
by Chris Jay
This site is funded by tips from readers. Securely support Chris with a tip of $5 or more by clicking the “Buy me a taco” button.
I. The Golden Door is Locked
To be a Jew in Poland—or anywhere in Eastern Europe, for that matter—at the dawn of the 20th Century was to be surrounded by a violently, overtly anti-Semitic society. During World War I, the Jewish population of Poland had grown rapidly, as Jews from Russia fled worsening conditions there. As a result, the Polish government implemented measures that limited or eliminated the ability of Jews to receive bank loans, work in the public sector, obtain business licenses, or enroll in universities.
Jews throughout Eastern Europe were carried westward by a wave of institutionalized racism and violence. Pogroms, or riots that were essentially organized massacres of Jews, broke out across the Russian Empire in places like Ukraine and Lithuania. Whispers of one atrocity after another spread through Jewish communities, and Yiddish-language newspapers in major urban centers like Warsaw warned of more violence to come.
For hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews, the best hope for survival was passage to the United States. In response to the ever-increasing numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe who arrived daily at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, the 68th Congress of the United States passed the Immigration Act of 1924. The purpose of this act, in the U.S. Department of State’s own words, was to “preserve the idea of U.S. homogeneity.” Among other results, this act established the United States Border Patrol as well as an early version of today’s system of visas and consulates.
One of the specific goals of the law was to reduce the number of Eastern Europeans arriving on American shores. The provisions of the act were so restrictive that in 1924 more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, and Romanians left the United States than arrived as immigrants.
Something about the phrase “the idea of U.S. homogeneity” is as damning an indictment of the hypocrisy embodied by the Immigration Act of 1924 as anything that I could write, but I still feel inclined to point out that Congressman Albert Johnson, author of the Immigration Act, referred to Jewish immigrants as “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.”

II. Not the Land You Were Promised
By my best guess, 1924 is the year that the main characters of our story fled Poland. I do not know their birth names, but their anglicized names were Jacob Greenberg, 24, and Gloria Greenberg, Jacob’s wife, 19. Jacob’s name may have been Jakob, Gloria was likely Grunya. Fleeing an embattled city called Vilna (or Vilnius), a place long embroiled in a violent political tug-of-war between Russia, Poland and Lithuania, the young couple may well have been duped by a crooked emigration agent. According to an article by Marcin Kula in the Spring 1989 volume of Polish American Studies:
“Emigration agents and common crooks and often agents who were crooks as well, persuaded people ignorant of the world that by going to Cuba they could avoid American restrictions. They said there would be no problem leaving Cuba for the United States.”
-Marcin Kula, “Those Who Failed to Reach the United States: Polish Proletarians in Cuba During the Interwar Period”
The Greenbergs, along with 2,552 other Polish Jews who made the same journey in 1924, had likely been led to believe that Cuba would only be a brief stopover in their voyage to the U.S. What emigrants like Jacob and Gloria were not told was that there were newly established annual quotas limiting how many Polish citizens could make legal entry into the U.S. The American consulate in Havana is believed to have issued fewer than 100 Visas per year to a waiting list that numbered nearly 9,000.
“My understanding is that they were unable to enter the States because there was a quota,” said Ron Lepow, Jacob and Gloria’s grandson.
Though no one knows exactly how long Jacob and Gloria called Cuba home, Lepow believes that his grandparents resided in Havana for six to ten years. Lepow’s Aunt Reba, one of three girls born to Jacob and Gloria, was born in Havana in 1928.
“When they did make it to the U.S., they were able to come in with something called a Capitalist Visa, which bypassed the quota system,” Lepow said. “They were able to somehow prove that they would not be a burden on the government, and they came in through Ellis Island.”
Despite three weeks of searching, I could find no evidence of the existence of Capitalist Visas, nor any reference to the diplomatic use of such an instrument. A friend who is knowledgeable on the subject laughed off the idea, howling into the phone as we spoke: “A ‘Capitalist Visa’ is a bribe!”

