Alicia Parla

Parla was born in Havana, Cuba in 1914 to a middle-class family.[1][2] Her father worked as an ophthalmologist, and her uncle was Cuba's first aviator.[2] Parla had one sister,[2] Zilia Navarete.[3] Her mother was strict, warning her daughter from age nine onward almost daily not to marry unless she was no longer a virgin.[3] During her childhood, Parla had the ambition to become a professional rhumba dancer after becoming obsessed with the technique, but her father was against Parla dancing and wanted her to obtain self-sufficiency by becoming a typist and then marrying.[2][4] In Cuba's 1920s political turbulence where Gerardo Machado became dictator of the country,[5] the family moved to Miami, and Parla was sent to convent school in Key West, while her father remained in Havana.[3][4]

After graduating, Parla and her mother moved to New York,[4] defying her mother's wishes and took a job as a cigarette girl in a night club in Greenwich Village and waiting to attract more attention over other dancers,[3][5] as she shared the house where she lodged with a dance school.[2] She agreed not to tell her father about her job and allowed her mother to work as a on-the-job chaperone and threatening to kill herself.[3] Parla's job gave her the confidence to audition in the presence of director of the Havana Casino Orchestra Don Justo Angel Azpiazú,[4] after the club's Spanish dancer felt unwell.[3] Out of 150 candidates held at an audition at the Paramount Theatre,[3][6] she won the audition to be part of Azpiatzú's dance team because of "her gyrating hips".[4] Parla was due to be paired with a male dancer but she demanded to Azpiatzú that she dance the rumba alone after she declared one of the candidate's uncoordinated.[3][4] She said, "The rumba is very sexual, and I didn't like doing it with a partner."[3]

Parla and the group toured New York in 1930, becoming a success with her "sexually suggestive rumba act".[4] The following year, she toured the United States to demonstrate her technique,[4] before moving to Europe with her mother to tour with the group in 1932.[6] During an engagement in Monte Carlo, Parla attracted the attention of Edward, Prince of Wales and his brother Albert, Duke of York.[3] Edward summoned Parla to his villa the next day to teach him the rhumba.[7] On Bastille Day on July 14, 1932,[2] she descended a stairwell draped in Cuba's red, white and blue colors, causing the French to mistake her patriotism of her homeland as a gesture to their own national holiday and earning her praise with shouts of "Vive La France".[3][4] This led "Mariana scarfs" copied from her costume to go on sale in chic French stores,[3] along with casseroles, cocktails and perfumes named after her,[8] and taught Josephine Baker the rhumba.[3] Parla then went to Brussels, where Leopold of Belgium was so taken with her rhumba that he provided her with a large enough box of chocolates that she stepped on it.[3][4]

She returned to the United States via the SS Île de France in November 1933.[3][9] Parla spent 1934 dancing at Mon Paris nightclub, before complying with the wishes of her father at the end of the year to return to Havana and marry a millionaire rancher.[3][4][5] Life living on a Cuban became too domesticated as a housewife and mother and she exchanged marriage for a return to public view.[2][5] In 1935, Parla received an appointment to teach Edward the cucaracha in London,[8] and said wanted Edward to visit Havana.[10] She became friends with Ernest Hemingway, and featured in two films in Mexico, The Angry God and The Black Privateer,[4] along with multiple documentaries.[11] After Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, Parla and her family fled to the United States and settled in Miami,[3] working as a hospital administrator and typist at Victoria Hospital before retiring 20 years later,[4][6] with the occasional appearance in nostalgia shows.[7]

Parla was married three times.[2] Her first marriage to millionaire rancher Antonio Fuello resulted in a daughter before they divorced.[2][4] Parla's second marriage, to jai alai player Guillermo Amuchastegui who toured the globe in the 1940s,[3][6] also ended in divorce.[2] She was lastly married to Armando Gali-Menendez,[2] a senior Cuban Revolutionary Army officer serving under the rule of Fulgencio Batista,[6] He predeceased Parla.[2] She died from cancer on the night of October 6, 1998 in Miami.[1][2][7]

Orlando González Esteva, a historian, called her "a fabulous story of Cuban music",[11] and several publications termed her "the Queen of Rumba".[4][7][12] Walter Winchell, the journalist, called Parla "that lovely Havana torso flipper".[3][12]

• Alicia Parla at the Internet Broadway Database
• Alicia Parla at IMDb