Lebanon casinos, cabarets down but not out

From the glamour of the Casino du Liban for the high society to downright seedy bars for the low-life, Lebanon even in wartime caters for all tastes.

“The show must go on” has long been the motto of the casino nestled on a hill on the tip of the Bay of Junieh, located in the Christian heartland north of Beirut.

The opening hours, however, have been curtailed and it now closes at a modest 1:00 am, instead of the normal five in the morning. At dawn on Friday, an Israeli air strike gouged craters in a road bridge near the casino.

“Everybody is feeling down. There is no life. You call this life?” said a cashier, pointing at a mostly empty room full of slot machines and flashing lights. “Normally you can’t walk through here, the crowd is so thick.”

Only one out of three gaming rooms is operating, for aficionados of roulette and blackjack, with guests asked to hire a jacket and tie if they don’t turn up in the proper attire.

The private rooms are closed as “the high rollers were the first to leave the country”, the cashier explained. And the summer show, complete with dancing girls, has been called off.

Opened in 1959, the casino has kept going against the odds and operated more or less normally through most of the 1975-1990 civil war. But it was badly damaged and forced to close its doors during inter-Christian battles in 1989.

It was completely renovated and had a grand reopening in 1996. “The legend of Casino du Liban has dazzled and attracted millions of guests from all over the world,” the casino boasts on its Website.

As the croupier prepared to announce the final “les jeux sont faits” of the night, a young Lebanese hostess turned gloomy.

“Who knows what will happen tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow we will have no petrol, no mobiles, maybe we will be back on donkeys,” she said. “And if Syria and Iran become involved, then it’s game over.”

A gaming casualty of the war between Israel and the Shia fundamentalist group Hizbullah is Lebanon’s popular “Loto”. It has been cancelled, with 3 billion Lebanese pounds ($2 million) up for grabs on its return.

“We hope with all our heart that these harsh trials which we are enduring will come to an end the soonest,” reads the lottery operator’s advertisement in the local papers.

As the lit-up Our Lady of Harissa mountain-top church watches over Junieh, with its stone houses and a port that was the lifeline of Christians during fiercer periods of civil war, the seafront cabarets and bars come alive after midnight.

With names such as Barbie Super Night, Joy, Dallas, Cobra, the cabarets are having a rough ride. Many have closed, with dozens of their eastern European artistes having joined the foreign exodus.

The rest are operating normal hours, until 5 am. In a gesture toward Arab moral values, there is no striptease.

The boss of one of the biggest cabarets in Junieh says Saturdays are still busy, especially as there is less competition. The punters “spend good money”, he said, although out of his normal complement of 40 girls, only 14 remain.

“Their embassies phoned them and asked if they wanted to leave. Many of them have been evacuated to Syria and Cyprus and found themselves new jobs over there,” he said.

But Svetlana, a pony-tailed blonde from Kiev, and Natasha, from Russia, said they were staying put. “My friends stayed, so I stayed,” explained Svetlana, 26.

Amid the smoke and blasting music, mostly Oriental jazz mix, a customer belly danced at one end of the stage, a girl gyrated around a brass pole and the others sat in a circle looking bored.

Twenty to 30 young men were clustered in groups, while others had taken refuge to more intimate corners with a girl in tow.

“They come to relax, to forget about the situation. They don’t want to talk about the war,” said Svetlana. “I switch on CNN each morning after work and cry, especially when I see pictures of the children who are being killed.

(AFP)

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