Rumba, the Heartbeat of Cuban Music
By Jon Pareles. The New York Times. June 11, 2000
HAVANA -- IMAGINE a Grammy Awards show in which every musical segment before the grand finale was devoted to field hollers: century-old songs that hark back directly to African music. Audiences would be startled, wondering why anything so antique was on the air; recording companies would chafe
because they'd want to promote more current styles. But when Cuba's annual awards for recordings, the Cubadisco prizes, were given out on May 24 at the Teatro Nacional here, there were roars of applause for group after group playing rumba, the style at the deepest roots of Cuban music.
The rumba at Cubadisco wasn't the south-of-the-border pop "rhumba" of Fred Astaire dance numbers, or the driving, brassy big-band rumba of Tito Puente or the lilting guitar rumbas of Congolese soukous. Nor was it the "son," the style that has reached its latest international
audience through the Buena Vista Social Club. It was the unadorned propulsion for all of them: the kinetic sound of sputtering, snapping percussion with voices arching over the beat, propelling dancers whose crouching, hip-swiveling moves have been traced back to Africa.
Unlike the field holler or rural blues in the United States, rumba in Cuba is still contemporary music. "What is Cuba?" said Oderquis Revé, who leads the band Oderquis Revé y su Changüí. "Sugar cane, rum and rumba."
Yet dedicated fans say rumba has been hiding in plain earshot, acknowledged but ignored. Musicians and aficionados believe that the rumba is underappreciated because it began as, and remains, the music of the poorest and darkest-skinned Cubans. "The rumba has been mistreated by history,"
said Diosdado Ramos, the director of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, which has been playing traditionalist rumba since 1952. "That's because it has always been the music of the poorest people, the most humble people, the black people, the drunks."
By making rumba its theme, Cubadisco 2000 sought to pull rumba in from the margins. Along with the awards show, the annual Cubadisco is a showcase for Cuban music to the outside world. Cubadisco presents a music-business convention along with performances in clubs, theaters, parks and the
Pabexpo convention hall. This year, Cubadisco also sponsored an academic symposium on the rumba, with musicologists and musicians giving papers on everything from the rumba's lesser-known African roots to its new influx of female drummers.
Caridad Diez, a musicologist who is the head of artists and repertory at the Bis Music recording company, had initially proposed that Cubadisco 2000 make rumba its theme. "We want to expand people's thinking about the rumba inside and outside Cuba," she said. "The rumba needs a
place in the media. We don't want to impose anything, we just want to open everybody's eyes and ears and senses to know that the rumba exists. Many people don't know where elements of the music came from, and they came from the rumba."
To underscore the rumba's legitimacy, a concert with the revered Cuban composer Leo Brouwer conducting Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" -- a European vision of a percussive, pagan ritual -- was followed by a rumba showcase in the park next to the concert hall. A procession of classical
musicians and twirling, shimmying rumba dancers linked the two events.
There was also an all-night rumba marathon at La Tropical, Havana's top outdoor dance hall, and an afternoon-long rumba showcase at Callejón de Hamel, an alleyway that has become an Afro-Cuban cultural center with bright murals, art galleries and a small outdoor stage. The cornucopia of
rumba groups revealed not a folkloric music being carefully preserved by holdouts, but a vital, unregimented music that is still being invented.
"The rumba is a process," said Jesús Peréz, the leader of Odba Ilú. "The chemistry keeps changing, but it's all rumba."
The rumba appeared in Cuba in the middle of the 19th century, when the slave trade was thriving here; slavery continued in Cuba until 1886, a generation after emancipation in the United States. In Cuba, unlike most parts of the United States, slaves were allowed to play drums, and they held on
to sacred African songs and dances. They also developed secular songs for drums, percussion and voices that bemoaned problems -- romantic, social, philosophical -- and held on to community pride. African languages were replaced by the Spanish of Cuba's colonial rulers, and the melody lines adapted
scales and contours from Spanish songs. "It was the first moment of synthesis in Cuban music," said Alessandra Basso, a music researcher.
That synthesis, in turn, seeded virtually all the Cuban music that followed, including son, guajira, guaracha, cha-cha-cha and the frenetic 1990's dance music called timba. It made its way, diluted, into cabaret shows, pop songs and Cuban classical compositions. It also spread to the world,
reaching into music from Broadway to New Orleans rhythm-and-blues to disco to Spanish flamenco-pop to African guitar rock.
