“40 words or less” – An ambitious
hotel pool boy in the late 1970’s becomes manager of Miami’s most infamous
nightclub and devises a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro with the help of the
club’s notorious patrons in order to open a franchise in Havana
Full Summary:
It’s 1978 and The Renegade Hotel on
South Bayshore Drive in Coconut Grove is at the epicenter of the drug fueled, high-society
Miami party scene. Carlos Estrada, a handsome
Cuban in his late-twenties, is a pool boy at the hotel who spends most of his
time on his hands and knees scrubbing tiles while the drug kingpin guests around
him constantly flaunt their money, get high and drunk and cavort with young
models less than half their age.
One especially wealthy drug dealer,
Ariel Mendez, soon befriends the disgruntled young man and asks him to do a
series of menial tasks. Having proven
his worth, Ariel quickly takes Carlos under his wing, even inviting him as his
guest to the ultra-exclusive private nightspot attached to the hotel, The
Renegade Club.
According to Carlos, The Renegade
Club was “the epicenter of the
cocaine jazz age and 1970’s Miami decadence.
The club was so exclusive even I couldn’t walk in here as a hotel employee. Rumor has it a yearly membership cost
$20,000. Sure, the place was ultra-exclusive
but everyone who’s anyone came here on any given night. There were flashy drug dealers, their wannabe
hangers-on, gun runners, politicians and legitimate South American businessmen desperately
trying to become fixtures on the burgeoning Miami nightlife scene. The Kennedys’ were regulars and so was Governor
Reagan. There were athletes, singers,
celebrities, Hollywood starlets, bankers, Cuban refugees both old and new, every
hot girl within a 50 miles radius whether they were paid or not, and even the
occasional exiled dictator from some small third-world Caribbean country that no
one’s ever heard of. But definitely no
pool boys were here. If you were famous
or infamous, no trip to Miami would be complete without a stop at The Renegade
Club. Hell, rumor had it, local law
enforcement, and even the fucking CIA, was known to visit the place, and why
not? If you wanted to know what illegal
activities were going on in Miami…or Latin America or South America for that
matter, and who the players are, you’d come here. You really had to see it to believe it.”
The only thing that
rivaled the excesses seen and done in The Renegade Club were the actions and
activities taking place in the hotel suites above. Depravity and debauchery were the rule
virtually every night in the hotel suites which offered privacy from the
outside world and a place to continue the party after the club closed, or start
the party before it opened.
Carlos further ingratiates
himself to his new benefactor by serving as a lookout for a drug shipment coming
in by sea but when Mr. Mendez offers him a more permanent position in his
organization, he surprisingly declines. When
pressed on why he declines, Carlos shares his lifelong dream with Ariel. All he wants to do is run a nightclub with
the stature of The Renegade, he wants to be the center of Miami nightlife, he
wants to know everyone worth knowing and, more importantly, he wants them to
know him. After hearing this, Ariel uses
his contacts, and unconventional tactics, to get Carlos a job at the club but
he has to start off on the bottom rung of the ladder, a busboy.
In his new position,
Carlos immediately butts heads with the current manager of the club, Paco, and
quickly finds himself in a predicament that could mean his life. To save his own life, while also positioning
himself to become the new manager of The Renegade, Carlos pitches a rather
insane plan to Ariel. In order to build
a coalition against the current manager, Carlos presents his idea of
franchising the club into other markets, the first being Havana, and giving
Ariel a piece of the business. How was
he going to open up an American franchise in communist Cuba? By assassinating Fidel Castro of course.
Although thinking
Carlos is crazy for such an overture, Ariel can’t help but also think about the
lure of making money off the club so he decides to back Carlo’s ascension to
manager, again through the use of unconventional tactics. Once he takes charge, Carlos devises his
assassination plot with the help of the club’s notorious patrons, all of whom
have their own personal and professional hatred of Castro. He enlists old Cuban refugees involved in the
Bay of Pigs, drug dealers, legitimate South American businessmen, gun runners, financiers,
speedboat world champions, even a couple rogue CIA agents and a well-known Latin
American singer.
