"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
There are dire consequences to life under totalitarianism and it impacts everything including music according to the book Shoot the singer!: music censorship today edited by Marie Korpe there is increasing concern within the international music community that post-revolution generations are growing up without knowing or hearing these censored musicians and that this could lead to a loss of Cuban identity in future generations.The phrase cultural genocide is used to describe the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s that blacklisted and censored scores of musicians and artists. The following is the continuation of a modest attempt to identify some of the victims of this process that has damaged and continues to damage Cuban culture and Cubans.
Celia Cruz born in Havana, Cuba asÚrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonsowas one of the most successful Salsa performers of the 20th century, with twenty-three gold albums to her name. She was renowned internationally as the "Queen of Salsa" as well as "La Guarachera de Cuba". She spent most of her career living in New Jersey, and working in the United States and several Latin American countries. She was a nonperson in Cuba. Celia Cobo of Billboard Magazine once said "Cruz is indisputably the best known and most influential female figure in the history of Cuban music." At the time of her death the Associated Press reported:
"While the death of salsa singer Celia Cruz was reported prominently in newspapers across the world, the news got scant and somewhat bitter treatment Thursday in the official media of her homeland. The Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma reported Cruz’s death in a tiny, two-paragraph story published low on page 6 of the eight-page edition." [...] Cuban officials reportedly refused her request to visit her dying mother. “She always said that they didn’t let her see her mother when she was dying,” Soriano said, “and now she (Cruz) died without ever getting her fondest wish, which was to see this house again one day.”
Paquito was a child prodigy. He started learning music at the age of 5 with his father Tito Rivera, a well-known classical saxophonist and conductor in Cuba. D'Rivera grew up in Cuba, playing both saxophone and clarinet and performing with the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra at a young age.When he was seven, became the youngest artist ever to endorse a musical instrument, when he signed on with the music company Selmer. By 1980, D'Rivera was dissatisfied about the constraints placed on his music in Cuba for many years, and had always longed to come to the United States. In early 1981, while on tour in Spain, he sought asylum with the American Embassy, and left his homeland, wife and child behind in search of a better life with a promise to get them out. Upon his arrival in the United States, D'Rivera found help from many people for him and his family. His mother Maura and his sister Rosario had left Cuba in 1968 and had become US citizens. Many notables who reached out to help Paquito were Dizzy Gillespie, David Amram, Mario Bauza and Bruce Lundvall, who gave him first solo recording date.
Arturo Sandoval is a jazz trumpeter and pianist. He was born in Artemisa, in Havana Province, Cuba. Sandoval, while still in Cuba, was influenced by jazz legends Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, and Dizzy Gillespie, finally meeting Dizzy later in 1977. Gillespie promptly became a mentor and colleague, playing with Arturo in concerts in Europe and Cuba and later featuring him in The United Nations Orchestra. Sandoval defected to the United States of America while touring with Gillespie in 1990, and became a naturalized citizen in 1999.
The last time Los Van Van played in Miami over a decade ago I participated in the public debate and had two essays published in the FIU Beacon and the Miami New Times. Here is the New Times piece the title was theirs not mine.
Los Van Van: Symbols of Repression, Symbols of Freedom
Pedro Luis Ferrer, Bobby Jimenez , and Bibiana Borroto are names that may not be familiar to you. They are Cuban artists who were blacklisted because they were not sufficiently revolutionary for the Castro regime. Blacklisting in Cuba is worse than anything found during the McCarthy era in the United States. It has a more Stalinist edge. Not only are you unable to work, but your name is erased from your old albums. You become a nonperson.
Even more tragic is that friends of those blacklisted turn their backs on them. The famous Cuban folk singer Silvio Rodriguez has never spoken up for singer and author Pedro Luis Ferrer, his blacklisted ex-friend. Another famous folk singer, Pablo Milanes, turned his back on Bobby Jimenez, a man who had been like a brother to him. The irony is that Jimenez was neither a revolutionary nor a counterrevolutionary. In Cuba, in order to play you must be, at least in name, a "revolutionary." More ironic still, both Pablo Milanes and Silvio Rodriguez spent some time in prison for their counterrevolutionary views before being "rehabilitated." Even heredity can crush a musical career in Cuba. Bibiana Borroto's career as a classical guitarist was stymied because her father was a political prisoner.
Fidel Castro sacrificed freedom in Cuba to advance his own agenda. If we even remotely use the same means as Castro, then we will be led to the same end. In short we are helping Castro when we attack freedom in the name of freedom. The Castro regime has being doing just that for 40 years. We, the Cuban exile, are part of the Cuban nation, and we must be a beacon of freedom and tolerance for those who have lived in the darkness and oppression of Castro's tyranny for these past four decades.
Los Van Van's members are serfs of Fidel Castro whether they believe in his communist regime or not. They have only three choices: exile, banishment from music, or hewing to the party line. To demand that artists follow a particular political line is an affront to both democratic principles and basic human rights. Let us who live in freedom embrace with our values and principles those who do not.
The true test of respect for freedom of expression and thought can be found in our reaction to those things with which we strongly disagree. Twenty years ago in Skokie, Illinois, Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust endured American Nazis marching through their community, with police protection no less. Recently in Washington, D.C., skinheads and members of the Ku Klux Klan were able to obtain a permit and receive police protection from the city government, without being charged for it. The City of Miami's attempt to stop the Los Van Van concert via clumsy attempts at censorship, prior restraint, and charging the promoter for security and insurance was just plain wrong.
Finally, to all of you who sit by quietly while others issue bomb threats: Have you ever thought that it is in the Castro regime's best interest to generate violent conflicts and bombings here in Miami in order to continue its campaign of smearing Cuban exiles and proclaiming us terrorists? The Castro spies arrested last year had a history of encouraging violence and calling into radio stations with outrageous threats. Violence should be condemned, not tolerated. We have a moral obligation to criticize in a civil manner what we think is wrong, but we also have a moral obligation to protect from violations of civil and political rights those with whom we disagree.
In my opinion, if we are to protest, it should not be against the artists, who are victims in this situation, but rather against the tyranny in Havana that has turned artists (as well as the majority of the Cuban people on the island) into vassals of the regime, working for the feudal lord and master Fidel Castro.
Secondarily, we should protest against politicians here in Miami who seek to profit politically from the suffering of Cuban exiles by playing cheap politics with basic human rights -- rights that end up being trashed in the process. Not only do these politicians (and their own scandals) give a black eye to democracy, they compound their sin by violating the fundamental Constitutional principles they are sworn to uphold when they take office. Perhaps in the age of Clinton oaths and lies, upholding the U.S. Constitution no longer means much. But it should.
Our struggle against Fidel Castro is a struggle for the future of the Cuban nation. Do we want a Cuba in which the freedom to speak, work, and pray are controlled by the state? Or do we want these freedoms to be the foundation of a free and prosperous nation? Whether the state is a totalitarian dictatorship, as in Cuba today, or a representative democracy like the City of Miami, neither the tyrant nor the democratic majority can nor should have the ability to silence unpopular minorities from freely associating and freely expressing themselves.
The names of Pedro Luis Ferrer, Bobby Jimenez, Bibiana Borroto, and the many other artists in Cuba whose careers were cut short, or who were blacklisted for refusing to bow to Fidel Castro, should never be forgotten. They should be honored in the most tangible way possible: by buying their music.
Leave the artists to their art and demand that the Castro regime do the same. Politicizing the arts has been the playground of totalitarians since the French Revolution. Basta ya!
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