Cuban dancer who triumphed at Tropicana in the 50s and emigrated to Spain: "When the communists arrived, we left"

A Cuban dancer who triumphed in the famous Tropicana cabaret in the 1950s and has been living in Spain for more than six decades, stated in an interview that she decided to leave Cuba, where she had triumphed and was very happy, when communism arrived.

Marta Castillo Torrens She was a prima ballerina who performed in the three most important cabarets in Havana: Sans Souci, Montmartre and Tropicana. But it was in the latter where he spent the most years doing shows, with two productions per season, one in winter and one in summer.

All that ended with the triumph of the Castro revolution. First he went to Miami, from there to Puerto Rico and then to Mexico, where he stayed for three years, until in 1964 he decided to settle in Spain. He has never returned to Cuba again.

"While in Barcelona I heard many rumors about the revolution, but I didn't pay much attention to them. The truth is that when the communists arrived, we were lucky enough to be able to leave. Maestro Roderico [the legendary choreographer Neyra] had a contract to be able to go on tour with one of the Tropicana shows, and we all went...", he said in an interview withThe reading, cultural supplement of the Spanish newspaperThe world.

Born in Havana in 1931, during her rich career in Cuba she worked with great figures such as Benny Moré, who was her partner in a show in Montmartre that had great success.

"He was an extraordinary person, although he already drank a lot (I think he died of something with his liver), but the more he drank, the better he sang. Everyone adored him and I had a very good friendship with him," he said.

A member of the legendary "Mulatas de fuego", Marta denied that racism existed in Cuban shows.

"In Cuba there was no racism, we all lived together, whites and blacks, without complexes and without problems, and in the cabarets we also all performed together. I was a figure in Tropicana and I am not white, in fact there were many musicians who were also mulattoes" , he clarified.

"Where I did see racism was in Miami, there you did notice it on the street and in the restaurants, that's why I didn't stay there and preferred to come to Spain to live," he said.

Celia Cruz and Tito Puente had a special role in his life. The first was "like a sister to me," and she had a romantic relationship with the American musician that lasted more than 30 years, although he lived in the United States and she in Spain.

"Celia, when she came to Madrid, brought me gifts that Tito had given her for me. She was a very good friend and a great singer," he stressed.

Exile in Spain did not mean the end of Marta's career. With her dance partner, Miguel Chekis - who died in 2020 from Covid - she continued dancing around the world, until she was 61 years old. "And not because I didn't have more strength, but because everything changed and the shows had to be done without an orchestra," he stressed.

At 92 years old, this great artist lives in Madrid. Her nephew Jorge Enrique González Pacheco, poet, writer and founder and director of the Seattle Latino Film Festival in the United States, is looking for investors to make a documentary about the life of his aunt, who inexplicably is not known at all.

"[In Spain] I feel at home. I do have two loves, as Machín said, one is Spain and the other is Cuba. But I am already Spanish. I have never returned to Cuba. Chekis' mother told us He said that things were very bad there, that's why we never came back," he said.