Amor Verdadero (Guajira-Son), 1997

Classic old school Afro-Cuban son. This album was recorded in the same sessions that produced Buena Vista Social Club, with many of the same musicians.

This is old masters showing the kids how it’s done, swinging like tomorrow might not come after all.

Cuando Te Vea, 1958

Tito Puente, El Maestro, the OG. This album was a massive hit, and was the soundtrack to all your parent’s Cuba Libre-fueled key parties. And that’s why you’re supposed to stay in your room when you’re told.

This track features my favorite trumpet solo of all time, riding on top of that slinky, syncopated clave base.

*Fact check: Tito was an American-born Puerto Rican, but he was still a prime mover in Afro-Cuban jazz.

Esta China, 1980

The band that launched Youssou N’Dour into stardom. I love this track because I always think of Afro-Cuban music as unidirectional, the influences moving from Africa to Cuba. If nothing else, this track proves that things moved in the other direction, too.

I don’t know that the woozy horns are Cuban (they sound more drunken Mariachi to me), but the percussion could have been lifted straight off a classic Tito Puente track.

If those three songs don’t make you want to a) hear more Afro-Cuban jazz, and b) shake your groove thing, there’s no help for you. I mean, I guess we can still be friends…

Maybe.

Anyway, that’s what I had in my head when we talked about going to Cuba. I wasn’t planning on going out every night, but music tourism was absolutely top of mind. Thankfully, we were able to enjoy music from traditional to modern, in venues from bars to concert halls.

The first music we saw was at El Rintintin in Trinidad, which I covered here. That kind of classic sound really sings to me, and I found it again in Habana Vieja. The house band at restaurant/bar La Vitrola right on Plaza Vieja scratched the itch. Not Tito Puente, but that ship has sailed.

Our next concert was concert hall, not bar. It was staged in a beautiful Colonial church, and featured a group of maybe 9-10 musicians doing an overview of Cuban music from roughly the last 100 years. The entire program was excellent, but my personal favorite was a piece by composer/pianist Frank Fernandez, who was in attendance, called Bellas Artes. I can’t find any version of that to share, but here’s another piece by Fernandez that at least gets you close.

The very next night we saw some of the musicians who were in the concert perform as a jazz quartet at a local restaurant/bar. The Ernesto Oliva Band featured Ernesto on piano with a bassist and two percussionists. It was modern jazz built on a foundation of classic Cuban rhythm (although with a hint of 70s Airto).

Finally, we saw Frank Delgado, a beloved Cuban folksinger. His songs were not only catchy, they were obviously well-known, as the audience sang along with almost every number. He’s known primarily for two things: incisive songs that capture the contradictions at the heart of the Cuban experience, and pissing the Cuban government off. I have a hunch those two things might be related.

Attending the concert was kind of weird. Imagine seeing Dylan in a small house, if the US government has worked over decades to suppress his music, you’d never heard his songs before, and you didn’t speak English. So… cool but baffling?

I expected Cuban music to be a highlight of our visit, and I wasn’t disappointed. The range of music on offer was incredibly broad, with so many different approaches to honoring and updating a deep and rich heritage. I hope you follow up on some of this, and join me in the joyous rabbit hole of Cuban music.

There were six of us total on the road trip: Dorothy and I, Jenn, her local friend Adriano, and two of Jenn’s Canadian friends, Sebastien (Québécois) and Camille (Canadian by address, Brazilian by birth). We met everyone for the first time at a dinner party at Jenn’s the evening after we arrived. With no small trepidation, as we’d committed to spending a lot of time with people we knew either not at all or not much. That was more than a little unusual for us, as we have our own travel rhythm and we’re not keen on the triangulation required to keep a group of people happy. But this adventure is all about finding ways to say Yes, so we said Yes.

We keep mentioning our friend Jenn, but she’s who I just referred to as not knowing well. Which is weird, since we’ve known her for over twenty years. She’s part of our summer camp, Camp Little Big Bash. Every year, somewhere between 80-100 folks find their way to a WPA work camp buried seven miles deep into an old growth redwood forest outside Mendocino in Northern California. Unaccountably, this has been going on for 39 years, and we’ve been going for about 30 of them.