In its traditional form, rumba is not a soothing heartbeat rhythm, like reggae, or a steady shuffle like the blues, to name two other African-American rhythms that have made the world dance. It is jumpy and syncopated at every level, starting with a constant clave pattern emphasizing offbeats --
three taps, then two -- and layering it with controlled explosions from congas and other percussion.
The rumba embraces fractures and interruptions, with bursts of sound to answer singers and dancers with the speed of reflex. Instead of marking time like a clock, it traps time in a furious crossfire. For export, it had to be stabilized, with its percussion toned down and its improvisational
melodies made symmetrical like pop songs.
In Cuba, however, the oldest rumba rhythms -- particularly the popping fusillades that add up to the vintage rumba beat called guaguancó -- are ubiquitous. Los Muñequitos de Matanzas are known nationwide, and sit in with salsa bands. Local rumba groups take over courtyards and
streets for rumba parties across Havana on weekend afternoons.
The percussive chatter of the rumba also crackles within songs by top Cuban bands like Los Van Van, founded in 1969, and newer bands like Charanga Forever and Paulito F. G. y su Elite. Their timba songs combine the blunt sexuality of hip-hop with anything it takes to keep a crowd in motion;
riffing fast and jubilantly, the songs seem to metamorphose every 30 seconds. With its staccato horn jabs and its eruptions of keyboards and percussion, timba seems to map melodies onto the fastest-moving drumbeats of traditional rumba. "Yo soy el poeta de la rumba" ("I am the poet of
the rumba") sang Mario Rivera of Los Van Van, as horns and keyboards dropped away to reveal the fiercely pointillistic sputter of a rumba. "Yo soy Cuba."
Like roots music everywhere, rumba now has to compete with the sleeker, more accessible pop styles it spawned. "Rumba has not been a favorite of the media," said Ciro Benemelis, president of Cubadisco. "That's because we have a positive problem here in Cuba. We have too many
styles, too much good music." But traditional rumba also has image troubles because listeners don't forget where it comes from: the "solar," loosely translated as slums.
Giovani del Pino, leader of the rumba group Yoruba Andabo, said: "There has always been prejudice against this music, and the prejudice remains. Radio and television don't speak of the rumba. Yet rumba is not just an expression of the 'solar' or of black people -- it's a manifestation of
being Cuban."
Before the Cuban revolution in 1959, rumba received even less respect outside its own neighborhoods. The rhythm had worked its way into popular music, but its origins were ignored. The new Communist government established the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional to perform traditional music and
dance, honoring vernacular culture. One rumba musician from the group told a researcher that only when he saw a poster announcing a show by "Los artistas del Conjunto Folklórico" did he realize he was an artist. Nowadays, rumba is part of the percussion curriculum in the state music
schools that turn out Cuba's highly skilled musicians.
Rumba has strong survival mechanisms. While some rumba groups, like Los Muñequitos and Yoruba Andabo, have persevered for decades, new ones continue to form. In Cuba, musical genres don't seem to have expiration dates. Old styles like the son have never had to be self-consciously revived
because groups still play them as a matter of course.
Making connections to the drumming and singing of the Yoruba, Afro-Cuban rituals of Santería has also helped preserve the rumba. Santería is widely practiced in Cuba, more openly in recent years. Where a hip-hop act in the United States might poll the crowd asking, "Is
Manhattan in the house? Is Brooklyn in the house?" Cuban salsa bands ask for responses from worshipers of the Afro-Cuban pantheon: "Children of Obatalá? Of Eleguá? Of Changó?" Playing salsa at La Tropical, Oderquis Revé y su Changüí combined a
census of Afro-Cuban deities with offerings for each one, tossing candies to the children of Eleguá (a deity with a sweet tooth) and splashing water on children of Yemayá, the sea goddess.
They ended the song with openly sexual rumba moves.
Many rumba musicians also work as Santería drummers, switching from congas to consecrated batá drums to perform at Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies. They can also join pop and salsa bands. And when they play traditionalist rumba, they find audiences among Cubans and, increasingly,
among tourists who want a taste of old Cuba. The visitors may not realize that rumba, despite the low-tech simplicity of its drums-and-voices lineup, is by no means an archival genre, frozen in the past. The music has continued to evolve.
