Cuba. Si.

Welcome the music

The billboard said, “Bienvenidos a Havana.” Welcome to Havana. A kindly greeting. And, sure enough, a more hospitable experience it could not have been.

This was just last week, at the entrance to the Broadway musical “Buena Vista Social Club.” So, no, not actually Havana. But a New York City happening that transported me 35 years and more than 1,300 miles back to Cuba. It summoned a long-ago afternoon when a couple of us Yankee newspapermen, taking a brief break from covering the Pan American Games, stepped into El Floridita, the historic fish restaurant and cocktail bar in Old Havana that was famous for having been one of Hemingway’s favorite hangouts.

We walked in to find a live band performing, with a sound and energy that is so impeccably rendered by the 2026 “Buena Vista Social Club,” in which the assembly of musicians prominently own the stage throughout the show. Intense percussion, complex polyrhythms, call-and-response vocals. There are bongos, pianos, guitars (especially the tres, the Cuban variety of a Spanish guitar), a base, a trombone, a trumpet, a flute, woodwinds. And dancing.

As I often offered apologetically during that 1991 trip to the real Havana—“No entiendo muy bien el español”—I spent the entire production of “Buena Vista Social Club” only vaguely understanding some of the Spanish lyrics. Hardly a loss there. “Remember,” the show’s music consultant Juan de Marcos wrote in the Playbill’s introduction to the various numbers, “the music speaks for itself and comes straight from the heart. Enjoy the moment!”

There have been, in recent days and weeks, plenty of reports on how Donald Trump is predicting Cuba’s collapse; how he has imposed an oil blockade that has pushed the island into its worst-ever energy crisis; how Cubans clearly are suffering yet continue to demonstrate an extraordinary talent to adapt. As they have for nearly seven decades of U.S. political pressure, they are defying the odds, with a grit and resourcefulness to make do.

And that was so obviously in evidence during my sample of the actual Cuba in ‘91. Back then, as now, there was severe rationing of bread to citizens. Almost no traffic because there was almost no fuel to be had. Yet those natives who, despite being mystified by the U.S. government’s apparent intent on starving folks 90 miles from Miami, cordially interacted with us Yanqui visitors. One cabbie invited a colleague and myself to have coffee at his home. Another happily shared his knowledge that Hemingway “always wrote with a No. 2 pencil.”

Upon flying 600 miles East of Havana to Santiago de Cuba, which was serving as a second site for the Pan Am competition, we found more tumble-down buildings, more neglect and rubble. But also a nine-piece band waiting at the airport, pounding out toe-tapping local music. “Everybody,” a local greeter told us, “dances here.”

We made an excursion to the Bay of Pigs, where the doomed, ill-conceived Kennedy administration’s 1961 military attack not only failed to oust dictator Fidel Castro but cemented Fidel’s emergence from that victory as a charismatic leader. He had, after all, originally brought doctors and schools to pockets of extreme poverty following the rule of Fulgencio Batista, who had been aligned with the wealthiest sugar-plantation landowners and the American Mafia.

During my old adventure, some of us wondered if, post-Fidel, Cuba would evolve away from Castro’s anti-U.S. rule and his intolerance of homegrown dissent, or whether Cuba might merely digress to the Batista days, featuring a small upper echelon of the super rich and affluent tourists while again consigning the majority of Cubans to be an underpaid and under-educated servant class. It would represent the sort of regime change that appears to be Trump’s goal, seeking economic opportunities for U.S. businesses and, especially, based on his well-documented greed, himself and his family.

He is selling his strategy by labeling Cuba a “threat to national security,” a highly unlikely circumstance for a mostly destitute island, with roughly 32 times fewer residents than the United States. Especially since Cuba’s sugar daddy, the Soviet Union, collapsed in late 1991. And, even if Trump were aware of the existence of Cuba’s distinct, soaring music, he likely would be inclined to cast that as subversive as well. Another abject prevarication.

Anyway. Seeing and hearing “Buena Vista Social Club”—it’ll make sparks fly around your head—was for me a thoroughly engrossing (and educational) trip back to El Floridita and Santiago de Cuba. A respite from the xenophobia and ignorance that has become so prominent among our so-called leaders.

Bienvenidos a una comprension mas amplia. Welcome to a wider understanding.

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