It’s more glamping than camping. You can tent camp if you prefer, but there are cabins with cots and screens, and bathrooms dotted throughout the camp. More importantly, one of the bathrooms has hot showers, and there’s a lodge with a huge professional kitchen, a massive dining room, and a space for dancing. We cook gourmet meals for one another, mix delicious cocktails, hike, play games, swim in the swimming hole, or just lay about. One night we have a costume party and the next night we have a talent show.

What we don’t tend to do is talk about what we do when we’re not at Bash. It’s not taboo, it’s just not why people are there. First question you get at a party is, “What do you do?” No one asks at Bash, and few volunteer, which is how it’s possible to know someone for twenty years and not really know them at all. Until last year’s Bash, I had no idea Jenn lived part of the year in Cuba. Or that she was a professor. Or that she’d written about Cuba’s COVID response (here and here). Or that she lived in Canada. So for all intents and purposes, we’d signed up for four days in a van and an airbnb with five strangers. What could possibly go wrong?

We’d been group planning the logistics of the trip all along. I was responsible for housing; Jenn made dive and van arrangements; and Sebastien booked a walking tour of Trinidad. The night before we were to leave, we got a message from Jenn that our van had fallen through. No gas. Somehow, Jenn manifested a last minute replacement, and we were off. In style.

We got an early start because we had a big first day planned: snorkeling (or scuba diving for the younger and fitter), lunch in Cienfuegos, and Trinidad before dark. The before dark part was important, because the roads tend to be potholed, and you want to see those suckers and adjust. Taking them at speed is a bad idea.

I know, because our driver nailed one and I hit my head on the roof pretty hard. Apparently, there’s only so effective white-knuckling the edge of the seat will be to anchor you. The driver’s girlfriend (whose presence for the four days was never explained) kept checking on me like I was about to explode into angry gringo pieces. All good. Not my first concussion.

Our newly provisioned van had an open back with bench seats facing one another. That made for a much bumpier ride and a more communal pileup. We also learned that one of our crew, Camille, has a superpower: she can sleep anywhere.

Bahía de los Cochinos

I know, I buried the lede. And reburied it in Spanish. We snorkeled the Bay of Pigs. How cool is that?

The drive up to the Bay featured a long stretch positively pavéd with crabs. This photo is from right where we parked to swim, with just a single crab and a few casualties. But just prior, it looked like The Birds had been recast with claws and chitin. It was impossible to drive that stretch without playing the Nibelungen in the crab Götterdämmerung.

We pulled over at a wide spot called Cueva de las Peces (Cave of the Fish), which featured a cenote (the aforementioned cave), a dive shack, a snack bar, and a couple of tsatske shacks. And a deliriously beautiful panorama of turquoise water stretching to the horizon. If, say, you were planning on invading a country, you couldn’t pick a lovelier spot.

The snorkeling was wonderful. We were able to stay right near shore and swim the clear water amongst the rocks and colorful fish. At one point, we swam right through a school, which parted to let us through but didn’t scatter at our intrusion. We surfaced to see two teenage Russian girls throwing bread into the water. Those fish couldn’t have cared less about us.

Cienfuegos

I don’t know about you, but swimming always makes me hungry. And a nappy kind of warm. So it was good that our next stop was lunch in Cienfuegos, a lovely little Colonial town.

After lunch, we did the weirdest thing: we indulged in some IRL real estate porn. Somehow, Jenn had run across a luxury property for sale in Ceinfuegos, and she arranged an after lunch viewing. It was a ridiculous mansion: four bedrooms, two kitchens, multiple spaces that blended indoors and outdoors, 20 foot ceilings, and an entire extra apartment on the second floor. It had just been renovated and was in spectacular condition. Asking price: $185,000.

There were a few challenges, like foreigners not being able to own property, and having to know a guy who knows a guy for any inevitable repairs. So, not on our actual To-Do list, but another amazing experience hand curated for us by Jenn.

Adelante a Trinidad

We’d been in the van over three hours total to get from La Habana to Bahía de los Cochinos and then to Cienfuegos. It would take another bumpy two hours to get to Trinidad, but we’d be there well before dark.

Unsurprisingly, the countryside on the way was beautiful. It’s like we were on some kind of tropical island or something.

