Cuban rhythms
From Cuba to Congo and back again
In one week in July this year, two of the greatest personalities of world music died. Both were Cuban and both were heroes of their people, even as they represented two wholly disparate strands of Cuban society.
The first to die was Compay Segundo, aged 95. In a music industry dominated by teen bands and the quest for the next young starlet, Compay Segundo was a refreshing anomaly. A musician all his life, he did not become famous until in his nineties as the spiritual leader and charismatic soul of the worldwide phenomenon, the Buena Vista Social Club. When he was interviewed recently, he said: ‘The flowers of life come to everyone. One has to be ready not to miss them. Mine arrived after I was 90.’
As leader of the veteran musicians he became a cult figure, even starring in an acclaimed documentary about the group. It was the reward for a man who had known no other life than making music, even inventing his own guitar—the seven-stringed ‘armonica’—because he found normal guitars too restricting for the mellifluous Cuban son rhythms and melodies that filled his head. He also wrote the song ‘Chan Chan’, which became Buena Vista Social Club’s unofficial anthem. This grandson of a freed slave lived a life of excess and was loved all the more for his abilities as a raconteur, for his role as a ‘great connoisseur of female energy’, and for his panama hats always tilted at a rakish angle.
For Compay Segundo music and the good life it engendered were everything and when he spoke about politics it was with his customary wit. Ry Cooder, who helped spark the Buena Vista success story, asked him about politics in the late 1990s. His reply was simple. ‘Politics? This new guy is good. The 1930s were rough. That’s when we had the really bad times.’
Within days of Compay Segundo’s death, Cuban music suffered another loss. Celia Cruz was less known than Compay Segundo outside the Spanish-speaking world, but was nonetheless the undisputed queen of salsa, more responsible than anyone for the genre’s popularity—a Latin-American Aretha Franklin or Ella Fitzgerald.
Unlike Compay Segundo, Celia Cruz didn’t like the ‘new guy’, Fidel Castro, and fled Cuba in 1959. She never returned to her homeland. Instead she forged a career playing the memories of the large Cuban exile population, who were drawn to her