Cuba’s Ageless Diva Juana Bacallao Croons Past 80

The crowd roars as she makes her entrance, singing her way to the stage, batting her eyes at doting band members and coquettishly lifting the hem of her dress to reveal a bit of leg.

“Do we have any virgins here?” she asks the crowd in a low, husky voice, before suggesting that some of the male patrons ought to pay extra for staring at her so hard.

Not bad for a woman who is well into her 80s – and possibly as old as 93.

Whatever the number, Bacallao is a musical powerhouse, a Friday night must-see for locals and tourists alike who pack the Gato Tuerto – or One Eyed Cat – to hear her belt out Cuban salsa, son and guaracha classics, just as she has since Fidel Castro was a schoolboy.

Though she never got the world following of Celia Cruz or Omara Portuondo, she still tours, with performances scheduled this year for Moscow and Mexico. Her manager says he is also trying to organize a trip to South Florida, but has not yet received a U.S. visa.

Her songs are available on iTunes, and she even has a Facebook page.

“I will never retire. I will only stop once death has come for me,” she told The Associated Press during a lively interview in her two-story Havana home. She said she would keep singing “as long as I am healthy, because while I have my health I will never make a fool of myself” on stage.

Bacallao has four Cuban identity cards, all of which show different birth dates. One person close to her, who didn’t want to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, said she turned 93 on May 26, though articles written about her in 2000 said that she was 75 at the time, making her 85 now.

“I have no age,” she says, lifting up her dress to reveal muscular, stockinged thighs.

“My legs are exactly the same as they were when I was young,” she said proudly. “It is a miracle of nature.”

On stage at the Gato Tuerto, Bacallao sings about cheating men and desperate women. She performs in front of a four-man band including a conga player, drummer, pianist and a musician playing a “chequere” – an oblong wooden gourd that makes a sound similar to a maraca.

She frequently interrupts her performance to banter with the audience, and it is almost always to say something raunchy. At one point in the evening, she addressed a scantily clad young friend sitting in the front row, who was leaning back suggestively in her chair.

“You are ruthless, Maria Felix!” Bacallao yells from the stage. “Sit up correctly. You’re driving the men crazy!”

Bacallao’s life reads like a musical history of Cuba.

She was born Neri Amelia Martinez Salazar to a working class Havana family, then sent to a Catholic boarding school after she was orphaned at the age of 6.

She worked as a house cleaner as a teenager until one day the noted musical director Obdulio Morales heard her singing while sweeping a neighbor’s staircase. He was so taken by her voice he stopped in his tracks and introduced himself.

“He took me to the Marti Theater,” she said, referring to a famous pre-revolutionary Cuban nightspot. Morales gave her the stage name Juana Bacallao, and it stuck. So did she, becoming a fixture of Havana’s seedy but romantic cabaret scene.

Bacallao was a headliner in the 1940s and ‘50s at the renowned Tropicana nightclub, known as much for her risque personality as for her husky singing voice.

She appeared with such legends as Nat King Cole and Rita Montaner. She said she was friends with Chicago gangster Al Capone, a club regular who owned a mansion in Cuba’s Varadero beach resort, and also knew mobsters like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky.

“She occupies a very singular place in Cuban culture, a place that is a bit hidden – the kingdom of the night,” said Roberto Zurbano, a critic at Havana’s Casa de Las Americas, which promotes music, literature and other fine arts throughout Latin America.

He said Bacallao has always been known for being unpredictable, suddenly stopping her act to put on makeup, or remove her wig. She will sometimes make up songs on the spot.

“No other star was allowed to do those things,” he said. “She made the cabaret her home.”

Bacallao remained popular in Cuba in the 1960s and ‘70s, even after Fidel’s revolution turned the island from a naughty American playground into a communist Soviet ally.

Unlike Portuondo and Cruz, who found success inside and outside Cuba by leaving the cabaret scene and becoming recording artists, Bacallao remained a performer and a creature of the night.

She performed with both, as well as legendary singer-pianist Bola de Nieve, percussionist Chano Pozo and singer Benny More, considered by many to be the greatest Cuban performer of all time.

Hers was a world “not visible on television,” Zurbano said, adding that it is one reason she has not received the international acclaim of other Cuban singers. She also decided to stay, unlike Cruz and other stars, after Castro’s 1959 revolution.

Since Cuba embraced tourism in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been renewed nostalgia for the heady days of the 1940s and ‘50s. Bacallao, along with Havana’s nightlife, has had something of a revival.

She still enjoys a rabid following among Cuban night-owls, and insists she wouldn’t trade it for more fame, or the fortune that could have been made overseas.

“I know what life is – both poverty and wealth,” Bacallao said. “This is my land. It is where I was born, and it is where I will die.”