The Cuba connection

Will arts follow the shift in the political landscape?

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Even before Desi Arnaz first Babalu’d his way into American hearts and Dizzy Gillespie infused Cuban rhythms into mainstream jazz, music lovers in this country felt an almost mystical connection to the sonic soul and rhythm of the island nation that sits just 90 miles off the tip of Florida.

So when President Obama announced a major shift in U.S. policy toward Cuba last December, arts lovers rejoiced. Just this week, Obama announced further changes to the decades-long trade freeze that has defined U.S.-Cuba relations since 1960. All these changes must inevitably lead to a freer flow of culture between our two countries, right?

We might be witnessing the dawn of a golden age for Cuban arts up here in la Yuma (Cuban slang for the U.S.), but it’s too early to tell. Still, the close ties between Cuba and Madison predate Obama’s announcements. When the renowned Latin jazz group Irakere toured the United States in 1999 after being refused entry into the country for two decades, Madison was one of their stops. Master Afro-Cuban percussionist Roberto Viscaino taught at the UW for a semester in 2001. Legendary bandleader, composer and scholar Juan de Marcos González (best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club) has brought two of his projects, Sierra Maestra and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars, to Madison several times. Orlando “Maraca” Valle has been here. A handful of other, less-famous Cuban musicians, many of them based elsewhere, have visited Madison as well.

The UW’s Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program has been one of the key drivers of cultural interchange, hosting scholars and artists from Cuba, including a recent lecture by Tomás Fernández Robaina, archivist and head librarian from the National Library in Havana.

In the coming months, Madison will be awash in Cuban culture, thanks in large part to the presence of Juan de Marcos, a towering figure in Cuban music, who is doing a residency at UW-Madison this fall (see sidebar), punctuated by an Oct. 2 performance by the Afro-Cuban All-Stars at the Overture Center.

The Miami Herald characterized Obama’s actions this week as “taking a sledgehammer” to the embargo, which penalized foreign companies that do business in Cuba by preventing them from doing business in the United States. The goal was to topple Castro.

It didn’t work. But the embargo did not prevent all communication or travel between the two countries. More than a few Madison residents took advantage of that fact.

Cultural exchanges rely on person-to-person relationships, and many say Madison’s Cuban connection wouldn’t exist without Ricardo Gonzalez — a Cuban native and owner of the Cardinal Bar, a Latin music institution — who hosted the WORT-FM’s “La Junta” for 37 years and founded the Madison Camagüey Sister City Association.

Gonzalez believes Madison’s appetite for Cuban culture is growing, and that the shifting political landscape will help. “I think through the remainder of Obama’s term we’re going to see an increase in cultural exchange and Cubans traveling to this country, whether they’re musicians or artists of any kind,” Gonzalez says. “And you’re going to see a lot of exhibits and a lot more musical shows, and you’re going to see Americans going to Cuba to perform.”

He has one caveat, though. Cultural ties won’t be entirely normalized unless the embargo is completely lifted.

“The president can exercise his executive authority to strip the embargo of most of its teeth, but only Congress can eliminate it entirely,” Gonzalez says. “And if the president who gets elected in 2016 has different views about Cuba, they can roll back the changes and we can be right back where we were during the Bush years.”

A native of Camagüey, Cuba’s third-largest city, Gonzalez left Cuba in 1960, the year between Fidel Castro’s victory and the Bay of Pigs invasion. He did not return to the island until 1979, after the Carter administration made travel to Cuba possible again. In 1994, he launched the sister-city organization, which has sponsored a number of Cuban arts organizations, including a band, a chamber orchestra, a ballet and the International Video Arts Festival.

Bob Queen is another Madison figure who has brought Cuban culture to Madison.

He and his wife Nancy Kathman met there in 1971 while cutting sugar cane as part of the Venceremos Brigade, an international organization founded in 1969 by young idealists seeking to demonstrate solidarity with the revolution by laboring alongside Cuban workers. The couple has gone back many times since, most recently in February.

Queen, who once told a reporter he discovered his “first love” — Cuban music — on that 1971 trip, has brought dozens of bands from Cuba and other points around the world to play at Madison’s Orton Park Festival, La Fête de Marquette, Marquette Waterfront Festival and Central Park Sessions.

Queen sees the recent diplomatic shifts in a wider context.

