Forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiving is remembering without pain.” – Celia Cruz
Tonight, November 22nd Celia Sinfonica, in partnership with Loud & Live in Miami will honor the Queen of Salsa's legacy by reimagining her songs for symphony.
“On Saturday, November 22nd, her legacy will be honored through Celia Sinfónica, at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami, with a spectacular tribute unlike anything experienced before. Produced by Loud And Live and the Celia Cruz Foundation, Celia Sinfónica is a groundbreaking tribute concert that reimagines Celia Cruz’s most iconic songs as symphonic masterpieces. For the first time ever, her timeless repertoire including anthems like “La Vida Es Un Carnaval”, “Quimbara”, and more, will be transformed by sweeping orchestral arrangements together with the vibrant rhythms of Afro-Caribbean soul in an unforgettable evening, performed live by the Florida International University (FIU) Symphony Orchestra and accompanied by a lineup of renowned vocalists and instrumentalists, soon to be announced. ‘Celia Cruz was more than a music legend, she was a force of culture, identity, and inspiration for millions around the world,’ said Nelson Albareda, CEO of Loud And Live. ‘With Celia Sinfónica, we are honored to celebrate her enduring legacy in a way that’s never been done before. This production is not only a tribute to her iconic voice and music, but also a testament to her lasting impact on generations past, present, and future.’”
On December 5, 2025 the Miami Film Festival will screen the documentary La Cuba Mia (My Cuba) at the Koubek Center which focuses on a concert held in Little Havana in April 2001, which brought together Celia Cruz and her dear friend, Spanish artist Emilio Alberto Aragón—better known as Miliki—a beloved singer, accordionist, and clown who delighted Cuban children on 1950s television alongside his brothers Gaby and Fofó.
Who is Celia Cruz?
The centennial of Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso’s birth was observed and celebrated on October 21, 2025. She is better known by her stage name Celia Cruz.
She was born on October 21, 1925 in the poorest section of the Santos Suárez neighborhood in Havana and lived in a small home with 13 relatives. Her mother, Catalina Alfonso, was a stay-at-home mom who looked after her vast extended family, while her father, Simon Cruz, worked as a railroad stoker. He monitored steam pressure, managed water levels, maintained the fire, and regulated steam-powered jets that distributed coal within the firebox of the locomotive engine.
She began singing as a child, and to compete on radio programs as a young woman. Cruz’s cousin Serafín entered her in a competition on the radio program La Hora del Té (Tea Time) in 1947. She received first prize, a meringue cake, for her performance of the tango “Nostalgia.”
Fifty two years later on April 30, 1999 in the Spanish program, Séptimo de caballería”, in which she sang and took part in a panel discussion with other artists: Ángela Carrasco, Lolita Flores, and Miguel Bosé. Celia briefly discussed the role her mom played in circumventing her dad’s objections to his daughter having a career in show business. “My father didn’t want me to be a singer or an artist. My mother told me, ‘Forget it, I’ll get it sorted out with him.’”
To appease her father, who was embarrassed that his daughter was involved in show business, Celia pursued her studies to become a teacher, but continued to compete in singing competitions. She recorded her first track in Venezuela in 1948.
FBI files, declassified in 2004, revealed that she had allegedly flirted with Cuban communists in the early 1950s. This was at the moment that Celia was a breakout star in all of Cuba having joined the Sonora Matancera Orchestra in August 1950.
At the height of her popularity in Cuba, Fidel Castro took power in 1959.
Miguel Angel Quevedo, a Cuban businessman, hired Celia Cruz to perform with a pianist in his home at the beginning of 1959. The most influential magazine in Cuba, Bohemia, which had backed the revolution, was owned by Quevedo. … On the night of the performance at Quevedo’s house, Celia was singing when all of a sudden the guests began to rush to the front door. Fidel Castro had arrived. She kept singing.
Fidel Castro attempted to force the salsa singer to pay him homage prior to that, but Celia refused. Salserísimo Perú, a Youtube site founded by three Peruvian journalists to disseminate knowledge on salsa and tropical music. The following is their 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.
In the same Spanish program, Séptimo de caballería, mentioned earlier she was repeatedly asked to reconcile with the Cuban dictatorship, “to open the door.”
