Padura and Los rostros de la salsa.

Leonardo Padura’s book Los rostros de la salsa was presented on February 16, at the headquarters of the UNESCO Regional Office in Havana, with the presence of its author Leonardo Padura and the renowned Cuban musician Isaac Delgado, who closed the night in spectacular fashion with a performance in the company of his group and other prominent performers such as Roberto Fonseca. Republished by Aurelia Ediciones under the auspices of the UNESCO Transcultura Program whose motto is “Integrating Cuba, the Caribbean and the European Union through Culture and Creativity”, the book was also presented last year in the Dominican Republic.

Los rostros de la salsa was published in Cuba by Ediciones Unión in 1997 and by Planeta México in 1999. Aurelia's printing reproduces the one made by Tusquets Editores in 2020, which in addition to a prologue by UC-CUBA Secretary Raúl Fernández, includes the new interview conducted by Padura with Rubén Blades, one of the most representative musicians of that movement.

The book includes interviews conducted by Padura with other important figures such as Mario Bauzá, Tito Puente and Willie Colón, who marked an entire era of music in a geographical area that spans from New York to the Caribbean. Isaac Delgado, baptized at the time as “El Chévere de la Salsa” referred to his relationship with that rich and varied musical movement and the characteristics that had its impact on the island and in his own work, because although the origins of salsa owe a lot to Cuban music, there is no doubt that the salsa phenomenon meant a renewal of that valuable heritage.

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Professor Burke, Marisa Santangelo and myself traveled to Cuba Dec. 1-10. Below a ‘preliminary’ report on our activities as related to UC-CUBA. We met several times with our support on-the-ground Marina Rodríguez, Tony Pérez, and Elba Capote. As some of you know a few of us in UC-CUBA collected some money to help Elba purchase an electric bike which is quite an impressive machine. Some of you were lucky to use it as a personal “taxi” during your recent visit!!

Visited Belkis Quesada and Luis Montes de Oca at the Instituto de Historia. We gave them copies of the program flier for our recent UCLA workshop, and Belkis was delighted to see so many names she recognized: Isabel James, Sara Kozameh, Tom McEnaney and so on… The three of us stopped by CASA de las Américas and had a long conversation with Ana Albo, the Associate Director of CASA’s Latinos in the U.S. Program. We also visited Yolanda Núñez and Zohaina Suárez at the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí. Yolanda is now the Subdirectora of the BNJM and Zohaina oversees the digitization program. Zohaina emphasized their continued interest in the digitization projects, and that their needs had shifted from preservation via digitization to digital preservation. This means that they need storage and noted that even small terabyte hard drives that UC-Cuba graduate students using the library could bring would be immensely helpful.

Raúl and Marisa met with the Director of the Museo Nacional de la Música, the distinguished musicologist Sonia Pérez. (Her husband is the renowned musician Barbarito Torres.) We informed Sonia about upcoming lectures by Professor Pierpaolo Polzonetti, from UC Davis, sponsored by another great musicologist Miriam Escudero, expert on 19^th century contradanza.

We also briefly attended an event at CASA de las Américas where Professor Susan Eckstein presented her book Cuban Privilege, which details the various ways U.S. immigration policies have continually privileged Cuban migration to the United States after 1959. Ana Albo moderated the lecture, which was presented in English and interpreted into Spanish. The book and Professor Eckstein have been the unfortunate target of invectives by some members of the Cuban community in Florida.

In addition, Dr. Félix Valdés, from Instituto de Filosofía, paid us a visit at the ‘casa’ particular where we stayed; conversed briefly over the phone with the prominent writer Roberto Zurbano; stopped for refreshments at Cuba Libro, tried to check out the Fábrica de Arte (alas only open after our bedtime!), snapped souvenir pics in front of the Centro Fidel Castro, and took in a movie at the Festival de Cine Latinoamericano, the Argentine ‘clavo’ Náufrago.