“I’m glad Obama made the moves he did, but it took forever,” says Queen. “What they had to go through just to survive the blockade was hideous, something we should be ashamed of. During the period of adjustment when the Russians left, everybody lost 20 pounds. When the BP disaster happened and the oil slick was moving toward Cuban fisheries, nobody from the U.S. would talk to the Cuban scientists.”

But, Queen says, the Cubans adapted. “The last few times we’ve gone there, everybody has a little grocery and everybody has community gardens and fruit trees and pigs and chickens in the back yard, and they’ve become experts at homeopathy and herbal medicine. It’s just inspiring.” One constant since Queen began visiting the island is the music. There is, and always has been, an abundance of fantastic music being made throughout Cuba, and not just the salsa variety most Americans expect. There’s jazz, hip-hop, rock and more.

And not just music: Cuba has been producing outstanding ballet, theater and visual art for decades as well. Madison got a taste of that visual art this spring when UW’s Chazen Museum hosted a well-attended exhibition of Cuban photography. Chazen director Russell Panczenko believes that as more Americans visit Cuba and see all the great work being done there, they may return home with a new taste and appreciation for Cuban art. For its part, the Chazen purchased several pieces from the show for its permanent collection.

“Cuba has a vibrant arts scene, and we’ll undoubtedly see more of it in the United States,” Panczenko says. “We’d certainly love to see more of what’s going on there.”

But for the last half-century, most people in the U.S. have been deprived of most of that great art. While plenty of Cuban artists and musicians showed their work here even during the Bush years, a large percentage of them had already left Cuba. For Queen, there’s something special about bringing musicians straight from the island. “It’s easier to bring in a Cuban band from France or Canada, and most of them are great, but it’s like getting a pickup squad when you could have the real deal,” he says. Of course, Juan de Marcos himself has lived in Mexico for the last seven years and is in the process of settling permanently in the United States, but the rest of Sierra Maestra still lives in Cuba.

Queen believes the easing of travel restrictions for Americans who want to go to Cuba is already making a difference in terms of cultural exchange. You still can’t go online and book a flight to Havana on Delta or United, but important improvements have taken place. In the past, travelers had to be connected to a specially licensed organization, such as an academic institution or the Madison Camagüey Sister City Association, to go to Cuba from the United States, though many people found ways to skirt the rules by traveling via Canada or another country with fewer restrictions. These days, all you have to do is complete a self-administered permit affirming that your trip fits into one of 12 categories, from cultural to religious to education to medical to humanitarian. “Anybody with a pulse could fit into one of them,” says Queen.

As for the logistics of travel, companies in Texas and Florida are launching ferries to Cuba, and travelers can bring 200 pounds of gear with them, enough allowance for a band to transport a fair amount of equipment. Air travel to Cuba is still controlled by a select group of licensed charter companies, but President Obama is currently working on allowing U.S. air carriers to fly there without third-party involvement; just pop Madison and Havana into the little boxes on Orbitz, and voilà, you’re flying the friendly skies.

Despite the easing of restrictions, bringing performers from abroad is expensive, risky and complicated, even when they are coming from a nation with a friendly government, and many obstacles have more to do with bureaucratic bungling than with politics.

For example, one of the highlights of the autumn-long Cubano-rama was supposed to be an appearance by Sierra Maestra at the Sept. 19 Willy Street Fair as part of the Madison World Music Festival. But the band fell victim to a computer glitch at the U.S. State Department and members did not receive visas.

Sierra Maestra was replaced by the San Francisco-based Cuban band Pellejo Seco, but the cancellation highlights the challenges many performers face: Sometimes an artist has the misfortune of living in a country the U.S. government thinks is full of terrorists. Sometimes there’s no problem with the country, but the performer is too politically controversial for comfort. Sometimes an overburdened State Department employee drops the ball — or a computer breaks.

“It’s something that’s been befuddling presenters all over the country for a long time,” says Esty Dinur, marketing and communications director for the Wisconsin Union Theater. She serves as chair of artistic selection for Madison’s World Music Festival, which despite the difficulties, has wrangled visas for a number of Cuban acts, including Mezcla last year, Maraca in 2008 and Estrella Acosta in 2007.