HELIO OROVIO, author of the "Diccionario de la Música Cubana" (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1992), said that rumba is growing more elaborate and more flashy, starting in the last 30 years and accelerating through the 1990's. Where older rumba musicians were self-taught, learning
from parents or neighbors, younger ones are likely to have conservatory training, and they're eager to show off all their technique instead of respectfully accompanying the singers. "Sometimes," he said ruefully, "they invent so much that they leave the roots behind." Since the
1990's, he noted, jazz flourishes have infiltrated the drumming, while elements of rap are moving into the vocals. And where an older rumba might have had one or two sections, newer ones often have five.
Little is standardized in current rumba. The instrumentation might, or might not, include batá drums and bongó along with congas, cajones (wooden boxes), guagua (wood blocks), claves or tambourine; the staging might be casual or choreographed. At the all-night show at La Tropical,
there were rumba groups dressed in white, like Santería musicians, and in baseball shirts and baggy pants; there were dancers in street clothes and others with headdresses and tasseled bikinis like show girls. There were groups that started at breakneck tempos and then sped up; groups that
deliberately brought out African-style vocal inflections and others that leaned toward the trumpet-like phrasing of salsa; even a group that sang an Islamic blessing.
It was easy to hear a generational difference between the aggressive younger groups and Los Muñequitos, whose rumbas moved with deliberation, holding back until an unstoppable momentum boiled up from within. But Los Muñequitos aren't frozen in any era; while its dancers can do the
shoulder-shaking, hip-grinding moves of classic rumba, they also do slow-motion tumbling and what they call rumba-tap, clicking out rumba syncopations with tap shoes.
After the Cubadisco awards, there was a late-night set at the Cafe Cantante by Charanga Panorama, a salsa group. It kicked into an uptempo song and suddenly, the dancers from Los Muñequitos slipped onto the floor. Shoulders back and pelvises thrusting, they had found the ancient rumba
rhythm within the salsa tune, and they danced as if they knew it would always be there.
Cubans Making a Lot Out of a Little
By Annette Grant. June 11, 2000
ANTIAGO DE CUBA -- SANDRA LEVINSON, the director of the Center for Cuban Studies in Manhattan, was exhilarated as she stepped into the elevator of her hotel here one afternoon in February. Luis Rodríguez Ricardo, a young naïve artist, had finished the painting he had promised Ms.
Levinson to illustrate a brochure for a tour sponsored by the center. She balanced the work, "The Arrival," a jubilant view of the Santiago de Cuba harbor in full fete, on her hip, moving aside as a French group entered.
"What a beautiful painting!" one Frenchman exclaimed. "Where did you get it?"
An address was provided (there is no phone) and that afternoon the party dropped in on Mr. Rodríguez and his wife, Luisa Ramírez, an art historian, at their studio-home to view more of his work. Throughout Cuba, art aficionados and artists connect in such casual ways.
If asked to name a Cuban artist with an international reputation, most people would probably say Wifredo Lam, the great modernist who died in 1982. In the United States, only a handful of contemporary Cuban-born artists (most now expatriates) are known outside art circles: José Bedia
(Miami), Manuel Mendive (Havana), Tomás Sánchez (Miami), Ernesto Pujol (Brooklyn) and Alexis Leyva, called Kcho (Havana). Far more are recognized in Mexico, France, Italy, Scandinavia and especially Spain, where many Cuban artists regularly exhibit and travel.
While every year a few more Cuban artists have shows in galleries and museums in New York, only Ms. Levinson's Cuban Art Space on West 23rd Street has continuous exhibitions, as well as an upstairs room packed to the gunwales with paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, collages, papier-mâché,
decorated shopping bags and cigar boxes, sculptures and carvings. Even this profusion represents only a fraction of the work in all mediums that is being made in Cuba, in spite of severe shortages of basic materials like paint, brushes, canvas and paper.
Like artists everywhere, Cubans are producing installation and performance pieces, a trend at the 1997 Havana Bienal that will surely continue at the next one in November. Yet most artists throughout the country still make representational paintings and sculptures that investigate subjects like
religion (Roman Catholicism, especially Christ figures, and wildly popular Santerían saints and ceremonies), interior monologues akin to magical realism, history and daily island life. Iconic heroes like José Martí, Fidel Castro and the charismatic Che Guevara appear frequently
(though not as agitprop), as do depictions of the human heart, the Cuban flag and the shape of the island itself, speaking of both pride and isolation.
