Peter Margasak’s Post No Bills article about Buena Vista Social Club [June 25] is sort of the kind of sweet, endearing story you would expect when writing about exotic octogenarians–it is also so full of distortions and misinformation that it could have come from a press release issued by the Cuban American Foundation.
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On the contrary, after 1959 education was made free through the university level to even the most marginalized classes in Cuba. This made formal music training previously inaccessible to poor and rural people available on a national level. The revolution also in its policies to eradicate racism on an institutional level encouraged the study and inclusion of indigenous Afro-Cuban music in the academic curriculum so that musicians coming out of Cuba who were educated in the last 40 years have equal familiarity with the classical canon as with the guanguanco or the rumba. This was especially important, as historically the Afro-Cuban population was the most brutally discriminated against prior to 1959. Romanticizing the era prior to ’59 creates a nostalgia for an era when Jim Crow was worse than in the U.S. South, and even the best that the Buena Vista musicians or other men of their color could hope for were squalid living conditions and no possibility for a future beyond the color line.
Thirdly, as to your point that these great artists were languishing shining shoes, which again you attribute to a communist tragedy, we can look to many great artists in our own rich capitalist system and discover many who never received the riches they deserved or have never been treated with any degree of respect: Muddy Waters before being ripped off by the Rolling Stones, Billie Holiday chained to her hospital bed, Paul Robeson stoned at Peekskill, Florence Ballard of the Supremes left destitute, etc, etc. What were Ladysmith Black Mambazo doing before Paul Simon? What was Virginia Rodrigues doing before Caetano Veloso?
HotHouse
I would also like to note, as I should have in the original piece, that the recording situation in Cuba has improved in the 90s.