Dinur traveled to Cuba as part of a delegation from UW-Milwaukee back in 2001, and was floored by the caliber of musicianship she saw on the island: “I was just amazed by the music there, the variety, how beautiful it is and how prolific it is, with a band playing on almost every street corner,” she says.

Willie Ney, executive director of UW’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, which spearheaded the Juan de Marcos residency, has been burned by performers’ visa struggles too many times to be overly optimistic. He says the ebb and flow of Cuban performers into the U.S. has largely been a function of who’s sitting in the White House. When a Democrat is president, things open up. As soon as a Republican takes office, the door slams shut again. The flow improved markedly during the Clinton years, paving the way for visits to Madison by the likes of protest singer/songwriter Carlos Varela, who played the Barrymore in 1998. But Varela was essentially banned from the United States by the George W. Bush administration, and didn’t set foot in this country again for a decade. Since Obama has been in office, Varela has toured the U.S. a couple of times and has met with lawmakers to advocate for mending relations with Cuba.

Montes de Oca, a Havana-based music promoter and producer, is also hopeful but wary. “The new situation and possible removal of the embargo would be beneficial for cultural exchange, especially for music, in my opinion,” de Oca wrote in an email to Isthmus. “But...what is being said today could be different tomorrow, and the reins of the politicians and their bureaucracies as means of control are beyond our reach.”

de Oca also worries that artists may not all benefit equally. “The market is a dual thing,” he says. “On the one hand it could save us, but on the other, we could lose out to the favored commercial interests.”

As for Cubans’ appetite for visits by U.S. performers, Ricardo Gonzalez is certain that it’s strong, noting that the Minnesota Orchestra recently performed to a sellout crowd in Havana. In November, the sister-city project is taking the Madison-based Afro-Peruvian jazz group Golpe Tierra to Camagüey to play at the Fiesta del Tinajón, an annual celebration named for the traditional symbol of that city — the large clay pots used for centuries by residents to collect rainwater. Gonzalez says this is the first time he is aware of a band from Madison traveling to Cuba to perform. And he says it wouldn’t be possible without the opening of travel to Cuba that is taking place right now.

“This is the irony of the whole thing,” he says. “After 57 years of revolution and anti-imperialism campaigns, the Cuban people love anything that’s American, and they love American people. The relationship between Cuba and the United States goes deeper than these cultural things. There is truly a unique connection between the two countries.”

Juan de Marcos, who has experienced the oscillations of U.S. policy toward Cuba firsthand, agrees with Gonzalez. “There’s an appetite for American music,” he says. “I started out as a rock ’n’ roll player. I loved the great rock bands of the ’70s: Iron Butterfly, King Crimson, Steely Dan, Grateful Dead, Santana.”

de Marcos hopes people here will rediscover their passion for Cuban music — which happened to some degree during the 1990s with the arrival of the Buena Vista Social Club album in U.S. record stores. He also believes that Cuban musicians stand to benefit financially as they gain access to U.S. companies with better distribution and marketing muscle. But he worries a little about how that could influence the product.

“I just hope commercialism is not going to kill our music,” de Marcos says. “We have been enclosed in kind of a bubble for years. When you don’t have access to information, you may think everything going on outside is better than what you have. But in fact this is not the truth. We do have a history. We do have a culture that we must preserve.”

Awash in Cuban music

Juan de Marcos González & the Afro-Cuban All-Stars

Overture Center, Oct. 2, 8 pm

Juan de Marcos played a central role in the creation of the Buena Vista Social Club and Sierra Maestra. The UW Arts Institute, the School of Music and the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives are sponsoring a number of public events as part of Juan de Marcos’ interdisciplinary residency, including lectures (de Marcos possesses encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Cuban music) and workshops.

Gliceria González Abreu, workshop concert

Oct. 18, Immanuel Lutheran Church, 1021 Spaight St., 5-7 pm

The event features two of de Marcos’ daughters, Gliceria (left) and Laura Lydia González Abreu. And it’s the final concert by students in a Cuban string ensemble workshop. Featuring a lecture on the history of Cuban music by Juan de Marcos.

Telmary Diaz (Havana-born,Toronto-based hip-hop artist)

Lecture: Oct. 20, Fredric March Play Circle

Performances: Oct. 22-24, Overture Center’s Promenade Hall as part of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives “Passin’ the Mic” event.

For details on these events, visit artsinstitute.wisc.edu.