The five artists profiled below came of age about a decade ago, around the time the Soviet Union collapsed and pulled out of Cuba, throwing the country into an economic crisis that persists. Yet little art seen in a recent visit protested this condition. Aided by the United States' exempting art
from the trade embargo in 1991, many artists can earn a reasonable living while maintaining a studiously neutral political posture.
Luis Rodríguez Ricardo, 31, lives in Santiago de Cuba and the village of Mella, the home of an art collective called Grupo Bayate. The eight artists who form the group include his father, Luis Rodríguez Arias. Banding together in times of crisis makes sense economically and
aesthetically, for it helps communities preserve their cultural patrimony. The group's ideal was not to sell their work, but to do it for the soul. Hard times changed that. As a result, the younger Mr. Rodríguez has become a modest commercial success and lives well, though not extravagantly,
in a sparsely furnished old house belonging to his wife's parents, with two refrigerators, "one American, one Russian," he explains.
The Grupo paints in a naïve, narrative style and takes rural life as its subject. The work of the Rodríguezes is riotously colorful and stacked like a rush-hour train, with a few ghosts as outriders. Neither father (a baker) nor son (a sometime construction worker) has studied art,
and the younger man signs himself "El Estudiante," to distinguish himself from his father, whom he calls "el maestro." F AR from this prelapsarian world, physically and philosophically, is the rarefied universe of Carlos Estévez, who lives and works in old Havana and keeps
a motorcycle in his studio entrance (along with a sculpture of Jesus with a hole in his midriff). Just inside the studio is a three-tiered CD-tape deck, the nearly ubiquitous symbol (along with the personal computer) of a connection to a larger cultural universe.
Mr. Estévez, 30, has always known he wanted to be an artist and went to art school at 13. He is the son of an engineer, and it shows in the elegant craftsmanship of his work, which is largely concerned with metaphysical transformation. In drawings and installations, he has recreated the
medieval bestiary in a modern anthropological fable, and examined history through figures like Joan of Arc, Isadora Duncan, Karl Marx, José Martí and Abraham Lincoln. He has also produced elaborate metaphors for creativity: the brain represented by coils of music staves, for example.
Mr. Estévez is practiced at making statements about art. In one catalog interview he said, "Creating is an act of faith, an attempt to project this world inhabiting us," and, "We are all making our own history while also making reference to every other person."
While Mr. Estévez's work has intellectual roots, it is also highly accessible, which has made him popular at the Havana Bienal (he's working on a piece involving 100 notes in 100 bottles for the forthcoming one) and abroad, where he has had many shows and won several residencies,
including one in upstate New York. Currently he is in Norway, where, he says, "I'm getting rich in my soul, and famous in a very small village."
Across town in the Vedado neighborhood, Elsa Mora, 29, pursues her own kind of alchemy, working out of the apartment she shares with her husband, Yamel Alvarez Duran, a specialist in the use of psychology in marketing and his wife's agent. "She works all the time," he says, "without
regard to day or night."
Ms. Mora's subject in paintings, drawings and photo-collages is the female body and soul, and she seems to serve her observations directly from her own subconscious. "It interests me to take woman as universal data," she has said. "This way I can talk about a thousand things:
life, death, loneliness, sickness." Ms. Mora's mother moved to Miami three years ago, and much of the pain in Ms. Mora's work seems to derive from the sorrow of separation, a common situation in Cuba and one exemplified by the Elián González story.
Ms. Mora had a show of hand-shaped cutouts last year at the Cuban Art Space. She has also shown at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York.
Ms. Kind, who is interested in outsider and self-taught art, is attracted to Ms. Mora's work because, she says, "like a true artist, she doesn't always know where it comes from, so there is no self-consciousness." Ms. Kind goes on to point out that, in her opinion, while Ms. Mora went
to art school, "it didn't ruin her."
In a way, Lester Campa, 32, is a political artist, his subject the politics of the environment. Mr. Campa lives in Las Terrazas, a planned town built in the 1960's and 1970's near the ruins of a coffee plantation in the Sierra del Rosario mountains an hour west of Havana. Las Terrazas is part of
an environmental center and botanical garden that specializes in nearly extinct indigenous plants. Overlooking the town is a hotel, La Moka, that is one of the leading tourist attractions in the area, not least because it is built in the forest around a tree no one could bear to cut down.