When we finally got to Trinidad and our airbnb, I was a little nervous, as the location seemed potentially iffy. But we were a block from the Centro, and the unit had four private rooms, each with its own bath, and a lovely rooftop terrace for made to order breakfast and evening drinks.

Was everyone happy with the Airbnb I’d found? Yes, everyone was happy. I was just relieved.

Trinidad itself was beautiful, and well worth the bouncy ride, dead crabs, and concussion. It was also colored by how little of Habana we’d seen before we set out. We’d only had two days, so we hadn’t strayed out of our neighborhood, Vedado, and we weren’t truly settled. Where Trinidad was truly lovely, Vedado, which was all we knew of Habana, was decidedly grittier.

I’ll confess that I had an imaginary Cuba living in my head long before before we actually got there. My fantasy Cuba featured stately Colonial streetscapes, little shops with local handicrafts, and Afro-Cuban music pouring out of bars and clubs at night. Turns out I hadn’t imagined Cuba, I had manifested Trinidad. It was everything I thought Cuba should be, and I fell in love.

We immediately started discussing changing our plans and staying in Trinidad for the rest of our time in Cuba. That got rejected pretty quickly over cost (we’d still have to pay for our Habana casa particular) and logistics (The six hour drive was… exciting, and no guarantee gas and driver would be available when we needed to return for our flight back to Mexico). Instead, we committed to figure out where to find in Habana the things we loved about Trinidad. Still, it’s a testament to our strong feelings that we considered it at all.

We don’t often feature pictures of ourselves on the blog, but this is how much we loved Trinidad:

Music was an important part of my desire to visit Cuba, and we weren’t disappointed. We wandered Trinidad’s streets after dark, listening to the music flowing out from the bars and restaurants, until we heard the band playing at El Rintintin.

Heading Home

Trinidad was Monday afternoon through Tuesday, leaving Wednesday morning, but with a few stops on the way. Our first stop was on our way out of Trinidad. We had seen a collection of really wonderful ceramics in town, so we stopped at the studio on our way out of town.

Taller Ceramico Santander

This visit was much like our visit to the ceramics taller in Oaxaca, Alfarería Rufi. Santander makes beautiful, graceful shapes that are variations on classic designs, with glazes and coloring that somehow look both modern and traditional at the same time. Like Rufi, they also had a patriarch who’d been making ceramics for decades. As with any master potter, it seems less like he’s shaping the pieces and more like he’s casting a spell with his hands, conjuring them.

There was no way to know for sure that they’d be open when we visited, because Cuban internet, so we were delighted to be able to walk right in. Even better, we walked back out with the piece on the right.

Visiting Che

Our first stop out of town was a visit to the Che Guevara Mausoleum in Santa Clara, about three hours out of Trinidad. I’m not a fanboy, but it was a lovely museum and tribute (sadly, no pictures allowed). Pictures were allowed on the grounds, which featured a pretty monumental monument.

At the risk of seeming shallow, my key takeaway was that the dude owned lots of guns. The museum couldn’t possibly have held all of his guns, but even if that was everything, it was a lot. And this wasn’t some gentleman’s collection; they all looked like they’d received hard use. Boy liked to shoot.

Jibacoa

Our last stop Wednesday was the strangest of the trip. Adriano, Sebastien, and Camille headed back to Habana, but we and Jenn were dropped off at Memories Jibacoa, an all-inclusive resort a little more than an hour short of Habana. Jenn stayed with a friend in town, so Dorothy and I spent the afternoon and most of the next day pretending we belonged at an upscale resort.

What made it so strange is that, well, that’s kind of not how we roll. Resorts like that are like cruise ships on land. They offer a curated, inauthentic experience, meant to simulate being in a foreign country, but with all of the rough edges sanded off. They’re EPCOT center experiences, not real experiences, so we avoid them.

I’m certain we were the only people there who had stayed anywhere off-resort. Everyone there had flown into Habana, taken a shuttle to Jibacoa, stayed there without ever leaving, and shuttled back to the airport without ever seeing the real Cuba that exists outside the tourist’s Green Zone. We generally find that setup kind of icky.

