Every autumn, I revise and resubmit a fellowship application to Harvard University Libraries to consult the 1928 travel advice book When it’s Cocktail Time in Cuba. The grant has not worked out, yet. It has become a personal quest to find a nice copy with all twenty images intact that depict Cuba’s tourist entertainment highlights. The collector’s cost for the art deco-styled book is now upwards of $800. The volume’s value, however, exceeds its very clever title. It indirectly provides a broad understanding of the American tourists increasingly flocking to Cuba in order to consume the nation’s culture back in the 1920s.
Basil Woon’s When it’s Cocktail Time in Cuba illustrates the anxieties of the Prohibition era in the United States and, arguably, its very long term impact upon the U.S. tourist experience of the Caribbean nation. A myriad of photographic portraits of American tourists, to which I have had extensive access, reaffirms this angst. In the 1920s, and early 1930s, a legion of Cuban photographers snapped portraits of American tourists able to drink alcohol publicly in Cuba’s bars and parks. Some of Cuba’s ongoing, prominent brands, including the beer Tropical, sponsored these photographers. The vast body of photographic images available from this period appears to indicate that large-scale bars, including the American-owned venue Sloppy Joe’s, frequently had more than one photographer on site during business hours.
Surveying these portrait images, I found that many of these 1920s photographs featured women with a drink in hand. My initial instinct was that these were people who were visiting Cuba to binge drink—a prominent issue receiving recognition today. But, upon recalling interactions with my Great Aunts, Kitty and Ella Lee, especially the manner in which they shared with me their memories of visiting Cuba, I suspect there is more to it. Kitty and Ella Lee, notorious troublemakers in my family, were early twentieth century middle-class, Southern United States feminists, albeit conflicted ones. In the 1990s, as I announced that I was writing my PhD dissertation about Cuban art, their lips and eyebrows twisted in wry amusement. Thereafter, almost every time Kitty would start to tell me about their visits to Cuba, Ella Lee would abruptly change the subject.
I suspect that these photographs of Prohibition-era North American tourists offer clues to what my great aunts decided not to share with me. Kitty and Ella Lee bore striking resemblance to these women, who were confident to have themselves portrayed as breaking conventions of their time. Moreover, the photographs’ idyllic scenes portray the country as a safe space to do so. In one image here, two women, and one man, sit around a bar in front of a painted beach backdrop. In another image, one woman sits with two men in one of Havana’s parks. The fashionable way in which these individuals are dressed conceals any possible transgression of contemporary social mores. Moreover, the emphasis on Cuba’s tropical environment underscores that United States’ laws are absolutely not applicable to these brief indiscretions.
Under Prohibition, the number of United States tourists grew in Cuba, with figures in the hundred thousands. There, tourists much like Kitty and Ella Lee had the fleeting opportunity to explore roles not permitted at home. Although many of the portraits I have consulted were printed on postcard paper, none were ever mailed. These possibly compromising photographs have remained in private collections for decades, probably in the hands of the individuals featured.
United States audiences were desperate to find places where they could misbehave.
The larger writing career of Basil Woon, the author of When its Cocktail time in Cuba, also confirms that this sort of escapism was seen as salacious at the time. As an aside to a career as a playwright and journalist, Basil Woon wrote fairly risqué travel volumes, like his 1926 The Paris that is Not in the Guidebooks. He later followed up his classic work on the cocktails of Cuba with the 1933 guide Incredible Land: A Jaunty Baedeker to Hollywood and the Great Southwest. Many of these works are illustrated. I think I just might need to track these down, too. Basil Woon’s oeuvre indicates that United States audiences were desperate to find places where they could misbehave.
All images, property of Kris Juncker. All Rights Reserved.