Mr. Campa sometimes travels to Havana, but he doesn't particularly like to leave home or studio, where his windows look out on a paradisiacal landscape. He paints lavishly detailed versions of what he sees, often with coronas of clouds. But a closer look reveals trouble in paradise: the clouds
are smoke from burning logs; the forest of palms with their fat fronds is suffocating from pollution; the jutting rocks are upheavals of scorched earth. The message is clearly that man and nature do not cohabit easily, and it is no accident that a series of these works is titled "Life and
Death."
Las Terrazas has a store that sells original art on recycled paper and silk-screened T-shirts. Profits support a collective of local artists organized by Mr. Campa.
Environmental elements are used in a nostalgic way by William Pérez, 34, in an interactive installation he is preparing for the Havana Bienal. In it, he harks back to his childhood, when charcoal was prepared in an oven on a beach near his home in Cienfuegos. In the work, he will
reproduce the process, using actual workers, who will make the charcoal and then put it in bags to be carried away by visitors to the exhibition. Mr. Pérez will sign the bags. "It's a very large project," he says. "It'll need a lot of space. But I want to make art out of an
ordinary pastime and use everyday labor to make a dialogue between art and the public."
Mr. Pérez is mainly a sculptor, and a recent exhibition at the Cuban Art Space mounted 18 of his smaller sculptures and 12 drawings. He takes inspiration from Renaissance art, especially da Vinci's perfect man (sometimes with Guevara's features), and explains that he wants to "transmit
the idea of mysticism or religion through images that are concrete and have nothing to do with religion."
When Mr. Pérez and his wife, Dalila López, arrived in New York on a last-minute visa to install his show, he brought his own price list, thumbnail sketches of all of the works on two precious sheets of typing paper. He is accustomed to doing everything himself and to finding ways
to make art in a time of shortages. "Wood is easy," he says, "but metal is hard, so the big projects are sometimes made of a lot of little pieces," which are often donated by factories or individuals. Like most Cuban artists, Mr. Pérez gets by with a little help from his
friends.
Annette Grant is the art editor of Arts & Leisure.
On a Mission to Cuba, Bearing Balanchine
By Suki John. June 11, 2000
HAVANA -- PLEASE don't laugh," says Lourdes Lopez, a former principal dancer of New York City Ballet, "but I had a sort of second coming." Ms. Lopez, who left her native Cuba when she was one year old, is describing her first trip back here in 1997, at the age of 39. "For the
first time I felt like I belonged somewhere."
Upon returning to New York, Ms. Lopez called Ben Rodriguez-Cubeñas, a Cuban-American program officer of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. "I said, 'Ben, now is the time,' " she says. "So we got our act together and founded the Cuban Artists Fund." The fund supports New
York- and Cuba-based artists working in all mediums. "We are trying to re-establish cultural bridges, as well as promote better understanding," Mr. Rodriguez-Cubeñas says. "The arts are a great force for bringing people together."
Cuba has a strong artistic tradition, fostered by a system that provides free higher education to those who exhibit talent. Working in old studios where both the floorboards and the pianos are splintering, the Cuban Escuela Nacional del Arte has a nationwide enrollment of more than 1,200 and has
produced dancers and musicians of international acclaim. Carlos Acosta of the Houston and Royal Ballets and José Manuel Carreño of American Ballet Theater are two of the most famous alumni of this system.
Cuban artists work with a wealth of knowledge and a constant lack of the basic materials of their craft. Their persistence and resourcefulness impressed Ms. Lopez. She and Mr. Rodriguez-Cubeñas began traveling to Cuba lugging "extra suitcases filled with brushes, oils, canvases,
point shoes, tights, CD's, music sheets, clay, plaster of Paris, pens -- you name it," she says.
They soon learned that carrying donations to Cuba isn't easy. Most airlines have a weight limit of 44 pounds, and point shoes are heavy. Although Air Jamaica can be softhearted regarding humanitarian aid, Marazul, which flies direct from New York to Havana, charges $3 per overweight pound. "We
had no money," says Ms. Lopez. Showing their own resourcefulness, they held a benefit. Happily, they soon discovered what is now common knowledge: Cuba is hot. The fund even found support among Cuban-Americans in their 60's and 70's, frequently the most virulent enforcers of the 38-year-old
United States embargo of the island.
