Viva Vida

It's a rainy afternoon when she walks into a casual bistro in the Miracle Mile section of Los Angeles. Even when she's dressed down--jeans, hair pulled back, next to no makeup--Vida Guerra turns heads. Underneath a creamy leather jacket, her white tank top hugs her curves with a vengeance, while her blue jeans stretch tautly across the most famous rear end this side of a certain singer-actress (the one formerly known as J. Lo).

The fact sheet at Vida's website, Vidasworld.com, supplies the raw data: brown eyes, brown hair, caramel skin, Cuban nationality, five-foot-three, 115 pounds, 34C-25-37, shoe size six. But the stats--and the photos and the videos and the fact that she's been named the number one most searched-for model on the web--leave out some important info about this Latin charmer. For example, that she has a disarming down-to-earth demeanor. Or that after six months in L.A. she still doesn't know her way around and that she apologizes for it. And then there's the slightly crooked smile that keeps crossing her face as she considers her path from Cuba to New Jersey to the pages of Playboy.

Over lunch Vida seems less like a bombshell than a small-town beauty, one who prefers bowling to clubbing and who, after surveying the eclectic menu including fontina-stuffed ravioli and whitefish in yellow curry, is confident enough to say, "You can't go wrong with a burger."

And so it happens that before long Vida is digging into her avocado cheeseburger. Outside, rain streaks the restaurant windows, leaving SoCal drivers struggling to deal with the confusing sight of water falling from the sky, as Vida laughs about how she loves Los Angeles because of...the weather.

"New Jersey's kinda gray," she says. "I like sun. I like colors. Jersey's cool because the people are real. I'm glad I grew up there, but you have to move on."

And so she does--quickly, much as she always has. A couple dozen years ago her family fled Cuba when its government tried to force her father to depart the country but leave his wife and children behind. Vida left when she was five, turned six in Costa Rica and was in the United States a month later--first in Miami, then in the Garden State, where her parents had relatives. Growing up in Perth Amboy, she harbored ambitions to model, sing and act, but her parents encouraged more sensible pursuits, and Vida complied. "I'm very intuitive, and I always knew there was something bigger and better out there for me," she says. "But getting there was the big question."

She was working for a bank, writing mortgages, when a boyfriend sent her photo to a magazine. The publication ran a single shot of her and the reader response was instantaneous and enormous--the biggest response that magazine had ever seen. It didn't hurt that in a group shot of five women, Vida was the only one with her back to the camera.

"I knew that picture was going to get a lot of attention," she says, smiling. "Ever since I was a little kid my butt has always drawn attention. From first grade on, the boys were always trying to grab it. When I was in fourth grade I was passing out tests when the teacher stepped out of the classroom. I saw this one guy reach out to squeeze my butt."

Big mistake.

"I grabbed him and threw him," Vida says, "and he hit his head on the corner of the table and needed nine stitches." She shrugs. "I was only nine or 10, but I was already tired of guys grabbing my butt."

In her teens Vida went so far as to hide her (text concluded on page 124)Vida Guerra(continued from page 110) curves beneath baggy clothes. By the time she was 17, though, she'd come to terms with her body and all that attention. "Now," she says proudly, "I embrace it." But despite her success with print modeling, her appearances in videos such as the one for the Nelly, P. Diddy and Murphy Lee hit "Shake Ya Tailfeather" and a stint on Comedy Central's Chappelle's Show (she was a dancer in a skit about R. Kelly that is arguably the most hilarious Dave Chappelle bit ever), Vida's Playboy photos mark the first time she has ever displayed herself in all her glory. (She doesn't count those grainy photos that were splashed across the Internet after someone hacked into her cell phone; the most revealing ones, she says, weren't even of her.)

"At first my dad was very upset by my modeling. I was in lingerie and showing my body. But when he saw that it was starting to turn into something, he was supportive. Now he's one of my biggest fans," she says. "When I told him about Playboy, he was like, 'Do it. Do it.' If he had said no, I wouldn't have done it. I remember the first day we shot for the cover, I was in a bikini. On the second day, I was like, Whoa! But by the end of that day it was fine. I like these photos better than the other pictures of me with my clothes on."

These days Vida's career is taking off in new directions as well. This summer she'll appear in the big-screen comedy National Lampoon's Dorm Daze 2, in which she plays a tantalizing virgin trying to decide whether to go all the way with her boyfriend. ("You'll have to see the movie to find out what happens," she teases.) She's about to make another film, in which she plays a singer, and she's finishing an album, Theme Park, that will come out later this summer. Vida says the movie roles, the modeling and her album are just a start. Even though she loves the quiet life--spending time curled up in sweatpants, going to the movies, staying home to cook--she also has plans. Big ones.

"My ultimate goal is to do three movies a year," she says. "I want to make three albums total. I want to start my own clothing company. I want to design clothes, beginning with bikinis and lingerie, and I want to have my own perfume line. I want to do it all. I even want the Vida Barbie doll, the Cuban Barbie doll."

She breaks into that grin of hers, just lopsided enough to be completely charming, and shrugs as she considers dreams that would once have seemed ridiculous but now don't sound so crazy at all.

"I want to be the Cuban Oprah," Vida Guerra says. "You gotta think big."

See more of Vida at cyber.playboy.com.