At the end of our stay our entire support team of Marina, Tony, and Elba as well as the three of us provided logistical support and geographical and historical advice to USC Prize-winning writer and professor Andrew (Sandy) Tolan, author of several works of narrative non-fiction including The Lemon Tree about Palestinian-Israeli relations. Professor Tolan is working on his fourth book, an account of the 19^th and 20^th century sugar empire of several well-to-do Cuban families, their business successes as well as the conditions in which, first slaves, and later “freer” manual workers, labored in the sugar fields and mills of Matanzas and Santa Clara provinces. The book extends his reporting, mainly in Mother Jones, on exploitative and dangerous sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by the same families.

La Ópera Italiana en Tiempos de Revolución

Curso de Posgrado
Profesor: Dr. Perpaolo Polzonetti
Universidad de California, Davis

13th UC-Cuba Gradute Student Conference
Resilencia y Resistencia a la Cubana:
Deconstructing the Past and Re-Imagining the Future
November 16-17, 2023
 

The corneta china in Santiago carnival
 

12th UC-Cuba Graduate Student Conference at UC Irvine
 

Professors Burke and Fernandez visit to Cuba
 

Professor Nancy Burke and Raul Fernandez visited Havana (Dec12-18) to further UC-CUBA activities, develop potential new collaborations with local cultural institutions, and pursue their own research. Belos some highlights of the trip.

-We visited the Instituto de Historia de Cuba, the site of much archival research conducted by UC-CUBA doctoral students and discussed new ways of cementing our relationship with the Institute with its Director, historian Yoel Cordoví. Director Cordoví is also in the Editorial Board of the prestigious Cuban Studies journal published by the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. We were accompanied by one of our on-the-ground coordinators, Elba Capote.

-Professor Burke and Fernandez and Elba Capote visited the newly inaugurated Fidel Castro Center, a multipurpose institution similar in some ways to U.S. Presidential Libraries. We met with Director René González Barrios and were given a tour of the facilities. The research library, which contains a wealth of Castro’s documents, interviews, speech transcripts, etc., represents a significant resource for historical and political research.

- Professor Burke and I met with Isabel James (Geography, UCLA) one of the students organizing the next UC-CUBA graduate workshop to discuss details of the upcoming event (February 3, 2023) at UC Irvine. We held the meeting at the CUBA LIBRO Space, a circulating library of English-language books run by long-time American expatriate Conner Gorry. CUBA LIBRO houses several books from UC-CUBA faculty and alumni.

-We held discussions about future activities with our other on-the-ground supporters on the ground, Antonio Pérez and Marina Rodríguez.

-Professor Fernandez obtained several copies of his book Ontología del son, recently published in Cuba by Editorial Letras Cubana. This book contains 20 published and unpublished articles in Spanish, that he authored on Cuban music and musicians between 2005-2021 some of which appeared in earlier versions in academic and non-academic journals in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, as well as online. All articles were edited and revised for the published collection.

Radamés Giro, musician, author, editor, and self-taught researcher and musicologist was a central figure of Cuban music over the last 50 years.

Perhaps his most striking work was the publication in 2007 of the monumental Diccionario enciclopédico de la música en Cuba (DEMC), four volumes in the original edition, which covers 1169 pages, more than 2,000 entries and 600 photos and scores. The fruit of 40 years of study and compilation, the "Diccionario de Radamés", as it came to be called, is of enormous use for writers, music and literature critics, researchers, journalists, record companies, disc jockeys, and all those who, being specialists or not, need references, ideas, and solid data about music in Cuba.

Born in Santiago de Cuba, Radamés grew up in musical surroundings par excellence. His house provided rehearsal space for the Conjunto Hermanos Giro, in which his father played tres and his uncles Carmelo and Claro guitar and conga respectively. One of Radamés’ first mentors was his maternal grandfather, the legendary sonero and guitarist Ángel Almenares. The young Radamés then studied formal guitar with Professor Esteban Castillo. In the end, Radamés put aside his potential as a concert musician, and for several years served as guitarist in several local musical ensembles, such as the group Avances del 56, the trio Los Románticos, the combo of Conrado Wilson, and as an accompanist of popular singers like bolerista Orlando Contreras.

