Word: castros
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...last week, left her native Cuba in 1960 and spent the rest of her life taking listeners back there through her music. She was born around 1924, but was coy about her exact birth year. After growing up in Havana, she joined the band La Sonora Matancera. When Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959, she left for the U.S., where her career flourished. Her contralto voice was like the waters that separate Miami and Havana--inviting, sun-kissed, capable of rising up in a storm. Cruz sang with everybody who was anybody in Latin music--fronting Johnny Pacheco...
...knew it by its gravitational pull. I ate saffron rice and chicken al mojo de ajo; I listened to son, salsa and guaguanc? as it poured from car stereos on hot days. I nodded when Cuban exiles told stories about the raptures of Havana or the terrors of Castro. And I spent a lot of time looking south over the 90 miles of gray-blue water and trying to imagine what the Real Cuba was like...
...Watching him hold court on the terrazzo patio, it wasn't lost on me that the origin of his birth would probably have kept him out of such places in pre-Castro Cuba. Segundo, born Maximo Francisco Repilado Mu?oz in Siboney, Cuba, was the grandson of a freed slave. When fame came knocking on his door again, I think Segundo did not mind becoming another feather in Castro's utopian hat, adding poetry and charm to the drier accomplishments of universal health care, equal job opportunity, and subsidized education...
...That entire summer was an incredible show the island put on for us as well as others. The Cuban people were, and are, stunning in their warmth and generosity. The city itself, seemingly untouched in 40 years, was pure melancholic Caribbean beauty. And Castro endlessly paraded his significant achievements as a leader while behaving himself uncharacteristically well. It was as if this handful of old musicians and their songs of villages and girls from long ago lured both dissidents and oppressors into a season of d?tente...
...ferryboat in Havana Bay were executed by firing squad. This week, just days after Compay Segundo's death, two separate boat hijackings left 3 dead and a 10-year-old boy with a gunshot wound to the head. On Wednesday, Celia Cruz, the Cuban-born "Queen of Salsa" whom Castro barred from ever returning to Cuba, died in exile in New Jersey at the age of 78.