Word: cubans
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...when East Germany's communist rulers began to build a wall around West Berlin, and the divide threatened to destroy the world a year later, on Oct. 15, 1962, when the U.S. discovered Soviet warheads in Cuba, setting off the 13-day showdown of the Cuban missile crisis...
...Cooder's 1997 collaboration with a group of septuagenarian Cuban musicians, Buena Vista Social Club, sold 8 million copies and earned a Grammy for Best Tropical Latin Performance. It also earned Cooder a $100,000 fine from the U.S. government. "I learned that what Buena Vista means to the people who enforce the [Cuba trade and travel] embargo," says Cooder, "is not very much...
...fine was reduced to $25,000, but Cooder was ordered to stay out of Cuba at the precise moment the public was thirsting for more Cuban music. On the last day of the Clinton presidency--after Cooder had lobbied the State Department for two years--he was given a one-year exemption from the travel ban. The result is Mambo Sinuendo, Cooder's playful, dueling guitar album with Manuel Galban. "I knew that I wanted to work with the Buena Vista musicians again because, hey, many of them are geniuses," says Cooder. "But Manuel's the most surprising of them...
...Most Cuban musicians stick close to the technical requirements of their discipline. "For whatever reason," says Cooder, "Galban has made adjustments during his life, and he's developed into a free player. He breaks away from patterns and styles in ways that other Cubans don't. That suits the electric guitar really well, and it also allowed us as collaborators to kind of meet in the middle, 'cause I'm not Cuban." Mambo Sinuendo has moments where it sounds like the sound track to a particularly cool Havana nightclub, but the two players achieve a dynamic so loose and easy...
...It’s something that we’ve always had fun doing.,” the Cuban Revolution said. “Suddenly it’s becoming something we can actually make a career out of, and that’s just blowing my mind...