For more than four decades, Ofelia Fox and Rosa Sanchez always shared a car. They could easily have afforded two cars, but driving places separately would have robbed them of time together.

Because they lived in traffic-choked Los Angeles, they turned down jobs that would have prevented one from dropping off the other in the morning. The idea of not meeting for lunch every day was simply unthinkable.

``I hardly remember life before Ofelia,'' writes Rosa Sanchez, 75, who will appear Nov. 15 at Miami Book Fair International to read (in English) from Nosotras: Opening the Door to Our Love Life, the self-published memoir she wrote after Ofelia Fox died of colon cancer three years ago at 82. ``Someone said to me about our relationship: `I couldn't be trapped that way.' I felt sorry for her. Everyone should be so lucky as to be trapped in such love.''

The women met in Miami in the early 1960s. Ofelia was married to Martín Fox, the former owner of Havana's famed Tropicana, the modernist, open-air nightclub where stunning show girls danced under starry skies, and big spenders in tuxedos drove up in cars sleek with tailfins to gamble the night away. Martín ran it in the 1950s, Havana's heyday. The elegant, worldly Ofelia, who appears in one cabaret photo wearing a pink mink stole, the gift of mob boss Santo Trafficante Jr., was its first lady.

While Martín schmoozed the casino crowd, Ofelia wined and dined the VIPS: Liberace, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Ernest Hemingway, Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, Marlon Brando, Edith Piaf, Elizabeth Taylor, Tyrone Power. Nat ``King'' Cole, Josephine Baker, Yma Sumac, Paul Robeson, Carmen Miranda and Celia Cruz performed at the club. In 1960, after Castro's revolution took over their business, the Foxes fled to Miami to remake their lives.

HIDDEN MONEY

Not long after, however, Martín suffered a debilitating stroke. He had been moving money out of Cuba even before the revolution, Ofelia explains in Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub, her nostalgic memoir written with Cuban-American writer Rosa Lowinger and published in 2005 by Hartcourt. But now he was unable to communicate, and Ofelia had never been told where he kept their money or how much there was.

Overnight, she was penniless. Martín's family took him in but invited Ofelia to stay in the maid's quarters.

Rosa Sanchez, born in Sancti Spiritus, a colonial city in Central Cuba, had been to Tropicana only once, when she was under age. When she met Ofelia, she was separated from her husband, raising a son and working as the first female executive at Miami radio station WMIE, eventually La Cubanisima.

The women felt a connection the second they saw each other in a hallway of the station, from which Ofelia had begun broadcasting political messages to Cuban exiles arriving regularly from the island. They quickly formed a tight friendship.

But in 1964, Ofelia kissed goodbye the husband who no longer recognized her and left town with Rosa and her 5-year-old son. They hitched a U-Haul to Ofelia's Chevy Impala and drove across country to start again far from Miami. After 21 days of roadside diners and lumpy motel beds, they decided to settle in L.A.

They had been there a year and a half when, one day at the post office, another Cuban woman who had heard their familiar accents struck up a conversation and invited them to a party.

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