culture

Residents and visitors to Panama City fondly recall the quirky La Cascada (waterfall) restaurant which opened its doors in the 1970s and which continued to sell gigantic platters of calamari, shrimp, and other fatty fried delicacies until its demolition as part of the real estate boom around the new Cinta Costera. A tourist, who came before La Cascada’s destruction, recounts in a recent internet article how patrons pressed light switches to call their waitresses, who often seemed bored and taciturn in demeanor and whose apathy was contrasted by their attractive figures, their short skirts, and their red, tight blouses. La Cascada always had a seamy quality, and its atmosphere sometimes approached that of a brothel. Inevitably, it became a favorite of US military personnel, merchantmen, and other restless foreigners who filled the location with their shouts and rowdy laughter. Young men followed the indifferent servers to the tables. They carried the massive dinner platters, which were commonly large enough to feed three or four people. Today a shiny condominium rises from where this business once delighted its customers with its sculptures of mermaids, swordfish, and other exotic beings and its eccentric sixteen-page menu which outlined everything from the health merits of fruit juices, to how to select a meal, and to eat a pork sandwich. A page-long letter warned local fishermen to sell only the freshest catches to the establishment. La Cascada was located on the Avenida Balboa, at the end of Calle 25, and it stood as a shrine of Panamanian popular art.


Patrons dined in a massive open-air courtyard, packed with foliage and with the plaster statues representing the myriad characters of the Disney animal kingdom. Lions, zebras, rhinos, and gazelles peered out from the overgrown gardens. They were surrounded by a web of white, circular grating which gave the place a kind of “cage-like atmosphere” and through which flowed a murky moat, brimming with gold fish, canoes, life buoys, and plastic ducks. La Cascada’s decorations were gaudy and eclectic and included a plethora of randomly placed announcements which proudly touted the venue’s attractions. “La Casacada is like an oasis,” assured the long-winded menu, “like a dream, like a fantasy, like a mini-Disneyland in Panama.” At the center of the patio was a large, artificial cascade which filled the space with its bubbling. Nearly two years since La Cascada’s demise, these sights remain a topic of discussion. Numerous web postings have praised the restaurant, while Margot López, a Panamanian architect, offered a marvelous and earlier description of the locale in a volume entitled ciudadMULTIPLEcity (2003).


Nevertheless, a sense of uncertainty surrounds La Cascada. Despite all the discussion about its structures, very little is known about their creator. Who actually fashioned the sea maidens and other extravagancies which Lopez refers to as “grandiose kitsch” and which earned the admiration of so many people. Lopez, herself, attributes their erection to George Bush, the restaurant’s Greek-Panamanian owner, who adopted his name in the 1950s during an extended period in the United States. However, in a long interview conducted over his intercom system (Bush declined to speak to me in person), the enigmatic businessman refused to take credit, and instead, he pointed to Oliver Bruce (Bruzolli), a self-taught commercial artist of Jamaican and Saint Lucian descent, whose works are scattered across Panama City. Bruzolli (1928-2004) is a hero among the working-class Panamanians who decorate the bars and shops of low income areas with attention-grabbing depictions of the Interior, with beach scenes, and saints, and portraits of actors and singers. Nevertheless, Bruzolli is almost unknown outside these circles, and he has been entirely ignored by the country’s intelligentsia, even as books such as ciudadMULTIPLEcity have enthusiastically chronicled his creations.


Bruzolli and his brother Victor (1930-) were born in the Canal Zone and grew up in Frijoles, a segregated and local rate community. They attended schools in the US colony, before entering an artisans’ program in the Panama Canal Company. Like many other men of their generation, who would contribute to Panama’s popular art tradition, Bruzolli and his sibling first worked in the Zone. They fashioned signs for the US government, while undertaking a correspondence course with the Washington School of Art. Soon they grew tired of the Zone’s racist structures, its unequal pay scales, and limits on their advancement, and in the late-1940s, they left for Panama City, where they pursued they fortunes as commercial artists. Victor tended to concentrate on private residences, while his brother was employed primarily in bars and hotels, stores, music clubs, and other businesses. Bush later hired the talented Bruzolli to decorate a string of bakeries and restaurants, many of which bear the artist’s luminous paintings of pizzas, cakes, and other menu items, his prolific signs, and his reliefs and life-size statues of sea creatures and animals from Disney productions. Occasionally, Kuna Indians appear in these compositions, alongside women wearing the national pollera dress. Bruzolli also became well-known for his gregarious personality and his tendency to interrupt work with impromptu jam sessions. He urged his assistants to sing and beat on buckets while he played blues, rock, or jazz licks on a guitar. Both brothers became accomplished studio artists and did important commissions for the government.


Victor painted most of the Comptroller-Generals of the Republic, while his brother was hired by the Panama City Fire Department to make portraits of the heads of the institution, as well as sculptures and insignia for its stations. Today, Bruzolli’s renditions of Panama’s Fire Chiefs hang in the ceremonial room of the Darío Vallarino Barracks. Visitors can also sample Bruzolli’s creativity at other points of the Bush bakery-restaurant empire. La Cascada has sadly gone the way of the wrecking ball; nevertheless, Bruzolli’s genius survives at La Costillita, a more middle-class eatery on the Vía Argentina. His brilliance is also apparent at Betania’s Casa Redonda and at the eye-popping Casas de la Fruta on Calle 50 and in Villa de las Fuentes. Hotel Ideal in Santa Ana, however, probably best replicates the environment of the fallen temple. Sailors and other transients love this seedy venue and drink beer comfortably next to its fish-filled swimming pool, it faux waterfall, and statues of real and imaginary marine life. In the lobby, cut mirrors cover the walls and illuminate the entry into this Bruzolli masterpiece. Bruce enthusiasts can also stop by Victor’s studio in the Plaza 5 de Mayo craft market. There, in very difficult circumstances, the self-taught Victor continues to craft extraordinary paintings and offers testimony of his family’s ingenuity, its persistence, and contributions to Panama’s visual culture.