Columnist Susan Snyder: DeCastros are voices for all time

Tuesday, April 8, 2003 | 8:28 a.m.

The war is in Iraq, but the bombshells exploding in Las Vegas are Cuban.

The DeCastro Sisters -- Peggy and Cherie -- still call themselves the "Cuban bombshells," and still tear it up on valley stages.

The DeCastros are pushing, at, or past 80. Cherie doesn't want to tell her age, so Peggy won't tell hers either.

Such sisterly solidarity likely is the only way siblings could survive a 45-year singing career the first time around, only to find the desire to come out of retirement and sing once again.

A sense of humor doesn't hurt either.

"We never let the other one get away with anything," said Peggy, the elder. "We're always saying, 'Your lipstick is too dark,' or something."

Babette, their youngest sister, passed away in 1993. Olgita DeCastro Marino, a cousin, filled the onstage gap left by Babette, but died in 2000. Peggy retired from the trio in 1996 when her husband, a California veterinarian, fell ill.

He died in February, and Cherie traveled to California to coax her sister back to Las Vegas and back onstage. Lois "Louisa" Denny makes the twosome a trio once again.

The DeCastros' mother was a former "Ziegfeld Follies" dancer in New York City, and their father owned a sugar cane plantation in the Dominican Republic. Peggy was born on the plantation. Cherie was born in New York, and Babette was born after the family moved to Havana.

Sitting on the sofas in Cherie's apartment in Cambridge Towers Apartments one recent afternoon, the sisters recalled the upbringing that forged their bond.

"We grew up in Cuba in this big mansion. Our daddy kept us isolated," Peggy said.

"We had a ball," Cherie added. "We were three little princesses living in a castle."

Their mother took up opera singing as a hobby. Pretty soon her daughters were singing too. They were imitating the Andrews Sisters and hitting Cuban stages before any had turned 14.

And they sang in English. In one of their first public performances as children they wore white dresses, carried U.S. flags and sang the U.S. national anthem.

"We didn't want to be Latin singers. We wanted to be American," Peggy said.

"Our mother used to say, 'You're going to the States. You learn your George Washington and other history,' " Cherie added.

They moved to America, where they played such places as New York's Copacabana, appeared in a movie with Carmen Miranda and made it big in 1955 with their one and only hit, "Teach Me Tonight." The song remains their hallmark and is on the CD they released last year.

Though technically on the one-hit-wonders list, the true wonder of the DeCastro sisters is that after all these years they are still singing, still dancing and still good friends.

Their stages are more likely to be in community centers or schools now. But their dresses are still slit up to there, and they dance in stilettos that would cripple women half their age.

"They don't stop moving. They're like jumping beans," said Desire Di Lorenzo-Proctor, their manager.

And they're living proof that life gets better with age.

"We're oldies but goodies," Cherie said.