Get ready for the Cuban invasion
Better press your ruffled shirts. As the Castro era winds down, the music of Havana -- old and
new --promises to follow swing as the next big trend.

Saturday, February 13, 1999
STEPHANIE NOLEN
Arts Reporter, the Globe and Mail, Canada

Miami, Fla. -- The sound vibrates up from the asphalt a
half-block away. Behind the door of Café Nostalgia, there
is a massive, almost violent barrage of pulsing congas and
blaring horns. A motley collection of young artists from
Cuba is on stage, performing an endless improvisation
that weaves from mambo to salsa to jazz to son.

Café Nostalgia is the size of a large living room, tucked in
on Calle Ocho (Eighth Street), the heart of Miami's Little
Havana. It is thick with smoke and so dark that the drinks
menu (10 variations on rum) comes with a flashlight.
Memorabilia from prerevolutionary Cuba are everywhere:
The walls are covered floor to ceiling with age-stained
portraits of Benny Moré, Celia Cruz, and the other great
names from the heyday of Havana's Tropicana Club.

The café, which opened in 1995, has been drawing
crowds in the past six months to see acts like this
impromptu band, in their football jerseys and baseball
hats. This is the new Cuban sound, and its only rival for
the attentions of an increasingly ravenous audience is the
old Cuban sound that gave it birth. When the band at
Nostalgia takes a break after hours on the stage, a movie
screen drops down behind them and flickers with archival
footage of Moré and other legends. The musicians stop
clowning around at the bar and turn to watch,
mesmerized.

Old or new, if it's Cuban, it's hot. The first signal came
two years ago, when Buena Vista Social Club, a CD
featuring former stars of the Havana nightclub scene, won
a Grammy and became a sleeper hit. There has been a
steady buzz about the music ever since. But now, in much
the same way that mambo and rumba followed big-band
swing in the 1950s, Latin music antique and fresh seems
poised to take over from this decade's swing-revival craze.
Salsa has drawn steadily greater crowds to clubs from
Halifax to Victoria for the past 10 years. Now it is being
joined by the heavier, conga-driven music of Cuba, and
the cigar-smoking, mojito-drinking lounge scene that
comes with it. More than just music, it is art and film and
all manner of fancy culinary treatments of yuca and
plantain, all with their inspiration in Havana's glory days.

"The old Cuba is like Atlantis," says Cuban-American
writer John Lantigua, sipping a daiquiri on a warm winter
evening. Lantigua (whose novel about Cuban exiles,
Player's Vendetta, will appear in August) has watched
what he calls the "Cuban craze" with some bemusement
from his adopted home of Miami. "It's an island
continent that sank. It was a continent of magicians,
except in this case the magicians were the musicians."

But why now? First, there is the growing appetite for
"world music," matched with the growing numbers and
visibility of Latin communities in North America. In
particular, though, loosening political strictures in both
Cuba and the United States are making much more of
this music available. Fidel Castro's Communist regime is
weakening from economic pressure and his old age, while
tourists (from Canada, Europe and, increasingly, the
U.S.) are visiting the island in record numbers. The
world's eyes are on Cuba, and this has fanned the flames
of nostalgia for the prerevolutionary era.

"It's a phenomenon," says José Tillan, the director of
talent relations for MTV Latin America, which is based in
Miami. "This music that was never exported; it's
romantic. And it's had an influence on the musicians and
their movement."

The legacy of Moré and company is clearly audible
among the new bands, whether they play traditional
music, Afro-Cuban jazz or, the latest thing, spicy songo.
Buena Vista Social Club, with elderly greats such as
79-year-old pianist Reuben Gonzalez, is by now a
platinum seller worldwide, and Gonzalez's young
successors are finding enthusiastic international
audiences. The hottest is Changa Habanera, a band that
plays the new Cuban sound, timba: a fusion of jazz and
rumba, with hip-hop and reggae thrown in. It has its roots
in son, the guitar-and-brass-driven Afro-jazz band sound
of the fifties. Timba is dance music in the tradition of the
mambo, but with a much harder edge.

Many of the most popular timba songs are subtly
political, a departure from the sex-and-tears tradition of
bolero. Take Manolín Gonzalez Hernandez, better known
as El Medico de la Salsa -- the salsa doctor. A physician
turned musician now adulated in Cuba and beyond,
Hernandez is unusually outspoken in his critticism of the
revolution and what it has done to Cuban music. "They
tried to take away the son," he has said, sneering at the
folky protest-song sound of Castro's Cuba. El Medico
sings fast tunes about life in dollar-driven Havana, about
a local girl who left him to mix with free-spending
tourists.

"The new music is sort of blender music, it's merengue
on speed," says Nil Lara, a child of Cuban exiles who is
now a musician in Miami. With his eponymous band
(which includes Toronto's Andrew Yeomanson on guitar)
he sings in English and Spanish, and plays an electric
version of the tres, a traditional Cuban six-stringed
instrument. "This music has no structure; it's just -- bang!
But that's the frustration of the people. They just want to
play. The bands are like paratroopers."

Yet the traditional music is selling every bit as well. The
most magical story in this revival is the work of Alejandro
Blanco Uribe, a sound engineer from Venezuela. Sipping
Tanqueray and soda in a café, Blanco Uribe is poised and
charming -- except when he starts talking about Cuban
music. Then he splutters and rants and resorts to
exuberant arm gestures that impperil waiters passing with
trays of spicy shrimp.

