that popular Afro-Cuban dance form.153 Edmundo’s negrito is limited here to performing a version of the bufo’s “final rumba” with Estrella, who was played by Estrella Segarra, a winner of the Campoamor contest. Appearing with such a local-girl-done-good intensifies the Latino-Harlem associations of the negrito Edmundo, whom the audience already knew, of course, as the negrito O’Farrill. But it is the likening to Al Jolson that most significantly renews the film’s and O’Farrill’s relations with a Latino-Harlem locality. A “Cuban Al Jolson,” here in the film’s belated Apolo-era/Prohibition setting, figures anew the central image of O’Farrill’s Harlem Meer “Pegas Suaves.” In his big, blackface break, identifying with a renowned Jewish-blackface performer, Edmundo is awash, like the “Pegas” protagonist, in the negro cristalino run-off of a Jew—an identification that, again, compromises the raza hispana.
It is no surprise, then, that No matarás concludes with the principal characters aboard a ship bound for Spain. It is an Americas-phobic ending that would take the cast to the Hispanic “source” of the raza (in the case of O’Farrill, as a maritime “Hispanic” departure that reverses the meaning of his “African” Key West arrival on the Governor Cobb). Yet, because the film gives Edmundo the last word, the ending takes a different course. At one point, Edmundo claims to have seen a whale and is accused of having “visions.” “And what is life?” he replies. “A vision.” He then paraphrases a few lines from the poem “Dolora XXXV: Las dos linternas” (The Two Lanterns), by Ramón de Campoamor, the nineteenth-century Asturian poet. A sign of Campoamor’s popularity at the time, Edmundo’s reference is also more: as the namesake of the theater on 116th Street and Fifth Avenue—even as the film abandons Harlem and the Americas—Campoamor allows O’Farrill to pay tribute to the theater, the site of his greatest professional success.
Off screen, where O’Farrill ended up was a different story. Most immediately, in late November 1935, he was the subject of an homage at the Club Atlético y Social Pomarrosas on Eighth Avenue between 116th and 117th Streets: “No one deserves such a tribute better than Alberto after triumphing in his first film, Mi hermano es un gangster. O’Farrill’s work has been well appreciated by the public wherever he has performed, and tomorrow night a supportive crowd will applaud the honoree, offering thanks for the happy moments he has spread throughout the city’s Hispanic theaters [teatros hispanos].”154 Among the scheduled participants were Alberto Socarrás, Marcial Flores, and Fernando Luis, together with the Campoamor chorus. Augusto Coen and his orchestra and Davilita were also scheduled to appear, along with Guillermo Moreno and Antonio Machín. The Puerto Rican poet Ángel Manuel Arroyo was also in attendance, and Erasmo Vando served as the master of ceremonies. The event, billed as a “dance-show [función baile]” on behalf of the “popular ‘negrito’” and “great Hispanic actor [gran actor hispano],” went off in an “atmosphere of great warmth,” lasting until well after two in the morning.155
Return to Havana, 1936
But soon O’Farrill ended up still farther away: not in Spain but in Cuba. In February and March 1936, a year after the Harlem uprising and the collapse of the Alhambra, O’Farrill parlayed his success with No matarás into producing, directing, and performing in The O’Farrill’s Scandals (in English in original), a revue at the Teatro Prado on the corner of Trocadero Street and the Paseo del Prado in Havana, two blocks from the site of the Alhmabra. The Prado was not on the list of “the most prominent theaters in Havana” during the period—a list that included the Nacional, the Regina, the Principal de la Comedia, the Martí, the Encanto, the Fausto, and, of course, the late Alhambra156—which is in keeping with O’Farrill’s hardscrabble career narrative in literature and performance between 1925 and 1935. Clearly modeled on George White’s Broadway Scandals, The O’Farrill’s Scandals traded on, among other things, O’Farrill’s recent experience in the film industry and familiarity with popular African American music and dance. Likely performing in blackface, O’Farrill was billed as “the star of the film No matarás,” and the initial week of the Scandals featured a series of “Hollywood Revues” (in English in original), with sketches such as “Mi vida en New York y Hollywood” (My Life in New York and Hollywood), “Lindy-Hoop” (sic; Lindy Hop), “De México a Hollywood” (From Mexico to Hollywood), “La boda de Minnie de Mooker” (sic; The Wedding of Minnie the Moocher), and “En un studio de Hollywood” (In a Hollywood Studio).157 The Scandals cycled through two other original stagings during its month-long run at the Prado, where O’Farrill was described as “keeping the audience constantly roaring with laughter” and even engaging it personally “on the origin of the dances” appearing in the show.158 It was the return to Cuba (if not triumphant, then at least with a professional project of his own design) of the barrio afrolatino negrito, here outliving the early twentieth-century Havana bufo at its most institutional: the fallen Alhambra. O’Farrill returned to New York City soon after the Scandals closed, and it was another ship’s “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers”—the Pennsylvania’s this time—that again identified him officially upon his rearrival in the United States. Now, under the column “Race or People,” O’Farrill was not called “African,” as was the case in Key West ten and a half years before. Rather, his “Race or People” was “Cuban.” The Afro-Cuban American negrito, once and still an “African,” could now add “Cuban” to his repertoire of racial and national performance in the Americas.159
2 / Re/Citing Eusebia Cosme
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