III. The Americans
Once the Greenbergs made it to U.S. soil, they quickly connected with Gloria’s younger brother, Nathan Meisel, who was born in Brooklyn and was therefore a U.S. citizen. His citizenship would later allow Meisel to successfully apply for a license to open a liquor store in Shreveport, Louisiana.
From Brooklyn, they traveled to Dallas, where a cousin by the name of Harry Sigel operated a chain of regional liquor stores as well as a liquor wholesaling business. According to Lepow, Jacob and Nathan had hoped to go into business with Sigel, but “things didn’t work out,” and the trio beat a quick path to Shreveport. Prohibition had ended in December of 1933, and a Gold Rush-esque race to open liquor stores was underway.
Here’s a moment when the knowable facts of history feel, to me, like a thin curtain over a window on a sunny day. I can see things moving beyond the curtain, but I can’t say for sure what is happening. To me, it is unclear whether things did or did not work out with Harry Sigel. Sigel, having previously operated a mail-order liquor business in Dallas which advertised in Shreveport newspapers, opened his own wholesale liquor shop in Shreveport on March 9, 1934. The first-ever location of Cuban Liquor, at 1163 Texas Avenue, opened four months later.
By 1936, Cuban Liquor had opened a second location, at 824 Texas Avenue. The business that had previously occupied the space was also a liquor store, which had been owned and operated by a high-profile wrestling promoter named Julius Sigel—brother to Harry.

It is impossible to over-emphasize how quickly Cuban Liquor grew. By 1941, Greenberg and Meisel were operating four liquor stores in downtown Shreveport, one liquor store in Bossier City, a wholesale liquor distribution company called Blue Grass Liquor Co., and the Northwest Louisiana Wholesale Liquor Distributors Association, which they’d founded in 1939.
It’s possible that the Greenbergs, along with Gloria’s brother Nathan, were just incredibly adept at the liquor trade. Perhaps they saw the opportunity presented by Louisiana’s laws governing the sale of alcohol—which allowed for what would have been called “racketeering” before the first World War—and took unaided advantage of that opportunity, surrounded as they were in northwestern Louisiana by territories that had not yet legalized the sale of liquor. Undoubtedly, a lot of alcohol purchased in Shreveport was bound for nearby counties in Texas and Arkansas, where temperance societies had kept Prohibition-era “dry laws” in place.

Liquor price fixing, as illegal as it sounds, was the law of the land in Louisiana until 1949, when a Roosevelt-era law allowing liquor wholesalers and retailers to get together and establish prices was repealed by Louisiana’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. Intended to prevent the elimination of jobs due to efforts among retailers to undercut one another, price-wise, this legal price-fixing allowed wholesalers and retailers who were friendly with one another to, essentially, dictate their own profit margins.
IV. “Despite Their Age”
In June of 1941, Cuban Liquor completed a huge new headquarters at 1149 Texas Avenue. That same month, on the other side of the globe, German forces marched into Vilna, where the Greenberg family had lived for 40 years. Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) rounded up 5,000 Jewish men in Vilna, marched them into a nearby forest called Ponary, shot them in their heads, and threw their bodies into mass graves. In August, the Germans killed 3,500 more of the Jewish men of Vilna. By the end of 1941, 40,000 lay in unmarked forest graves. During World War II, something like 100,000 more murders would take place in this same, godforsaken place.
Thankfully, Jacob Greenberg’s mother and father were not among those dead. By this time, like thousands of other Eastern European Jews, they’d long since fled to Palestine, where they managed an orange grove. In 1938, they’d even made the journey to distant Shreveport, Louisiana, where their 50th wedding anniversary was fêted with an extravagant, weeks-long family reunion paid for by their successful son, Jacob.
In a photo of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Greenberg that ran in The Times on March 7, 1938, the two stand side-by-side, finely clothed and grinning ear-to-ear on the lawn at 2204 Centenary Boulevard.
“Both are still active, despite their age,” the caption reads. I laughed out loud. Whoever wrote that caption had no idea how apt it was.

It’s telling that, on the day that the law allowing liquor price-fixing in Louisiana was repealed, Nov. 9, 1949, The Times in Shreveport called Jacob Greenberg for his take.
“I’ll abide by the law,” Greenberg told The Times. “I’ll keep my skirts clean.”
By 1949, there were 13 Cuban Liquor locations in Louisiana, including shops in Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Bogalusa, many adorned with breathtaking neon facades featuring a pair of waving palm trees and the word “Cuban” in glorious neon script.
The second address that the Greenberg Family called home, a sprawling estate at 818 Unadilla Street, filled with the laughter of three daughters.