Blanco Uribe has been manager of a Venezuelan record
label, director of the country's national arts foundation
and director of a major Caracas opera house. But his first
love is Cuban music. In 1995, financier friends of his
working in Havana caught sight of some warehouses
filled with vinyl recordings. "My friend called to tell me
about this, and I said, 'Tell me the names of the artists.' I
could not believe it," recalls Blanco Uribe, eyes wide even
now as he tells the story.

Within a week, he was in Havana for the first time in his
life. There he found decrepit warehouses filled with
stacks and stacks of recorded radio performances by
some of the century's greatest musicians: Moré, Nat King
Cole, Barbarito Diez. The recordings, made in the
200-seat radio theatres of the thirties and forties, had been
sitting uncooled and uncared for since they were made.
Some were almost unintelligible.

Blanco Uribe lovingly rinsed the records in shampoo,
played them on a Second- World-War-era machine, and
transferred them to digital cassettes for transport to
Cambridge, England. There, a new sound-engineering
process allowed him to remove what he calls "the fried
eggs," leaving the original music free of scratches and
hiss.

Of the thousands of recordings, he chose 50 for a
four-CD set called Cuba Es Musica, packaged with
lush historical documentation in a snazzy case that looks
like a cigar box (available in Canada in March). He
launched a new label, set up a studio in Havana, and
abandoned his life to restoring the long-silenced sound of
the thirties and forties. "It was like hearing ghosts," he
says.

Blanco Uribe's collection is made up mostly of ballads --
tracks too short to contain the wild, elated improv of
less-commercial music. But its recognizable romance
opened the door,, and a rash of other rereleases has
followed, including Forbidden Cuba and Cuba, por la
musica, siempre. The restored recordings have made
waves throughout Latin America. Cuba Es Musica
went gold in Venezuela and in music-mad Colombia in a
matter of days. "We mostly sell the older stuff," says
Ariel Estebes, sales clerk at a Latin-music mecca called
Power Records on Calle Ocho.

The newer Cuban music, by contrast, is biggest among
North Americans and Europeans. "It's more a non-Latin
phenomenon than Latin," says Tillan, sprawled
comfortably on the floor of his office in MTVLA's
frenetic headquarters. At his channel, which has 8.8
million paid subscribers (and countless more piraters) in
19 nations, the programming is viewer directed. And the
cool kids don't want to hear salsa. They want Mexican
rap bands, Colombian trip-hop, Argentinian reggae. But
Tillan understands the Cuban craze. "For a lot of people,
it's like they've discovered music that was taboo for a long
time."

Like MTVLA, the Latin music operations of all the major
record labels are now run from this city, which is
estimated to be fully half Hispanic. "You can find
everybody in Miami," says Blanco Uribe, who finds
himself there more and more. "It's a Latin city, but it's the
USA." And last year, with the loosening of Cuban
regulations and some softening from the virulently
anti-Castro exile community here, Cuban performers
began to play in Miami for the first time.

However, every show still draws protesters. A venue for a
concert by El Medico was firebombed two weeks ago. At
Café Nostalgia, the owners have drained the colour from
films of sixties and seventies performances, to make their
Castro-era vintage less obvious (but look closely and
you'll spot the synthesizer).

But the bands of protesters are nowhere near the size of
the crowds who come to dance. "It's unstoppable," says
Blanco Uribe. "Anybody who knows this music loves it.
And if you don't know it, you will love it."

HIGH FIDELITY

The vogue for Cuban stylings is not confined to music.In
Miami, Nuevo Latino cuisine is done best at Yuca, on
the lush pedestrian strip of Lincoln Road. Pork tenderloin
is marinated in mojito (the rum, lime and mint concoction
that has supplanted martinis as the cocktail of choice in
the trendiest bars) and a seafood puteria is served in a
marvelous basket of woven fried plantains. In New York,
restaurants such as Calle Ocho and L-Ray are doing
magical things with yuca, corn and classic rice-and-beans.

Here, alas, there are only the mildest influences thus far.
(You can sample more standard fare at Havana on
Vancouver's Commercial Drive, or La Carretta on the
Danforth in Toronto.) And the Cuban trend has also had
some unfortunate offshoots, such as the tacky, childish
production Hot Hot Havana at Toronto's Tropicana
dinner-theatre club.

But elsewhere, there is much to enjoy while you wait for a
timba lounge to open near you. First, seek out live music.
Sierra Maestra is at Harbourfront in Toronto today;
Cubanismo plays a series of Canadian dates in April.
Ramíro Puerta, Latin American programming director for
the Toronto International Film Festival, recommends the
films La Vida Es Silbar and Esi Me Comprendieras.

Of course, you can always dance: Try the Tickle Trunk
onSpring Garden Rd., Halifax, or the monthly Antara
Productions Latin party at Metropolis in Montreal. In
Ottawa, check out La Isla on Preston St. or Calliente on
Montreal Rd. In Toronto, the best Latin nights are at the
Bauhaus on Monday,at the Lava Lounge or Roxy
Blue on Wednesday, and Xango on Friday. For great
live music, check out LaVoe. And in Vancouver, it's the
Latin Quarter, again on Commercial Dr.

Or simply dust off your dinner jacket, light a cohiba,
crush some mint for a mojito, and put these on the stereo:
Cuba Es Musica (http://www.cubamusic.com); Las
Mas Famosas de Cuba, on the Bis Music label;
Grandes Exitos, El Médico de la Salsa; or Los
Exitos,Juan Formell y Los Van Van. -- Stephanie Nolen