By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 26, 2006; Page A22
HAVANA -- There was a commotion behind the smoked-glass door. Giggles. Squeals. Salsa music pulsing.
No one could hear the squat man outside. He stood there pouting, holding a makeup bag in his left hand, slapping delicately at the door with his open right hand.
"Ladies, please," the man screamed. "Let me in. Hurrrrrrry."
More men crammed into the foyer with him, each pouting. It was 8:30 p.m. in Lawton, a dimly lighted neighborhood far from the center of Havana, and it was time for Nayla to come to life.
By day, the impatient man is a waiter at a dreary state-owned cafe. His name is Jose, and he is a nobody. But in this room, a beauty salon with a torn red-leather chair and a cracked mirror, he becomes a star. He becomes Nayla, one of Havana's favorite cross-dressing performers, a marquee fixture of the underground transvestite scene.
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The cabaret they'd come to see has been an on-and-off affair for years. The haunts of Cuba's gay, lesbian and transgender communities were often shut down in the bad old days of the 1980s and 1990s, when discrimination was rampant and arrests -- often for no other cause than sexual orientation -- were, too.
But things have been improving lately, especially since earlier this year when Mariela Castro, the niece of ailing Cuban President Fidel Castro, took up the cause of gay, lesbian and transgender rights. The men in the audience -- mostly gay -- are feeling bolder. The show they had come to see is still not legal, but it is tolerated by the authorities.