For the first 20 or so years of its existence, the success of Cuban Liquor was helped along by the company’s ability to buy in bulk, their powerful role as wholesaler, distributor and retailer, the ability to legally write their own government regulations, and their clustered locations in bustling downtown areas throughout Louisiana.
By the mid-1950s, however, Cuban Liquor had become more than a successful chain of liquor stores. In newspaper advertisements and write-ups, it is clear that the businesses—especially the Shreveport locations—had become a part of their communities in a way that most liquor stores do not. In June of 1950, Cuban Liquor stores citywide hosted Shreveport’s first wine festival, which lasted three days and featured educational lectures by winemakers flown in from California. In 1954, the flagship store at 1149 Texas Avenue built out an enormous and beautifully decorated wine cellar, the Chateau Wine Cellar, carrying the world’s finest wines. Some of the stores added gourmet food departments where they hosted cocktail-making demonstrations and gourmet cooking classes.
When Jacob Greenberg died of a heart attack in 1957, at age 58, Shreveport Mayor Clyde Fant and First National Bank President Walter B. Jacobs Jr. were among his pallbearers.
Ironically, the advantages that propelled Cuban Liquor to such incredible heights were also the chain’s undoing. Having multiple stores clustered in downtown Shreveport was great in 1945, but not so great in 1965. Being both a wholesaler and a retailer was an advantage in 1940; in 1980, it was an easy way to anger the very same liquor stores that you were attempting to win over as customers.
“When I came into the business in 1980, we had Blue Grass Wholesale Liquor, we had Shreveport Beverage, and we had Cuban Liquor, and Cuban Liquor was really the orphan,” Lepow said. “It was losing money because we had bad locations, and we weren’t investing in better locations because that would piss off the retailers who were our wholesale customers. We were in competition with our own customers.”
Lepow sold Cuban Liquor to a family friend, Rex Smith, who ran the business from 1985 until 2012. He sold Blue Grass Wholesale Liquor to Glazer’s of Louisiana, who brought him on for a three-year stint to help transition the company. Lepow worked at Glazer’s, under that three-year contract, for 12 years. As he was wrapping up his time at Glazer’s, his friend Rex called him up with a question: Did he know anyone who may want to purchase the last remaining Cuban Liquor, the only retail location that hadn’t closed?
“He asked me to help him sell it. I had no intention whatsoever of buying it back,” Lepow said. “I bought it back on April Fool’s Day of 2012.”

The most recent change of hands, Lepow’s 2020 sale of the Cuban Liquor store at 928 Pierremont Road in Shreveport to local businessmen Grant Nuckolls and Andrew Crawford, brings us to the present day. The Cuban Liquor on Pierremont perfectly encapsulates what the chain was at its zenith. There’s a cheese counter curated by an excellent cheesemonger, a wine selection that would have made Jacob Greenberg proud, a gourmet food products area and, as The Times described the flagship store on Texas Avenue in 1949: “The stock includes unusual brands of beers, wines and liqueurs from foreign countries.” It is incredibly appropriate that this store is the last one standing.
Equally as appropriate is the new ownership of Cuban Liquor. I believe that, if Jacob Greenberg and Nathan Meisel could have traveled through time and hand-picked two contemporary Shreveport entrepreneurs to look after the business, they would have picked Nuckolls and Crawford, two energetic and civic-minded entrepreneurs of Jewish heritage whose partnership extends far beyond the margins of the business ledger.
Anyway, that’s how Cuban Liquor got its name. At least, that’s the short version.

Postscript
As Ron Lepow and I concluded our hour-long call that I’d promised would only take 15 minutes, we chatted for a moment about my own liquor-buying habits. I live next door to a major grocery chain, and it’s tempting to just walk over and grab a six-pack or a half-pint of Bourbon at their little liquor store. There’s no cheese counter, and there’s no wine selection worth mentioning, but the beer is cold and cheap and it’s right there. But it bothers me, you know, to shop there. I couldn’t say why.
“I can tell you why,” Lepow said. “It bothers you because when you do all of your business with national chains, what starts to happen is every city starts to look the same, everywhere in America. It doesn’t matter where you are. There’s a word for that.”
“Homogeneity,” I said.
“That’s it,” Lepow said.
This story was produced independently. If you’d like to support the creation of more stories like this, please consider buying the author a taco or sending him $5 via PayPal. If you’d like to advertise on this site, contact Chris at ChrisJay318@gmail.com.
