with women in varying stages of undress. They scarcely looked at her, but Inez, the heavyset wardrobe lady, waddled over to her and surveyed her with a quick glance.

“Get undressed and put this on,” Inez said, grabbing a bright orange costume covered with sequins and feathers. She handed Gabriela a G-string, fishnet stockings, and a rhinestone-studded bra to wear under her gown. To compensate for Gabriela’s lack of height, Inez gave her a headdress that looked a mile high atop her upswept mass of dark curls and put lifts in her dance shoes.

Gabriela almost froze when she heard the danzón music start, but she quickly joined the chorus line and took a position upstage. The beat of the music was so infectious that she abandoned herself to it, losing all inhibition and sense of where she was, and moved with the same torrid flamboyance as the rest of the chorus line.

As the youngest girl working at La Europa as a regular, Gabriela grew accustomed to being treated like a little sister by the other dancers, but she did not have much in common with them. Most nights, after the show, Gabriela liked to sit at the bar before going home. She didn’t drink, but she enjoyed chatting with the bartender, Diego, a wiry young man in his twenties who was working his way through the University of Havana.

Diego provided a storehouse of information about the shady characters who frequented La Europa and the illegal activities they conducted hand in hand with local government officials, who grew rich from a cut of the profits. Gabriela listened, fascinated, as Diego spun dark tales of kickbacks, fraudulent government contracts, and the skimming of public funds. It was a pattern of corruption that fostered a whole underworld of cocaine peddlers, black market gunrunners, and gamblers who ran illicit cockfights and the daily bolita numbers racket. In hushed tones, the bartender also spoke of military strongmen who spied on rival political groups, often assassinating their leaders in the dead of night, and of revolutionaries who had infiltrated the army and were planning acts of sabotage.

It gave Gabriela goose bumps when she looked around the room and recognized the big shots and gangsters whose faces she had seen in the newspaper. Here they sat at tables in La Europa, smoking Montecristo cigars and drinking the mojitos and daiquiris that Diego had prepared.

“That’s Batista over there,” Diego told Gabriela one night, nodding toward the strikingly handsome man in a white linen suit who was seated in a roped-off section. Gabriela remembered her father telling her about Batista when Arturo was a stoker and Batista a brakeman for the United Fruit railway. “They teased him for being a pretty boy and called him ‘El Mulatto Lindo,’ ” Arturo had said, “but I thought he would grow up to be president some day.”

Her father had been right right. Batista used to be president, but then he retired to Florida to marry Marta Fernández Miranda, his beautiful young mistress—“so romantic,” Gabriela’s mother had said. But three years ago, Batista had come back to Cuba to become a senator.

True to form, Diego had inside information. “Batista really wants to be president again,” he told Gabriela, “but he might lose if he runs for election next year, so he’s got to get rid of President Prío before that. I bet that’s what he’s sitting there plotting with his aides right now.”

“Aides” seemed like a polite word for the sinister-looking henchmen surrounding Batista in the booth. “The man next to him in the soldier’s uniform looks mean,” Gabriela said. “Who is he?”

“Oh, that’s Guillermo Sanchez. He’s a major in the secret police, and he is mean. He murdered a lot of people for Batista, and he even stuck one man’s head on a long pole and mounted it in front of his house.”

Gabriela shivered when she heard this, and the next night, another tremor ran through her when she spotted Guillermo Sanchez sitting by himself at a table near the stage. During the show, she caught him staring at her, and she quickly looked away.

“Seems like you have a fan,” the other showgirls teased Gabriela when Sanchez started coming to the club all the time. It was clear that Gabriela was the one who had captured his fancy because he seldom took his eyes off her during the show. But Sanchez never approached her for a private dance. He kept his distance, Gabriela assumed, because Miguel had told him that she didn’t do private dances and being unattainable made her all the more attractive to him.

When she hadn’t seen Sanchez at La Europa for a couple of weeks, Gabriela thought that he had grown tired of watching her perform. Then, in the early morning hours of March 10, 1952, the golpe happened—the military coup d’état that Diego had suspected Batista of plotting with his henchmen.

A few nights after President Prío had fled Cuba, Guillermo Sanchez was back at La Europa, celebrating the coup with some other army officers as they downed one drink after another. Their loud laughter and raucous shouts caught Gabriela’s attention while she was sitting at the bar after the show. She looked in their direction and was alarmed to see Sanchez staring back at her like a hungry cougar waiting to pounce. He raised his hand, pointed to her, and signaled to Miguel, who was standing at the bar.

Before she knew what was happening, Miguel had yanked Gabriela off her stool and was leading her to a room upstairs.

“Miguel, let me go!” she cried as she tried to wriggle out from his iron grasp, but he held on to her firmly.

“Shhh, don’t make any trouble,” he told her. “Just do what the major wants, and everything will be fine. Otherwise, heads will roll.”

Gabriela remembered what Diego had told her about the head of a Sanchez victim on a pole, and her heart froze with terror.

“She’s all yours,” Miguel said to the major when he saw Sanchez lumbering toward them, obviously drunk. He handed Sanchez a key, then turned on his heel and left.

Sanchez opened the door and roughly pushed Gabriela inside. Then he locked the door, pocketed the key, and turned toward her. When he began ripping off her clothes, Gabriela felt a scream rising in her throat. She clutched at the half of a silver locket that she always wore on a chain around her neck and silently prayed to her mother in heaven to help her.

Carmela must have heard her prayer because, at that moment, Sanchez stumbled on the worn carpet and fell backward against a table. While he pawed at the air, trying to regain his balance, Gabriela picked up a lamp and brought it down on Sanchez’s head with all her might.

“You little puta,” he mumbled as he sank to the floor and passed out.

Gabriela didn’t care that he had called her a prostitute. All she wanted was to get the key out of his pocket without rousing him. She kneeled down beside Sanchez’s prone body and, shuddering at the sight of the gun strapped around his waist, slipped the key out of his pocket as delicately as if she was threading a needle. He stirred, and Gabriela leaped to her feet when she saw Sanchez’s hand reach blindly for his gun.

Without looking back, Gabriela bolted for the door and was out in the hallway—and ran smack into Diego. Oh, no, she thought, he’s come to make me go back in that room and let that horrible, drunken murderer and rapist have his way with me.

But Diego took her arm and said, “Come with me, Gabriela. I know a way to get out of here without anyone seeing us.”

Flooded with relief, Gabriela clung to him as he flew down a back stairway to the street. Once outside and at a safe distance from La Europa, Gabriela put her arms around Diego and hugged him, wetting his cheek with her tears.

“Gracias, Diego,” she said. Then she stood back and looked at him, puzzled. “But I thought you worked for Miguel. How come you helped me get away?”

“I work for Miguel only as a cover,” Diego said with a little smile. “I’m a spy for Fidel Castro. Fidel hates everything Batista stands for—the corruption, the goon squads, the social injustice, the raping of innocent women like you—and he’s starting a rebel movement. As a bartender at La Europa, I overhear a lot of secret information that can help Fidel get rid of Batista and free the Cuban people from oppression.”

Gabriela felt strangely moved by this disclosure. She couldn’t explain it, but when she smashed the lamp over Guillermo Sanchez’s head, something had exploded inside her, and she knew that her days as an innocent showgirl had come to an end.