As a result of an unfortunate incident in his adolescence, Radamés completely lost vision in one eye and suffered from limited vision in the other for the rest of his life. And yet this was no obstacle to the work he later developed as a researcher, author, and editor. In addition to the Diccionario, Radamés wrote several major studies of capital importance for the study of Cuban and Latin American music. Worth mentioning are his monographs on the history of the guitar in Cuba, the bolerista César Portillo del Luz, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villalobos, and the renowned guitarist, composer and conductor Leo Brouwer. Another work of great relevance is Cincuenta canciones en años de revolución, a selection made in collaboration with his wife Isabel González Sauto, which contains biographical notes and the scores of fifty songs that can represent as the authors say, "a chronicle of those fifty years", from 1959. The biographical notes, succinct but dense, constitute a small dictionary of 27 composers. The songs chosen by Giro and González Sauto range from the tearful to the erotic without skipping the political.

Radamés authored more than thirty articles for journals specializing in musical topics. As editor, beginning in the 1970s, Radamés oversaw the editing and publication of more than 100 titles dedicated to and/or including reissues of authors and composers such as Ignacio Cervantes, Leonardo Acosta, Argeliers León, Alejandro García Caturla, and Fernando Ortiz. Of particular significance was Radamés’ work in the search, edition, compilation, and dissemination of the totality of the work that Alejo Carpentier dedicated to music before and after the publication of Carpentier’s La Música en Cuba in 1946. The Museo Nacional de la música published Radames’ comprehensive edition of Carpentier's musical studies and commentary on it by several musicologists in La música en Cuba/Temas de la lira y del bongó.

Of notable importance too was the edition of a series of volumes based on interviews with dozens of Cuban musicians that make up an expansive oral history of Cuban popular music in the voice of its composers and performers, material of extraordinary value for the student of popular music, for example La música en persona by Erena Hernández, Ellos hacen la música by Raúl Martínez Rodríguez, y Cubanos en la música by Mayra Martínez. Two collections deserve particular note, El mambo, in which Giro makes a careful selection of texts aimed at differentiating between the various meanings of the word, and to find out who was its 'inventor' attributed, depending on the time and place, to Arsenio Rodríguez, Pérez Prado, Arcaño, and Cachao Lpez, among others; and the edited volume Panorama de la música popular cubana, with chapters dedicated to the history and character of every major genre of Cuban popular music. Finally, Giro supervised the translation and publication in 1973 of the Oxford Dictionary of Music, an essential reference for scholars of universal music. For his labors Radamés received the Distinción por la Cultura Nacional, the Raúl Gómez García and the Adolfo Guzmán Medals, and the Premio Nacional de Edición in 1999.

Of special interest is an interview conducted with him by writer Leonardo Padura which appears as a chapter in Padura’s Los rostros de la salsa. In his interventions Radamés establishes with safe and astute criteria the historical and technical relationship between salsa, as it was developed mostly by Nuyorican musicians, and the son and other genres of Cuban music.

During his lifetime Radamés shared his expertise with great generously with scholars inside and outside the country. There are numerous researchers in Cuba who sought his good advice. It is rare for an international researcher not to have consulted Radamés on matters related to Cuban music. Several foreign experts subsequently published notable studies on the subject. Radamés was a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution Latin Music Oral History Program lending his support for interviews with Richard Egües, Frank Emilio Flynn, Luis Carbonell, Celina González, Félix Guerrero, Enrique Bonne, Rodulfo Vaillant, Tata Güines and other artists in Havana and Santiago de Cuba in 1998-2004.