Celia's assessment of the Cuban government
Celia responded to them, “I’m not going to tell you she is above Cuba. But Catalina Alfonso [ her mom] is right next to Cuba, and for her I’m not the one who’s going to open the door. I’m not there, because they closed it to me. My mother died, and I couldn’t go and bury her because they didn’t want to let me in. Let that regime leave then, because it has to go. But should I go there? What you told me are pretty words but I won’t...”
Celia Cruz was punished by Fidel Castro for refusing to bend the knee, and for wanting to live in freedom on her own terms.
“I don’t want to go to a country where I can’t speak like I’m speaking to you now. They were the first to [distance] themselves. Now, since the dollars are so convenient for them, they send all those poor old people here.” …“[Cuba is] a farm, and he’s the owner.” … “There’s a book of Cuban music that couldn’t be released to the world if it didn’t feature Celia Cruz. And it didn’t, because I’m out. So they’re the most unjust and narrow-minded. Because Celia Cruz has to be included there, whether they like it or not, I am Cuba, period.”
The program ended with Celia Cruz responding to the Spanish actress and singer Lolita Flores with a sound bite to sum up her view of the Cuban government. “Let me tell you nicely: May the cancer that this country suffers from disappear.”
Her music still banned in Cuba
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.”
Cuban cultural genocide
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.
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.
How Fidel Castro destroyed Black Cuban civil society
In September 1960 when Fidel Castro met with Malcolm X in Harlem for a photo op, his communist revolution was ending Black Cuban's agency in Cuba.
This was known publicly 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 h as the largest per capita prison population in the world. Although official data is unavailable, it is known that a disproportionate number are Black Cubans.
Castro said he ended anti-black racism in 1959, Blacks saying it still existed were punished.
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 for decades that there was no racism in Cuba.
Abdias Nascimento born in the town of Franca, State of São Paulo, in March 1914, Nascimento was the grandson of enslaved Africans. His father was a cobbler and a musician; his mother made and catered sweets and candies. He received his B. A. in Economics from the University of Rio de Janeiro in 1938, and post-graduate degrees from the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (1957) and the Oceanography Institute (1961).
Nascimento participated early in Brazil’s equivalent of the civil rights movement, the Brazilian Black Front (São Paulo, 1929-30). He led the organization of the Afro-Campineiro Congress, a meeting of Brazilian blacks to protest discrimination in the city of Campinas in 1938. Nascimento passed away in 2011.
This is what he said in an open letter on October 30, 2009 concerning racism in Cuba:
“The facts as I have come to know them indicate that we are facing a clear case of political intimidation against those, in Cuba, who raise their voices in protest against racism, discriminatory practices, and all kinds of intimidations meted out to citizens who dare call for the establishment, in their country, of a State that is respectful of Civil Rights, of the right of citizens to freely congregate and form organizations and to freely demonstrate their opposition to discriminatory practices of which they feel they are a target for one reason or another.”
Meanwhile 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.
Celebrate Celia, Forget Fidel
Communists are already celebrating the centenary of the birth of Fidel Castro in with a series of propaganda stunts over the next year. They should be called out and fact checked.
However, supporters of freedom and beautiful music should continue to commemorate Celia Cruz’s entire life and legacy through her music, and words.
There are other events being organized to celebrate her life and legacy that you can still attend.
On November 7, 2025 the Coral Gables Museum in South Florida opened a Celia Cruz photo exhibit of the work of photographer Alexis Rodriguez-Duarte in collaboration with Tico Torres. It is titled “Happy 100th Birthday Celia!”
In September 2025 the Latin Grammys celebrated her Latin Grammy win.
A special way to honor and celebrate the memory of Celia Cruz: Celebrate black artists jailed in Cuba today for acts of conscience.
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| Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara jailed for their art |
Celia spoke out for Cuba’s political prisoners in life, and she would have spoken up for prisoners of conscience Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, and others if she were still with us.
Despite winning two Latin Grammys, their music is also banned in Cuba by the dictatorship.
Celebrate Celia by lifting them up, and letting others know about their plight, and that of other Cuban prisoners of conscience.
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