On the day Celia Cruz died, I tried to explain her significance to a gringo friend over dinner. It goes without saying that he wasn’t getting it.
“I know she’s famous, but all I see is a old woman who dresses like a drag queen and looks like she should of retired years ago,” he said. “What so great about that?”
A long pause followed as I eyed him carefully, washing down my plantain chips with coconut water. I told him I felt like he’d just insulted my mother.
Of course, he found the comparison obsessive, but I wasn’t alone in feeling it. To the Cuban exile community in my new home, Miami, Celia Cruz’s death was like losing the closest of family members. The entire city seemed to be in shock. A few coworkers called in sick the following day. A hip-hop radio station and an alt-rock station played her songs in tribute. The Spanish-language stations suspended regular programming to field phone calls from fans expressing their grief.
Her passing would have been deeply felt if it had only represented simply than the loss of a consummate entertainer, but this grief was also about the vanishing of a dream. Celia’s music is reminiscent of a Cuba that existed before Fidel Castro’s dictatorship and now exists only in memories. Her rich voice and charisma made her fans forget — at least temporarily — the burden of exile and cultural separation.
Perhaps even more important for me, Celia celebrated her Afro-Cuban roots with a simple inner pride characteristic of that bygone era, before a singer’s looks always mattered as much as her sound. Like Puerto Rico’s Ismael Rivera and Peru’s Susana Baca, she gave a voice to the Afro-Latin experience through her music.
The voice came first from the beginning. Born in Havana on October 21, 1925, Cruz first attracted the attention of neighbors who passed by the window of a room where she lulled her brothers and sisters to sleep. At age 14 she began studying music at Cuba’s National Conservatory, and in 1949, after singing and dancing her way through Mexico and Venezuela with the dance troupe Mulatas de Fuego, she took over as the lead female singer of the legendary Sonora Matancera, Cuba’s most popular orchestra.
With her operatic abilities, and the band with the most tumbao (swing) backing her up, Cruz established herself as the leading pioneer and popularizer of the son, an Afro-Cuban rhythm that is the foundation for modern salsa music. Sporting perfectly manicured nails, elegant dresses and nine-inch heels that would make Imelda Marcos cry for mercy, she embodied the look of the golden age of Afro-Cuban music, too, yet her powerful voice, not her looks, were always the focus of her career.
After defecting from Cuba in 1960 following Castro’s takeover, she resided in Mexico for awhile before finally making a permanent move to New York. Two years after leaving her native country, she experienced what she would later describe as “one of the most difficult days of my life.”
A few hours before going on stage in Manhattan, Celia received the news that her mother had died in Cuba. Most artists would have canceled the show. Celia instead decided to go onstage, singing and crying her way through the performance in tribute to her mother. She tried to attend her mother’s funeral, but Castro branded her a traitor, forbidding her to return. She carried the pain of that event throughout her life, expressing it in hits such as “Cuando Salí De Cuba” (When I Left Cuba) and “Si No Regreso” (If I Don’t Return).
For me, Cruz’s pain reflected my own strained link to my past, and her music became a symbol of the Cuban grandmother I never knew. My parents are Jamaican, but my father’s family is originally from Cuba. My grandmother, who was a teacher, existed in stories passed down to me by my Dad and an uncle. By explaining the tangled web of my family’s Cuban history my uncle cemented in me an appreciation of my diverse Caribbean culture that wasn’t always there.
As I grew up on Cleveland’s East Side, my house was filled with the sounds from a variety of Caribbean, gospel and country records, but I preferred sneaking to my room to listen to Slick Rick instead of the Sonora Matancera or my mother’s beloved Harry Belafonte. It wasn’t until my early teens when I developed an interest in my family’s history that I began to listen to Jamaican and Latin music, mainly Bob Marley and Celia Cruz. I wore out the cassette of her 1992 release Azucar so badly that I had to buy it twice.
Amazingly, my dream of meeting Celia came true in the late ’90s while I was living in Mexico City and working as an entertainment reporter. I’d written a feature her manager in Mexico, Alejandro Zuarth. He knew I was a fan so whenver Celia was in town, he let me tag along.
Over breakfasts, late-night video shoots and backstage converations I gained a small glimpse into the life of an artist who seemed as humble in person as she was on stage. She was a stickler for punctuality and always let you know what was on her mind, but her firmness went hand in hand with her natural sweetness: with Celia, what you saw was what you got. The only time I saw her upset was when I’d ask about Cuban politics and Fidel Castro, to which she responded that she wouldn’t return to Cuba until Castro was out of power.
If she ever minded the attention from fans, she never showed it, graciously signing autographs and posing for photos whenever it was requested. I think it was this class, perseverance and abundance of energy that impressed me more than anything else about her. During a video shoot in Mexico City’s historic barrio chino she was up cracking jokes with dancers at 3:30 a.m. while I stood dozing against a wall. I was 24, and she was 73 at the time.
On stage, she commanded a crowd like few artists can. As Nat Chediak, a music critic in Miami, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel, “No one sounds like her. She spawned a veritable rag-tag army of second-rate imitators but there’s nothing like the original, and it cannot be confused.”
There was no need for an encore when she performed because the crowd wouldn’t let her leave the stage. Actually, Celia had a hard time leaving herself. During one Mexico City show, she sung her infectious hit “La Vida Es Un Carnaval” twice at the audience’s request.
Her songs were as reliable and addictive as a Caribbean mother’s home-cooked dishes — you knew you would like them even before you tried them, no second-guessing. And there was always that extra-added sprinkle of “azucar,” Celia’s trademark phrase her songs that kept her from ever flagging. Her last Sony Discos recording, Regalo del Alma (Gift from the Soul), features a variety of danceable rhythms from reggae to salsa to hip-hop, demonstrating her willingness to adopt new styles while keeping her heels firmly planted in salsa, son and guaguanco. The disc’s first single was already climbing the charts before she died.
But it wasn’t until her death that those unfamiliar with her music, like my friend, began to sense the magnitude of her significance (remember the bewilderment of outsiders over the death of Kurt Cobain?). The expression of grief from the thousands of devoted fans who lined the streets of New York and Miami were the ultimate testament. Here in Miami, a friend waited in line for six hours under the sweltering sun, his 89-year-old grandmother dressed in suit and heels by his side. Some cried as they passed her coffin, other danced in front of it, singing a final song to their beloved queen.
Celia Cruz may have lost her battle to cancer, but she left a legacy of music and culture that has inspired generations, despite one government’s notorious efforts to deny it. News of her death was limited to small, two-paragraph story on Page 6 of a Cuban newspaper, which focused on her supposed “counterrevolutionary activities.”
Her music has long been banned on the island of her birth, though she was arguably the island’s greatest cultural ambassador, proving that some voices can’t be silenced by exile. Or even by death. As long as Cuba exists, so will Celia Cruz.
Azucar!
Originally published in UrbanDialect
