In Cuban parlance, she was a vedette (a star), and was well known in Mexico City, Paris, Miami and New York, where she performed, filmed and recorded on numerous occasions.

Though classically trained as a soprano for zarzuelas, her mark was made as a singer of Afro-Cuban salon songs including "The Peanut Vendor" and "Siboney".

[1] Throughout her career, Montaner kept a close personal and professional relationship with two famous musicians from her hometown of Guanabacoa: pianist-singer Bola de Nieve and composer Ernesto Lecuona.

[4] Her father, Domingo Montaner Pulgarón, was a pharmacist and her mother was Mercedes Facenda; she herself was short in stature, good-looking with a fine smile, and intelligent.

In 1917, Montaner played Mendelssohn in her final examination at the Peyrellade Conservatory in Havana; she graduated in piano, song and harmony with a gold medal.

[10] March 1922 saw the launch of Montaner's career at a concert of typical Cuban music in Havana, organized by the composer Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, a friend of her family.

[13] She sang duos with Eusebio Delfín, and as a solo, pieces by Alberto Villalón, Ernesto Lecuona, Sánchez de Fuentes and others.

She performed with maestros such as Lecuona, Jorge Anckermann, Delfín, Sánchez de Fuentes and Gonzalo Roig and was successful and respectable, as befitted a middle-class married woman of those times.

It became clear that performing in public was the most important thing in her life, and this was hardly compatible with her role as a bourgeois wife and mother.

[14] The title role was played by Caridad Suarez, with Rita in blackface and male drag as El Calesero (the coachman).

The second one-act work on the same program was the premiere of Lecuona's La tierra de Venus, where Rita sang "Siboney", which is still a Latin standard.

When she was in Cuba, Rita had a regular engagement at the Edén Concert, a nightclub right in the center of Havana (Zulueta Street, near the Parque Central).

Armando Romeo, later orchestra leader at the Tropicana, gave an interview later in life: In 1933, she went to Mexico City, with Bola de Nieve as her accompanist.

"Rita's shows at the Teatro Iris were triumphant, but her mouth got the better of her"[20] On 1 April 1933, she married Ernesto Estévez Navarro.

In El Paso, Texas, Vargas denounced her as an enemy of Mexico, hoping to prevent her return to his country.

[27] She also helped Chano Pozo before his career took off, getting him a job at the radio company RHC-Cadena Azul as a door-man and bodyguard.

After closing temporarily when tourism declined during wartime; the Tropicana re-opened in 1945, along with other night-clubs such as the Sans Souci, the Montmartre, and their competition, the Gran Casino Nacional.

In 1955 she triumphed as Madame Flora in the opera La Medium by Menotti,[31] and in 1956 in the comedy Mi querido Charles.