The People's Forum warmly welcomes the Cuban dictatorship’s Foreign Minister, Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla in New York City, but should be celebrating the life and legacy of Celia Cruz instead.
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| Forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiving is remembering without pain.” – Celia Cruz |
The centennial of Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso's birth will be celebrated on October 21, 2025. She is better known by her stage name Celia Cruz.
Celia had agency and she decided not to bend the knee to the dictatorship. She wanted to live and perform in freedom, which meant leaving Cuba after 1959.
Fidel Castro attempted to force the salsa singer to pay him homage, but Celia refused. Salserísimo Perú, a Youtube site founded by three Peruvian journalists to disseminate knowledge on salsa and tropical music, provides a more comprehensive and accurate history than the Smithsonian Institution.
The following is an account of Celia Cruz’s first “encounter” with Fidel Castro.
“In the early months of 1959, Celia Cruz was hired to sing with a pianist at the house of the Cuban businessman Miguel Angel Quevedo. Quevedo owned the magazine Bohemia, the most influential in Cuba and who had supported the revolution in the last few years. The guerrilla movement with a certain Fidel Castro in front proclaimed in Santiago the beginning of the revolution. At that moment Celia enjoyed great popularity for “Yebero Moderno”, “Tu voz” and “Burundanga” songs she had recorded with the Sonora Matancera. As a guest artist of Rogelio Martinez’s group the Guarachera (Celia) was free to accept other contracts as a soloist. This allowed her to show her talent on different radio stations in Havana, and perform in Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru. Since the regime of Fidel took power, it had begun to systematically seize businesses, radio and television stations. [Fidel Castro speaking: ‘The revolution was something like a hope and that joy, possibly, prevented us from thinking all that we still had to do.’ For the Guarechera, Fidel was ending free expression and the arts in her country. The night of the show in the home of Quevedo, Celia was singing standing next to the pianist, when suddenly the guests started to run to the front door of the house. Fidel Castro had arrived. Neither she nor the pianist moved and continued singing. Suddenly, Quevedo approached Celia and told her that Fidel wanted to meet her because in his
guerrilla days, when he cleaned his rifle he was listening to Burundanga. Celia replied that she had been hired to sing next to the piano, and that was her place. If Fidel wanted to meet her, he would have to come to her. But the commandant did not do that.”
Castro barred Celia Cruz from visiting her dying mother
Since Celia Cruz refused to bow to the new dictator, and wanted to continue to live the life of a free artist, she had to leave Cuba on July 15, 1960. However, when her mom was ill she tried to return to see her in 1962, but was barred from entering the country by Fidel Castro. When her mother died Celia was again blocked by the dictatorship from attending her funeral. Because she was not an active supporter of the regime, her music was banned in Cuba.
She was finally able to return to Cuba in 1990, but not on territory controlled by the Castro dictatorship, when she played a concert for Cuban employees who worked on the U.S. Guantanamo Naval Base, and collected Cuban soil that would be entombed with her in 2003.
Music still banned in Cuba today
Regime apologists and their agents of influence have attempted to pretend that things have changed with regards to artistic freedom.
On August 8, 2012 BBC News reported that Cuba’s ban on anti-Castro musicians had been quietly lifted and on August 10 the BBC correspondent in Cuba, Sarah Rainsford, tweeted that she had been given names of forbidden artists by the central committee and the internet was a buzz that the ban on anti-Castro musicians had been quietly lifted. Others soon followed reporting on the news. The stories specifically mentioned Celia Cruz as one of the artists whose music would return to Cuban radio.
There was only one problem. It was not true. Diario de Cuba reported on August 21, 2012 that Tony Pinelli, a well known musician and radio producer, distributed an e-mail in which Rolando Álvarez, the national director of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión (ICRT) confirmed that the music of the late Celia Cruz would continue to be banned. The e-mail clearly stated: “All those who had allied with the enemy, who acted against our families, like Celia Cruz, who went to sing at the Guantanamo Base, the ICRT arrogated to itself the right, quite properly, not to disseminate them on Cuban radio ”
Celia is in good company. Other major Cuban artists who have had their music banned by the Castro regime are Olga Guillot, Rolando Lecuona, Paquito D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, Israel Cachao López, Ramón “Mongo” Santamaría, Mario Bauza, Arsenio Rodríguez, Willy Chirino, and Gloria Estefan.
