Word: islanders
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cuba from the inside. During the campaign, he stopped short of calling for an end to the embargo but pledged to make it easier for Cuban Americans to travel and send money to Cuba. But one way or the other, change is coming to Cuba, and if the island is going to preserve its identity, it will need its music more than ever. But will my friends even be there to set the drama to song...
Oscar sees his current band's mission as simple: defending the Cuban sound. In 10 to 15 years, adds the bandleader Jesús, there won't be any Cuban music left on the island. It will all be in foreign countries, stagnant nostalgia acts like the kind that spun off from the Buena Vista Social Club album. That seems a dire prediction, but a Thursday night in Havana makes you wonder how Cuban music will survive. On Avenue G, the roqueros gather to get high and watch rock videos on makeshift outdoor screens. On the Malecón in front...
...vital outlet for taking on taboos, like Los Van Van's early critique of rampant prostitution in a 1996 song about papayas: go ahead, they sang, touch it; it's a national product. During the economic crisis following the Soviet collapse, music was the one thing that held the island together, a common passion for both revolutionaries and reactionaries. The government understood its power; that's why supergroup La Charanga Habanera was banned for months in the '90s after using a military helicopter to drop the group onstage for a stripteasing, innuendo-filled concert on national TV. It was, someone...
...everywhere here--from the ubiquitous Yutong buses to the new renovations financed by the Chinese at Lenin Park on the outskirts of town and the three channels of Chinese state-run television that play in Havana hotel rooms. But unlike in the U.S., China hasn't flooded the island with cheap consumer goods--at least not cheap enough...
...enticement of Washington's wet-foot, dry-foot policy that rewards Cubans who survive the trip across the waters with citizenship (while denying many visa requests made through proper channels in Havana)--even before Fidel Castro--relationships have been uneasy between Cuba and the U.S., which essentially colonized the island after Spain left in 1898. There was the U.S. administrator who in the early 1900s announced plans to "whiten" the population. And the 1901 Platt Amendment, which helped carve the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo out of Cuban territory. But Cuban outrage never extinguished the lure of the north...