On Tuesday, the Cuban Artists Fund will hold its second annual benefit, "New York for Cuban Artists," at Wallace Hall on Park Avenue. The fund has reason to celebrate. This October, at the International Havana Festival of Ballet, the hottest ticket will most likely be "Ballo Della
Regina," which George Balanchine made for the ballerina Merrill Ashley in 1978. In March, Ms. Ashley traveled to Cuba to teach "Ballo" to the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, in the fund's first major collaboration with a Cuban arts organization.
When Ms. Lopez first considered traveling to Cuba in the early 90's, she says: "It was still dicey. My parents didn't want me to go because of repercussions in Miami. I was still actively performing in City Ballet. My mom said, 'If you come to Miami to dance, what's going to happen?' I was
afraid for my mother. She was getting some funny phone calls. Her friends in the tight Cuban community where she lives said: 'I hear your daughter is going to dance in Cuba. What is she, a Communist?' " Ms. Lopez canceled her trip. A few years later, she retired from dancing, joined a WNBC news
team and traveled to Cuba with other journalists. Since it took place under the aegis of the news media, her trip was overlooked by Miami Cubans. She interviewed Alicia Alonso, the artistic director of the Ballet Nacional and a former star of American Ballet Theater. Ms. Alonso lured Ms. Lopez out
of retirement. (When the younger ballerina protested that she had already retired, Ms. Alonso laughed. "It's December," she said. "I'm giving you eight months to get into shape.") Ms. Lopez didn't dance again in Miami, but she danced in Havana. While there, she noticed that the
Cuban repertory was distressingly light on Balanchine, and she set about remedying the situation. She thought it was essential to give the Cuban dancers firsthand information from someone who would demand the most of them. "I had a sense that Merrill and the Balanchine Trust would agree,"
she says.
The Balanchine Trust protects the choreographer's copyrights. (Paradoxically, because the United States and Cuba have no diplomatic relations, and intellectual property is as foreign a concept to Cuba as the Nasdaq, it's unlikely that anyone could prevent the Cubans from dancing whatever ballets
they choose. On the flip side, the byzantine regulations guiding relations between Cuba and the United States specify that Cuban artists working in the United States cannot be paid.) Artistic solidarity prevailed over political punditry: the Balanchine Trust licensed "Ballo" to the Ballet
Nacional for free.
Ms. Lopez still had to get Ms. Alonso's approval. "It was like visiting the Pope," she says. Ms. Alonso had hoped to get another Balanchine ballet, "Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2." Ms. Lopez felt it was too difficult for dancers unaccustomed to the Balanchine vernacular,
and began to describe "Ballo."
"I kept saying, 'If you could see this, I can send you the tape.' " To which Ms. Alonso, who has had many eye operations and is almost blind, responded, "Well, Lourdes, that's just not going to help me."
Ms. Lopez described "Ballo's" "little variations, hops on point, brisées, cabrioles, tours to the knee," and the engaging energy contained in the 20 minutes the piece takes to perform.
"Que sabrosa tu eres," said Ms. Alonso ("How delicious you are").
Ms. Lopez laughs at the memory: "That was the O.K."
Ms. Ashley describes working with the Ballet Nacional as "one of the highlights" of her life in ballet. "They were so eager," she says. "I didn't have to teach the men to do double saut de basques or multiple pirouettes; they could do them at any speed." Ms. Ashley
noticed an unusual camaraderie among the dancers, "all of them rooting for each other, helping, excited by each other's successes." Though the dancers lack good shoes, tights and vitamins, they have a "supportive attitude, rather than what I see in many companies -- each person trying
to outshine the next to get a better role," she says.
Like Ms. Lopez, Ms. Ashley was surprised by what the dancers did without. "It didn't occur to me they wouldn't have a Band-Aid, silicone pads, normal things ballet dancers now use."
Ms. Ashley anticipates returning to Cuba in October to rehearse "Ballo" before the premiere. While Congress considers softening the embargo to permit exports of medical products to Cuba, the ballerina considers what to pack. "I'm inspired to bring a whole suitcase of dancer
medical supplies," she says.
Suki John, who writes and choreographs in New York and Cuba, is working on her first book, ``Cubanilla: A Dancer in Havana.''
The Heart Was Their Guide, in Love and the Arts
By Michele Willens. June 11, 2000
AVANA -- THEY are American-born women who fell in love with radical Latin American men. Each has lived close to four decades in Cuba, and while their husbands spent time in prison or in the mountains with Fidel Castro, they carved out distinctive artistic lives.