Given the well-deserved fame of Radamés Giro as a 'detective' of music in Cuba, we should not be surprised that the writer of 'detective' novels Leonardo Padura, himself an enthusiast of popular music, brilliantly incorporated the musicologist in his work La neblina del ayer, in which the character "Rafael" Giro, a faithful portrait of the Radams Giro of real life, assists as a musical specialist to homicide detective Mario Conde.

With Radams Giro’s death, Cuban musicology loses one of its great figures, a talented, generous, and collegial person. A great friend in the Cuban music family of his friends.

 
Raúl Fernández
Professor Emeritus
Unveristy of California, Irvine
https://temas.cult.cu/articulos-academicos/radames-giro-y-la-investigacion-de-la-musica-en-cuba/

11th UC-Cuba Graduate Student Conference at UC Merced

For several decades the danzón was regarded as Cuba’s national dance. A novel mixture of the old Spanish contradanza and Afro-Cuban melodic and rhythmic elements, the first known danzón was premiered by Miguel Failde and his orchestra in Matanzas in 1879 and titled “Alturas de Simpson,” celebrating one of the city’s barrios.The danzón spread to the Dominican Republic, New Orleans, and Mexico, where even today it is cultivated with passion.

A handful of danzón scores from the late 19th century, lost in the archives of the city of Matanzas, lay forgotten for more than 100 years until they are now rescued. Joyas Inéditas of the Failde Orchestra contains four of the recovered danzones. The Failde Orchestra is currently conducted by Ethiel Failde, great-great-grand nephew of Miguel Failde, widely regarded as the creator of the danzón.

A team of musicologists scoured the archives of several Matanzas institutions such as the Provincial Library, the Concert Band archive and the local museum to find them, after detecting that despite the fact that the danzón was born in 1879 in this city, there were not many written signs of it until the first decade of the 20th century.

Among the 16 pieces that slept for more than a century, four are part of the album Joyas Inéditas, produced by the Egrem label with arrangements and interpretation by the Failde Orchestra, led by flautista Ethiel Failde. Recorded in February 2021, it contains the lost danzones “El naranjero,” “Cuba Libre,” “A La Habana me voy” and “Nievecita,” all compositions of Miguel Failde.

Ada Ferrer's CUBA: An American History

The just released CUBA: An American History, is medicine codified as history.

It is a prodigious distillation of the best available scholarship on Cuba's history and U.S.-Cuba historical relations. Reading it you won't have to read several dozens books and hundreds of articles and documents in English and Spanish.

CUBA: An American History is everything the book blurbs and early reviews say it is. A masterpiece, a literary performance, an epic, sweeping , riveting, nuanced, fluid, informative, remarkable work of history.

Ada Ferrer, a Professor of History at NYU, is a distinguished historian of Cuba who has previously written two prized-winning monographs: Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-98,University of North Carolina Press, 1999, and Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Her most recent book is a necessary, obligatory reference for Cuba scholars.

Sixty Years After the Bay of "Pigs" - Playa Girón Invasion

Photo by David Shankbone | Statue of José Martí in Central Park, New York City

Independence activist, he was an eminent orator, poet, novelist, and literary critic. In New York, where he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party, he wrote frequently for major newspapers in Latin America about life and events in the United States.

Martí was regarded by Guillermo Cabrera Infante as "one of the greatest writers in the Spanish language" and "a true original". Octavio Paz attributed to Martí the first ‘modernista’ poem that broke with poetic codes traditional in Spain. Lezama Lima and Cabrera Infante both considered Martí’s “Diario de campaña” the finest poem written by a Cuban poet.
 

On Jan 28, birth date of José Martí, Cuba's national poet and independence leader, Niagara Falls was illuminated with the colors of the Cuban flag: white, blue, and red.

Cuba has a special relationship with Niagara Falls since, in exile in the United States, the poet José María Heredia dedicated a poem exalted by the beauty of the natural break and longing for his homeland in the 1820s.

