The Jukebox: Cuba's Revenge

Rubbering up Broadway last week, wondering out-of-towners stopped to gawk at the window of an auto showroom—at the window itself, not at the glittering barges behind it. The glass flexed in and out, visibly and violently, like the stomach of a sales manager who has just hit a triple in a company Softball game. The explanation of this marvel lay in a large, gilt-plastered room one flight up: Manhattan's Palladium Ballroom. There, nearly 1,000 tunestruck New Yorkers—Cubans and Puerto Ricans, non-Latin secretaries and button-downs—were writhing from side to side, stomping and waving...