Lorna Burdsall, a charismatic white-haired figure, is now in her early 70's and the director of the modern dance company AsiSomos, which combines dance, image theater, poetry and music. Today she mostly performs in her home for visitors ("Where else do I get to hug my audience?"). But
since arriving in Cuba in 1955, the wife of a revolutionary who went on to become a top intelligence official, she has held high positions in both Cuba's world of dance and its culture bureaucracy. Along the way, she was a pivotal figure in establishing modern dance in Cuba.
Estela Bravo, in her late 60's, has made 26 documentary films since arriving in 1966. Many are about Cuba, and all are about Latin America; one depicting North Americans living in Cuba included Ms. Burdsall. Her latest, "Fidel," was shown at the Latin American Film Festival in Havana
in December. It was commissioned by Channel 4 in Britain and has been shown there as well as in Canada, Argentina and Chile. She is hoping to have it distributed in America.
Currently she is making "Operation Peter Pan," about the 14,000 Cuban children who were sent to the United States by their parents to escape the Cuban revolution.
Each of these women has a love story. Ms. Bravo, one of three sisters raised largely by union organizers (her mother died when she was 12), was a leader of Students for a Peaceful World at Brooklyn College when she attended a meeting of the Student Congress in Poland in 1953. There, she met
Ernesto Bravo, a medical student and activist from Argentina who was receiving medical treatment after having been tortured and tried under Juan Perón on charges of organizing anti-government student activities.
The chemistry was instant, but he returned home to Argentina and she to Brooklyn. The next year she made a trip to Brazil for another student conference, this time as a reporter for the periodical Latin America Today. "I decided I should stop by Argentina and see Ernesto," she said. He
was being hidden by anti-Perónists, but she managed to spend a week with him. "We decided then and there to get married," she said.
She eventually took a monthlong journey on a cargo boat from New York to Argentina, where the two were married in January 1956. Over the next eight years, they had two children (a third would come later) and Mr. Bravo became a professor of biochemistry. "One day," Ms. Bravo recalls, "he
told me he'd been invited to Cuba to teach biochemistry in medical school and I said, 'Great, it's closer to the States.' I thought I'd be visiting my home country more, but little did I know that the move would turn out to be closer only geographically."
When Ms. Bravo arrived in Cuba, Ms. Burdsall was already well entrenched. Raised in New London, Conn., she had trained with Martha Graham and Anthony Tudor and was studying dance at the Juilliard School. In 1953 she went to a dance at the International House in Manhattan, where she noticed a
young man doing the mambo. "He had the most intense eyes," she said. "I asked someone where he was from and was told Cuba."
Manuel Pineiro, the son of a Bacardi Rum executive, was studying business administration at Columbia University. The two were married in New York, but soon after, Mr. Pineiro, who was talking a lot of socialism and politics, said he needed to go back to Cuba for a vacation.
"I knew he was going to the mountains to fight with Fidel, but he never really said it to me," said Ms. Burdsall. "He kept saying he'd be back, but finally I got a call from him, while I was at a dance summer program in Michigan, and he said, 'Do you think you could come here
instead?' I went straight from Detroit to Havana."
There, she raised a son -- now with a daughter of his own -- and saw her husband only intermittently until the revolution succeeded in 1959. Sometimes, they met under almost comically dire circumstances, as when she visited him secretly in the mountains.
"I wore this beautiful yellow dress," she recalled, "but as I was going up to the mountains, it started pouring and there was mud everywhere. By the time I got to his location, I was entirely filthy. Still, his comrades were in on the surprise and they told him, 'The commandant
wants to see you.' And when he walked in, there I was. We got only an hour together before he was called into action. That night I slept on a pile of something very cold, which I later discovered was grenades and ammunition."
When Mr. Castro came into power, her husband -- known in the revolutionary world as Red Beard -- became Deputy Minister of the Interior, in charge of state security. After his death in a car crash in 1998, an obituary in The New York Times described him as the "ruthless but urbane spymaster
who for more than 30 years led Cuba's intelligence apparatus and directed its efforts to export revolution to the third world."
