In Brief
The Cuban Club in Tampa's Ybor City is loaded with ghost-tour legends — a hanged playwright, a woman thrown from the ballroom. None of them turn up in any record. The one death the building can prove is the one that reads like a murder.
The Full Story
The most-told ghosts at the Cuban Club in Tampa, Florida are a playwright named Victorio, said to have killed himself on the theater stage after forgetting the words to his own debut, and a woman named Rosalita, said to have been thrown from the third-floor ballroom balcony for refusing a man's dance. Tour guides have repeated them for years. Fox 13 and the ghost tours name them. When the Tampa Bay Times went looking for either death in the archives, it couldn't find them at all.
The building behind the legends is grand and real. El Círculo Cubano de Tampa raised it in 1917 — four stories of yellow brick designed by M. Leo Elliott, with a theater seating about 500, a ballroom, a pharmacy, a pool, and a boxing arena. It was a mutual aid society for working-class cigar makers, near 8,000 members at its peak, who paid dues for health care and death benefits. During the 1918 flu pandemic the club became a temporary hospital, even for non-members.
So there's plenty of death attached to the place. None of the famous ghosts come with a name in any record.
But one death does. On April 13, 1934, a club meeting about firing the house doctor turned into flying fists and bottles. Board member Bellarmino Vallejo shook a finger in the president's face, the two ended up in a small room behind the stage, and a gunshot went off. Vallejo was hit in the abdomen.
He didn't die right away. From his hospital bed he told four people that two men had held him, and he told his wife the man who fired was Edward Valdez — the club's own president.
More than twenty witnesses were in the building that night. There was a deathbed accusation. No one was ever charged.
The ghost tours skip that one. It's the only death the building can prove.