A bronze plaque with the image of Heredia and the verses of his "Ode to Niagara" remains located on a stone wall to one side of the waterfall, as a souvenir of his visit to the place.

 
Cuba has a centuries-old choral music tradition and its choirs are highly regarded around the world. An international choral festival is held every November in Santiago de Cuba.

Recently choirs from several Cuban cities organized a virtual choral event bringing together 108 singers. The occasion was the celebration of 60 years of the foundation of the Orfeón Santiago by the celebrated arranger Electo Silva, and to honor Digna Guerra, for 45 years the Director of the Coro Nacional de Cuba. 108 Cuban voices interpret Silva’s arrangement of “Juramento,” a signature song by Miguel Matamoros, a Santiago musician considered a foundational figure of the son cubano. Link at the bottom.

In the time of Covid, choir members around the world can only rehearse and perform virtually. Each individual must control for light, background and sound, using whatever device available, i.e. laptop, cellphone, etc. Singing to a guide track, each participant records and uploads a video of their part, which often requires many “takes.” Next the video is mixed, mastered, synced, and edited together with the rest of the ensemble. Given the difficult conditions of internet and wifi access in Cuba, putting together this large virtual choir, is a considerable feat of art and technology.
 

- UC-Cuba Statement by Anita Casavantes Bradford

Click Here to Read Statement

2020 UC-Cuba Graduate Student Conference II (June 05, 2020)

Click here to view the Conference Program | UC Cuba Statement by Anita Casavantes Bradford

This panel discussion offers short presentations and discussion about the situation of Covid 19 in Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the perspectives of three scholars with years of experience in these contexts.

 
Join us at: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92821059322

1. Nancy Burke, Professor of anthropology and public health at University of California, Merced
2. Dr. César Herrera, Director of CEDIMAT Centro Cardiovascular, Santo Domingo
3. Rodrigo Bulamah, Post-doctoral fellow at the Graduate Program of Social Sciences, Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), Brazil

2020 UC-Cuba Graduate Student Conference and Workshop

Click here to view the Conference Program

Click here to view story by NPR

Monday, April 1 | 2:00 - 3:30 PM | COB2 - 392

Rafael J. Betancourt, Ph.D.
Professor of Urban Economics,Colegio Universitario, San Gerónimo de La Habana

Abstract: Recent transformations in the Cuban political and economic system form part of an alternative model of development to those currently existing in the region and other parts of the Global South. What are these main changes? What model of socialism is being crafted in Cuba and what are its perspectives? What can it contribute to other countries if it succeeds?

Biography: Consultant for Sol2 Economics, a progressive consulting firm based in Berkeley, California, and The Center for Responsible Travel (CREST), a non-profit organization devoted to increasing the positive global impact of responsible tourism. Professor Betancourt is the author of Construyendo socialismo desde abajo: La contribucion de la Economía Popular y Solidaria (Editorial Caminos, La Habana, 2017), and co-author, with Martha Honey, Jannelle Wilkins and José Luis Perelló, of Por el Mar de las Antillas: 50 años de turismo de cruceros en el Caribe (Ediciones Temas, La Habana, 2018). He has numerous published articles and is a frequent speaker in Cuba and the US on economics and tourism in Cuba. Born in Cuba and educated in the United States, he currently lives in Cuba and shares his time between the two countries.

Click Here to Download Flyer

UCI-Humanities Gateway 1002 - March 19, 2019 | 4:00 - 5:00 pm

Click Here to Download Flyer

Living and Writing in Havana explores the connection of Leonardo Padura’s writing to the Cuban capital. The documentary also highlights the impressive reception his novels have in Cuba and the close relationship with readers through the iconic character Mario Conde.

Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs

Call for Panels and Papers
Twelfth Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies
Cuba and Puerto Rico: Two Wings of One Bird?
February 14–16, 2019

The Cuban Research Institute (CRI) of Florida International University continues its tradition of convening scholars and other persons interested in the study of Cuba and Cuban Americans by announcing its 12th Conference. We encourage the submission of panels and papers concentrating on any aspects of the main conference theme, but will consider all submissions relevant to the history, economy, politics, culture, society, and creative expression of Cuba and its diaspora.