In their marriage, serving Mr. Castro always came first. Fortunately for Ms. Burdsall, there was dance, and in 1959, she helped found the Compania Danza Contemporanea, for which she performed and choreographed for 15 years. In 1977 she became national director of dance and modern dance adviser
to the Minister of Culture. Ms. Burdsall's marriage lasted 20 years before she decided she wanted her independence. She remained on good terms with her ex-husband, and is especially close to her granddaughter, Gabriela, 11. who often performs the witty and provocative dances her grandmother
choreographs. "Gabriela is like my other self, a younger version," said Ms. Burdsall.
Ms. Bravo's marriage remains intact. Her husband is now a consulting professor on bioethics at the University of Havana. Both women live well by Cuban standards. The suggestion that such good fortune may have colored Ms. Bravo's recent documentary about Mr. Castro (it is generally flattering in
tone) infuriates her.
"I'm very independent, and I think Castro has only recently seen it," she said. "I originally asked for his cooperation and got back the reply, 'Why don't you do it after I'm not here anymore?' I decided early on that this was to be a piece about the man himself, not his politics."
The film includes observations from people like the director Sydney Pollack, who made the film "Havana"; the author Alice Walker, who calls Mr. Castro "the great redwood"; and the writer Gabriel García Márquez, who tells of going fishing with Mr. Castro.
Ms. Burdsall's artistic impact has not been political. She brought in influences from Western dance that have since been taught to many young Cubans. "By mentoring and inspiring scores of careers, Lorna has opened Cuba to the world in a very special way and also brought the outside world
somehow closer to Cuba," said Jon Lee Anderson, a New Yorker writer and author ("Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life").
Ms. Burdsall explains: "As part of the choreographic process, I have always demanded active creative participation on the part of the dancers. It's important for me that they reveal their cultural identity through movements, gestures and sensations."
Although she cites Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey as her main creative influences, she said her greatest influence came from a more personal place: "The personality of my very creative and humorous mother influenced me the most in shaping my personal style." Ms. Burdsall has saved
all the journals her mother (who died in 1978) wrote over 80 years. "She was a frustrated everything," she added. "All her life she was creative and had nowhere to put it."
While both Ms. Burdsall and Ms. Bravo have traveled back to the United States, they remain committed to Cuba. That commitment was tested during what the Cubans call the Special Period, in the early 90's, when the Soviets pulled out their support and left a shattered island economy behind.
"It was so terrible in the beginning," Ms. Bravo said. "There were no lights, no air-conditioning, no gasoline. I remember taking a walk by the sea with my husband and we asked ourselves, 'Should we leave?' Some of our friends had left. But we decided that we'd been here so long,
we had roots. And things slowly got better. People don't talk enough about the sacrifices Cubans made then, how they bonded together." M S. BURDSALL said of the same period: "I remember looking out my window and seeing people leaving on rafts. I remember performing for a group from Canada
in 1993, and there was no light on in the whole neighborhood. I greeted them with a flashlight and then made flashlights part of the performance.
"But you know, I came to Cuba for love and in a way I stayed for love -- this time for a country and the people, not one man."
Both Ms. Bravo and Ms. Burdsall say their art has had a far greater impact in Cuba than it probably would have had if they had not followed their men. "I have made 26 films and won many awards at film festivals around the world, but in America nobody knows who I am," said Ms. Bravo.
Yet on a recent visit, her phone rang constantly with calls from people like her friend and fellow documentary maker Rory Kennedy. And the longtime documentary maker Sol Landau, while questioning her independence, nevertheless said: "I can't say anything bad about her. She does good work."
Ms. Bravo said: "If I'd stayed in New York, I may or may not have gone to film school and made films in a more formulaic way, one of so many. Here I learn by intuition, and I think the style is more raw, straightforward."
Ms. Burdsall found a similar freedom: "What would I have done if I'd been just another dancer in New York? I'd have gone to auditions with 900 other dancers and been forced to retire at 40. Here I've had so many opportunities and the audiences so appreciate my style of modern dance. I look
at the dancers around the country and I think, 'They've almost all been my students at one time.' "
Last year, she attended her 50th high school reunion, making the trek back to Connecticut. "A lot of the people did not know what to make of me," Ms. Burdsall said, laughing. "But eventually they warmed up when I performed one of my dances. Most of them had stayed small, closer to
home. We looked back over things we'd written when we were graduating and mine said I was going to travel, write a book and live in the country. Well, I didn't say what country!"
Michele Willens's most recent article for Arts & Leisure was about Academy Award nominations for supporting actors and actresses.
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