Cuban pitching legend Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez uses an electric razor to keep his head shaven, but that doesn’t prevent his paying a visit to Maria Xiques’s downtown barbershop whenever he comes to Chicago. A trip to Upper Cuts, on the third floor of 333 N. Michigan, is practically mandatory for Cuban VIPs visiting Chicago: other notable pilgrims to the three-chair shop include Barbarito Torres and Juan De Marcos from the Buena Vista Social Club band and Pedro Calvo, a longtime vocalist for the Cuban dance band Los Van Van and now a solo performer.
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The Cuban community in America is tightly knit, and word gets around among musicians and athletes on the road about Xiques’s haircutting and hospitality. Hernandez, whose dramatic defection from Cuba on a small sailboat made headlines in 1997, was steered to Upper Cuts by Xiques’s uncle, Americo Miranda, who happens to be the manager of Los Van Van. “Americo told me I should call his niece whenever I come to Chicago,” says Hernandez in Spanish. “Jose Contreras comes when the Yankees are in Chicago. Alfonso Soriano comes. My translator tells other players about Maria.” His eyes range over the curios and boxing memorabilia that line the shelves of the shop, then come to rest on a carved wooden figurine of a shoeshine man smoking a big cigar. “I shined shoes in Havana to save money to buy my boat to come to America,” he says.
“As I was driving up Wacker, I looked up at the round window,” Xiques says. “I fell in love with that window. It’s one of the biggest windows in the building.” To scrape together the $20,000 she needed to secure the space, Xiques put in extra hours cutting hair in the kitchen of her Logan Square apartment. She named the shop Upper Cuts in memory of her father, Alberto, who loved the 1950s Cuban welterweight Kid Gavilan. When business was slow in the early days, Xiques used to put on a red silk boxer’s robe and do publicity work out on the sidewalk. Today she keeps a pair of binoculars next to her porthole window; she says she uses them to keep abreast of the hairstyles in the street.
Though she clearly enjoys the visits from her countrymen, the majority of Xiques’s customers are downtown professionals; she estimates that more than half are doctors or attorneys. “After working on Michigan Avenue for almost 20 years, I wouldn’t go into a neighborhood,” she says. “I like it here.”
