There are some very interesting things going on with Cuban music in the United States. For the better part of two years, Cubans have performed without incident in major venues in NYC. I reported on a "Dos Alas" (Two Wings) concert a few weeks ago, which co-starred a Puerto Rican Bomba band and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars. And the very next week I attended a "Cuban Jam Session" at Town Hall, which really gives you a flavor of the shifting cultural and political ties between the island and the US. The concert was presented by the Cuban Cultural Center, a NYC based outfit whose officers included Rafael Pi-Roman, a PBS announcer. This, I assume, spoke for the liberal tilt of the group, which probably stands for more open relations with the island but not to the extent of supporting the socialist system. The music was played by a combination of Cuban and New York Latino musicians, including exiles. It was presented in the form of a revue, which demonstrated all of the various Cuban dance music genres, from cha-cha-cha to Mambo. The eleven piece band really cooked. Two men and two women from a Cuban dance troupe performed with great authenticity. As the revue progressed, a huge screen at the top of the stage showed old movies of street life in Havana from the 20s and 30s. There was also some fascinating footage of Benny More in performance. Benny More was the greatest musician in Cuba during the 40s and 50s. Of African descent, he led a big band and often performed before thousands in open air dance concerts in Havana on Friday and Saturday nights. I am a huge Benny More fan. Interestingly enough, I introduced the sounds of More to a Cuban exile I used to work with in the 80s, who had rejected this type of music as old-fashioned. When he bought some More records and started playing them at home, his mother and father told him about how much the music meant to them. His father was a sergeant in Batista's army and hated Castro. Even though he knew I was a Castroist, he liked me as a person because of my love and knowledge of Cuban music. Music has the ability to overcome such ideological differences. This was in evidence at the Town Hall concert in fact. The audience was overwhelmingly Cuban and the program was written in Spanish. This was no attempt to "crossover" to an Anglo audience, David Byrne style. It was rather a straightforward celebration of Cuban life and culture. The fact that the audience was largely made of exiles and the performers Cuban nationals made no difference at all. I have a strong suspicion that top officials of the Cuban government are fostering such cultural initiatives in order to break down the hostility that once existed. After the Pope's visit and after the death of Mas Canosa, it seems more feasible than ever to end the embargo and normalize relations between the two countries. If you read between the lines, you will draw similar conclusions from this article which appears in today's NY Times. Although the article does not state it explicitly, one can only suspect that the Cuban government would like to see such exercises in Havana nostalgia flourish: October 13, 1998 A Nightclub Bottles Cuba, Before the Revolution By MIRTA OJITO MIAMI -- On the dance floor, Jose Cancela, a radio executive who left Cuba as a child, is shaking a pair of maracas, trying to keep up with the rhythm of a song that praises the hot tamales of a cook named Olga. Lily Renteria, a Cuban actress who arrived in Miami just over a year ago, is dancing next to him with a man who crossed the Florida Strait in a raft four years ago. It is dark and smoky on this recent Friday night in Cafe Nostalgia, the hottest dance club for Cuban music in Miami and, as its name suggest, the perfect place for those who like to cultivate their feelings of nostalgia for Cuba or, more specifically, for the nights of Havana, which for this crowd are one and the same. All night long, black-and-white musical movie clips from the 1950s and '60s play on a screen behind the stage. There is Celia Cruz, who was young and trim then but who is still singing and now lives in New Jersey. There is Beny More, long dead, but his voice strong and melodious on film. People sit mesmerized, listening to the music and looking at the images of their past. For the younger crowd, or for the non-Cubans in the audience, it is not their past they are looking at, but that of their parents or their own ideas of what Cuba must have been like back when it was fun and Americans liked to travel there for their honeymoons. The band plays again, and the music is loud but good, very good. Couples bump against one another on the tiny dance floor. The door opens a crack and a tall, handsome man comes in. An entourage follows. He is Francisco Gatorno, a Cuban actor who lives and works in Mexico City and is visiting Miami. He heads for the dance floor and taps Ms. Renteria, still dancing, on the shoulder. She turns around and jumps to hug him. They have not seen each other in five years. "When I saw him, my mind just went 'trah-trah-trah' and it went back to Cuba," Ms. Renteria said, making a mechanical sound as if the wheels of her memory were turning. "I can't tell you how many times that's happened to me here." Hovering over them, smiling beatifically at the scene as if it were his doing, is Pepe Horta, a Cuban government official turned successful businessman. Shortly after he left his job in Cuba at the government-controlled film institute in 1994 and moved to Miami, Horta opened Cafe Nostalgia, the kind of place that seems to exist to make such encounters possible. This is a place where on a given night a visitor to the club could run into her old high school teacher while, a few feet away on the stage, the Hollywood actor Andy Garcia, who was reared in Miami, bangs the drums. Ruben Blades has been here and so have Gloria Estefan and Bono of the band U2. But it is also the kind of place where grandmothers can be seen tapping their fingers to the beat. Horta is not the first Miami entrepreneur to profit from his own nostalgia and that of his countrymen, but he has managed to turn it into a kind of art. And now, with plans to open similar nightclubs in Miami Beach, Madrid and Paris, he may be the first to market internationally nostalgia for a certain lost moment in history. The longevity of Castro (73 years old, almost 40 of them in power) and the embargo that the United States has kept against Cuba for more than 30 years have made the island distant, inaccessible, mysterious. Horta has harnessed the allure and offered it in an irresistible combination: film and drinks and good music for a hungry crowd of exiles who cannot get enough of the country they lost. The seeming contradiction of his new role does not escape Horta, who was 6 when Castro came to power. Like most other people who remained in Cuba, Horta worked for the government all his life until his defection -- the same government that created the conditions that fueled the nostalgia in Miami. By the time he left Cuba, he was the director of Havana's Film Festival and generally considered one of the most powerful men on Havana's artistic scene. Now he is the person who has made nostalgia chic. "People said it would not be possible, that Miami is unforgiving, that Cubans here don't accept anyone who left after the 1960's," said Horta, 45, a smart man with a raspy voice and a suave air. "But here I am. I look at what I've done and I'm amazed at myself." Horta said he left Cuba on an impulse. Because he spent years living in Paris and traveling the world representing Cuba's film industry, he said, he had been privileged, and practically untouched by politics and the daily difficulties of life in Cuba. But everything changed one day at Havana's international airport as he waited to board a plane for Mexico on his way to a conference in New York. Suddenly, uniformed men ushered him to a room, took his passport and went through his belongings. Horta asked them what the problem was. They did not say. Eventually, he was allowed to go. By then, Horta had made up his mind. The rough treatment had been a warning: if he did not leave, he thought, he would be demoted or arrested. On arriving in Miami, Horta had to find a job. He said he had taken nothing of value from Cuba on that flight to Mexico except dozens of reels of old films for a documentary he was to make in Mexico about Cuban music. He was feeling nostalgic for his country and his family and noticed that everyone in Miami was similarly afflicted. The idea for Cafe Nostalgia just occurred to him. A friend lent him $48,000 and another gave him a few whisky bottles for opening night. At the beginning, some people stayed away. Horta had remained in Cuba too long, they said. He had been too powerful, too close to the decision makers to ignore what was going on, even if he had often been away from Cuba. But soon enough, attracted by the music and the buzz and the personality of Horta, the distrust collapsed and people flocked to Cafe Nostalgia. Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