In 1893, the Puerto Rican poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió (1843–1924) published her patriotic text, "To Cuba." In this poem, she wrote: "Cuba and Puerto Rico are / two wings of one bird / they receive flowers or bullets / in the same heart." Generations of Cubans and Puerto Ricans have recited these verses as an expression of the solidarity between the two peoples and their shared cultural traditions. Arawak peoples inhabited both islands before their Spanish conquest and colonization beginning in the late 15th century. Cuba and Puerto Rico remained the last Spanish colonies in the Americas until 1898, when U.S. troops invaded the islands.

Whereas Cuba attained its formal independence in 1902, Puerto Rico became an unincorporated territory of the United States. U.S. political, economic, and cultural influence was pervasive in the two Antilles during the first half of the 20th century. Puerto Rico became a U.S. Commonwealth in 1952, but the United States broke diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961, after the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. For several decades during the Cold War, Cuba and Puerto Rico represented countermodels for economic and political development.

The Twelfth Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies takes Rodríguez de Tió's famous metaphor of the "two wings of one bird" as a cue for comparative academic inquiry and public debate. Our main theme, the relations between Cuba and Puerto Rico, invites interdisciplinary approaches to the multiple, complex, and often contrasting links between the two countries, both historically and in current times. Although we welcome discussions about the recent situation and the future of Cuba and Puerto Rico, we invite a thorough retrospective examination of the social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of the intertwined histories of the two countries. We are especially interested in assessing the contribution of the islands' diasporas to the growing "Latinization" of the United States, particularly in Florida.

Published: November 16, 2017

Published: September 8, 2017

Between 1959 and 1965, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled political instability, repression, violence and material deprivation in their homeland. Under three consecutive US presidents, they benefited from executive actions that allowed them to live and work in the United States without immigrant visas and that provided millions of federal dollars for their resettlement, healthcare and education. In 1966 Congress acted to regularize the immigration status of these Cubans, most of whom had entered the US as "parolees" or on long-since expired tourist visas. The Cuban Adjustment Act granted these parolees and visa overstayers permanent resident status and provided them with an expedited path to US citizenship--though most of them declined to become citizens until the 1980s.

The recent decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive action that has provided temporary stays of deportation and work authorization to more than 800,000 undocumented young people--whose families have similarly fled political instability, repression, violence and material deprivation in their own home nations--has been justified by some as a corrective to an unprecedented and potentially unconstitutional overreach of executive power.

Today's Cuban American community owes its origins to just such an exercise of executive power.

As scholars of Cuba and its diaspora, we are not qualified to evaluate the constitutionality of these immigration-related executive actions. We nonetheless feel compelled to point out that they are not without precedent. Moreover, the history of the now prosperous Cuban American community, which has contributed so much to the social, cultural and economic life of the US, is just one example of the ways that our nation has benefited from the careful exercise of executive power to facilitate the integration of undocumented immigrants in our society.

The more recent history of DACA-mented youths' educational and professional accomplishments, their unwavering record of community engagement and desire to assume the full responsibilities of citizenship, provide further proof of the ways that executive action on behalf of unauthorized immigrants has enriched our national life.

As they did with the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, it is time for Congress to pass legislation allowing the 800,000 plus DACA-mented youth--as well as their hard-working, law-abiding undocumented family members--to regularize their immigration status and to live among us without fear, as equal members of the communities to which they have already contributed so much.

Anita Casavantes Bradford,
Ph.D. Co-Director, UC Cuba Academic Initiative
Associate Professor, Chicano/Latino Studies and History
University of California Irvine

University of California sues Trump administration on unlawful repeal of DACA program

UC Office of the President
September 8, 2017