Yearning for Cuba Libre

(Photo/Art Deco Cuban/Stock image)

By Sophia Petros

When I left Miami at the age of seventeen, I was shocked to learn that some of my university classmates had never heard of Fidel Castro. Or if they had, it was in a tangential way, perhaps from learning about the Bay of Pigs in AP US History. This was unthinkable in Miami. Even though I have no Cuban family and no direct ties to the island, Castro hovered, specter-like, across my childhood. Cubans across generations are woven into Miami’s landscape. Friends had relatives who had fled, teachers, acquaintances. Even if you weren’t talking about Castro, he was there. He loomed.

Buena Vista Social Club evoked the same feeling for me. Throughout the entire play, I don’t think Castro was mentioned by name. But he, and the revolution with which he was inexorably linked, determined the entire direction of the musical and the (mostly) true story of the artists that ultimately comprised the Buena Vista Social Club musical ensemble.

The musical is split between two time periods: 1956, when the Batista regime was on the verge of collapse, and 1996, in the middle of Cuba’s “Special Period” following the fall of the Soviet Union and its financial support to Cuba. In the 1950s, performers set the members-only Buenavista Social Club alive with music just before it was ordered shut. In the 1990s, an American guitarist landed in Cuba seeking to record music of the pre-revolutionary “greats.” Thus, the album “Buena Vista Social Club” was born, going on to sell more than a million copies and win a Grammy in 1988.

Buena Vista Social Club shows us the repercussions of repressive politics. In the 1990s, we feel the weight of broken dreams and austere poverty, inflicted by the regime. We mourn lost decades of life and music. Implicitly, however, we also see the flaws of what came before. Despite the nostalgia for the heyday of Cuban music, Omara performs mainly for tourists in the 50s. The artists at the Buenavista Social Club are exhilarated to perform for one another and no one else. This era was far from perfect, and it leads us to wonder: what exactly is it about the era that came before that led to what came after?

And how do you know when a society has hit the turning point?