Word: cuban
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...same way that astronomers know about black holes; I never saw it, but I 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...
...Segundo, the legendary singer and guitarist whose life had been long enough to accommodate two breathtaking rags-to-riches cycles: born poor, he became a celebrated musician in the '20s whose phone stopped ringing in the '60s until the late '90s, when he suddenly became the most famous (beardless) Cuban alive...
...Vista Social Club, the band that a year earlier had won Segundo a Grammy and generally elevated him and a handful of his compatriots from obscure relics of Cuba's golden age to international superstars, icons of the newly rediscovered grace and warmth behind the iron veil of the Cuban embargo...
...Septeto Tipico de la Habana, a talented and remarkably underpaid group of musicians who played weeknights at la Casa de Amistad (The House of Friendship). The casa was a mansion that had been nationalized to become a cultural institute and was now hosting Puerto Rican socialists on solidarity junkets, Cuban black marketeers and bureaucrats, and the occasional stray tourist...
...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...