CDMX, Mexico.-To talk about the mmusic culture and its legacy it is essential to mention Alicia Parlawhom many called the Queen of international Rumba. Although we clarify that the few videos that there are of her they really bring her closermore to the son, than to what we know today as rumba.
About Alice, though She did not perform on Cuban stages, it should be noted that she captivated with her dance in Paris, Monte Carlo, London, New York, and Boston.
This Cuban even danced for King George himself, father of Queen Elizabeth. As she also did it for her uncle Edward VIII, monarch of England until he abdicated the throne. King Leopold of Belgium was another nobleman she captivated.
Who was Alice?
Alicia was born in 1914 in Havana. Her family was middle class, and her father, her doctor, is not here.ba I very much agree with the fact that the young woman dedicated herself to dancing professionally. So she insisted that she also learn typing.
In the 1920s, Parlato He came to live in the United States, where he managed to convince his mother to allow him to work at a Greenwich Village nightclub. There, according to what she published The New York Times, he had his first opportunity to dance professionally. One night when the dancer from the center did not come, the Cuban woman took her place; and she did so well that the famous leader of the Cuban gang Don Azpiazu gave her the opportunity to keep her job.
Alicia made only one requirement: she did not want to dance with a man, she preferred to do it alone. In the long run this was a wise decision to sneak into the taste of conservative society. The waste of sexuality and eroticism that the rumba can have(or the sound) andIt was more tolerated if it was danced by a single person, and not by a couple.
In 1932 she traveled to Europe, accompanied by her mother, and there delighteither to the nobility “It was during an engagement in Monte Carlo that Miss Parlá caught the eye of two future Kings of England, Edward, the Prince of Wales, and his brother Albert, the Duke of York, who would later become King George VI. The next day, Edward called the lady at her villa to that you teachaa dance”, recalls TNYT
After making Europe fall in love, Alicia returned to the United States where she spent a year dancing at the Mon Paris nightclub. seeing her thereYo, journalist walter winchell hailed it as “that charming Havana torso flapper.” She returned to Cuba at the end of 1934 and married a few months later. At the age of 21, her legacy as Rumba Queen was already written. I didn’t danceor more.
When Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, Parlto, by then married to a Batista government official, fled to the United States and settled in Miami. She for 20 years she worked as a typist to earn a living.
By the way, they say that This Cuban was the one who taught Josephine Baker to dance.
