Tropicana Club

This guide to the Tropicana Club in Havana starts backstage, with the seamstresses and beaders who hand-built the towering headdresses and costumes for the club's nineteen fifties heyday, sourcing feathers and sequins as far away as Miami and New York. It follows the dancers known as Las Diosas de Carne, more than two hundred strong in a single show, and choreographer Roderico Neyra, known as Rodney, who built his routines around the club's living palm trees rather than painted scenery. You'll hear how the open-air stage was built right through those trunks. Look down at the floor beneath the stage for a detail the architecture is still hiding.