Cuban cultural genocide
According to the 2004 book Shoot the Singer!: Music Censorship Today edited by Marie Korpe, there is growing concern that post-revolution generations in Cuba are growing up without knowing or hearing censored musicians such as Celia Cruz, Olga Guillot, and the long list above. This could lead to a loss of Cuban identity in future generations. This approach has been referred to as a Cuban cultural genocide, denying generations of Cubans their history.
Communists are celebrating the centenary of the birth of Fidel Castro with a series of propaganda stunts over the next year. They should be called out and fact checked.
One of these stunts was carried out by the People's Forum in New York City on September 21, 2025, and was an effort to whitewash the racist legacy of the Cuban dictatorship.
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| The People’s Forum, September 21, 2025 on X |
In September 1960 Fidel Castro met with Malcolm X in Harlem, and this past Sunday the People’s Forum sought to celebrate this encounter and host Bruno Rodriguez, the foreign minister of the Cuban dictatorship.
Left out of the celebration was the anti-Black legacy of the Cuban revolution that continues to reverberate to the present day in Cuba.
Castro’s communist revolution ended Black Cuban's agency in Cuba.
This was known by 1961 when Cuban black nationalist Juan René Betancourt in his essay, "Castro and the Cuban Negro", published in the NAACP publication The Crisis in 1961 detailed how it was done.
“Of the 256 Negro societies in Cuba, many have had to close their doors and others are in death agony. One can truthfully say, and this is without the slightest exaggeration, that the Negro movement in Cuba died at the hands of Sr. Fidel Castro.” … “Yet this is the man who had the cynical impudence to visit the United States in 1960 for the purpose of censuring American racial discrimination. Although this evil obviously exists in the United States, Castro is not precisely the man to offer America solutions, nor even to pass judgement.”
Between 1898 and 1959 the relationship between Black-Americans and Black-Cubans was based on their being part of an international black diaspora. This relationship ended when the Castro regime ended autonomous black civil society in 1962, and consolidated totalitarian rule.
It was replaced by Castro and his white revolutionary elite allying with Black elites in the United States, and Africa while criticizing racism in the United States.
For decades, the Castro regime expected Black Cubans to be obedient, submissive, and grateful to the white revolutionary elite, and this was reflected in official propaganda with racist tropes.
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The elimination of Afro-Cubans from this dynamic by the new communist revolutionary elite turned racism into a political tool outside of Cuba to advance the Castro regime's communist agenda, but turned it into a taboo topic by ungrateful blacks, labeled counter-revolutionaries by the dictatorship.
Black Cubans who think for themselves are still punished today, and often with greater severity than their white counterparts.
Cuban blacks today that would have been political leaders in the 1940s and 1950s are dissidents persecuted, hunted and killed by the secret police.
Based on the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, according to the January 13, 2020 article by EuropaPress, Cuba today has the largest per capita prison population in the world. Although official data is unavailable, it is known that a disproportionate number are Black Cubans.
On March 22, 1959 Fidel Castro declared that racism no longer existed in Cuba, to question that was to be a counter-revolutionary. The regime claimed over the next six decades that there is no racism in Cuba while poverty disproportionately impacts black Cubans with 95% having the lowest incomes compared to 58% of white Cubans, after six decades of communism, and independent black voices continue to be silenced.
An opportunity next month to counter The Peoples Forum's and Castroism's lies.
However, next month supporters of freedom and beautiful music should commemorate Celia Cruz’s entire life and legacy through her music, and words.
Speaking up for jailed Cuban artists today, who Celia would have spoken up for their freedom if she were alive today, such as prisoners of conscience Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.
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