Cuban sets up show bar in Spain: "I have many nights left with the wig on"

Cubans turn everything they touch outside of Cuba into gold. Eniel Plana is 31 years old and grew up in the Bahía neighborhood, in Eastern Havana. He arrived in Spain very young, but on December 5, he took the step and opened the Las Vegas show bar in Torremolinos, Malaga, making it in a few months the elite of drag, within the epicenter of the Andalusian gay community.

Trained in the great school of Cuban transformism, Eniel Plana set out to do something, combining the talent and discipline of his native Cuba with the resources available in Spain. From there the Las Vegas show bar was born, which is currently closed awaiting permission from the City Council to reopen its doors. "Since it opened, it has been packed with a wonderful, international, straight and gay crowd. This is not a gay bar, it's an everyone's bar."

The name of his business recalls the shows in Las Vegas, the legendary venue located on Infanta Street in Havana, which became a point of contact for the LGTBI community. "I wanted to bring Las Vegas to Torremolinos" and he did, but updating it with shows in which Marilyn Monroe and all the glamor of Cuban cabarets revived.

In 2021, Eniel Plana was attacked in Malaga by Spanish communists against whom he filed a complaint for a crime of hate and xenophobia. The trial is still pending. The bar, obviously, has not been set up with the money it receives from compensation, but with a lot of effort to hire several artists brought from Italy. The idea is that, once their show bar reopens, they will have two of them permanently, so that they will perform exclusively in Las Vegas.

Before setting up his business, Eniel Plana worked as an administrator in an office, but one day he asked himself: "If I'm going to have to work the rest of my life, why not do it in something I really like?" And he decided to take the step, even though opening a business in a large capital, like Malaga, "is very expensive. Don't look at how many nights I have left to cross-dress here. I have many nights left with my wig on," he says. .

And he got it. He put on a show in which the audience is not insulted, with jokes, because that audience is the one that pays for the drinks. "I wanted a show, like in Cuba: act, act, act." When he takes the stage, Eniel Plana feels like he can handle that and more. "I feel empowered."