But as I’ve said, Jenn doesn’t really know us that well, and she said it was a fabulous experience, and it was just for one night, and we need to be able to find our way to Yes instead of No. So… Yes. Of course we stayed there.

And it was perfect. We wouldn’t have done it for more than the one day, but that day was great. We had a king size bed, and air conditioning, and meals with cheese, and a private beach, and an enormous pool, and no children anywhere on the premises. Cuba is hard work, and as fabulous as the whole Trinidad expedition was, it was really nice to spend our last day in pampered luxury. Then it was back to Habana’s mean streets Thursday afternoon.

The entire road trip (inclusive of concussion), was amazing. Our thanks to Jenn for pulling it off under insanely difficult circumstances, and the entire crew for being such excellent companions and stalwart adventurers.

I have one more picture I’d like to share, of our new good friend, Adriano. We spent time with him in Habana, as well, but he was an integral part of our Trinidad experience. As were, of course, Jenn, Sebastien, and Camille. But we don’t have anything like portraits of them as good as this picture of Adriano, so.. they’re dead to us. Long live Adriano!

Half of the Palacio is galleries and the other half is a performance space. There are a number of smaller galleries, which were closed when we there, and a single large gallery for rotating exhibits. The upper floor is a mural gallery, with massive pieces from Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and others.

Carnaval de la Vida Mexicana, Diego Rivera 1936

El Hombre Controlador del Universo, Diego Rivera, 1934

But the true star of the Palacio is the Palacio itself. The mixture of classic Art Deco with Mesoamerican motifs (a style I call AzDeco, because of course I do) is a sight to behold. It might well exist elsewhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that particular mashup was unique to the Palacio.

Los Galerias

The galleries and lobby are where the Art Deco elements of the design are really permitted to fly their colors.

El Teatro

The theater, unlike the gallery space, is recognizably Art Nouveau. When construction was restarted in 1932, the new architect updated the rest of the interior design to Deco. However, the theater’s curtain suggests how it avoided that fate.

The “curtain” isn’t actually a curtain at all. It’s a 24 ton beast made of almost a million pieces of stained glass that was built by Tiffany in 1911. I strongly suspect that the dome and the proscenium arch were created at the same time as the curtain, and were likewise waiting for construction to restart.

But even if the curtain was the sum total of extant design components, there was no way to install that clearly Nouveau curtain and update the rest of the space to Deco. No matter what newfangled ideas the architect had, that theater was being built to the original 1910 design spec.

The proscenium arch appeared to be a mosaic, until the lights went down. It’s glass, and it glowed when the backlighting came on.

Ballet Folklórico de México

We were able to get interior shots of the theater because we saw the Ballet Folklórico de México perform there. There’s a lot to unpack about that performance. First, and most obvious, just beautiful. Great choreography, wonderful dancing, killer live music. The hall itself, which is structured like a small opera house (1,936 seats), has ridiculously good acoustics, even in the cheap seats, and showcased the live band perfectly. It’s probably the best sound I’ve ever heard in a hall that size.

But…

I thought the overall program had a problematic relationship with indigenous culture.

It opened with Los Matachines, a drum and dance performance specifically based on pre-Hispanic religious ceremonies from the northern region of Central Mexico. This video is from ten years ago, but it’s the same number, and was shot at the Palacio.

A rocking good way to start. Energetic, colorful, and crowd pleasing. But it wrote a check about representation that the rest of the program couldn’t cash. While it promised a program rich in Mexico’s varied cultures, that was one of only two performances rooted in indigenous traditions. The rest of the evening was myopically Hispanic.

Danza del Venado was the only other indigenous performance. It’s based on the traditional deer dance of the Mayo and Yaqui tribes of Sonora and Sinaloa.

And… that’s it. Maybe 10% of the entire program allocated to indigenous performances, which is an interesting take on Mexico’s cultural history. The nods to indigenous cultures almost made it worse. If it had been presented as Hispanic folkloric dance, instead of Mexican folkloric dance, it would have been at least understandable. Narrow-minded, but coherent. As it was, the pair of indigenous performances only served to highlight how very little the company seemed to care about the richest part of Mexico’s cultural heritage.

But there was one performance that, by itself, made the entire evening worthwhile, and it didn’t even involve dance. The live band did two solo songs, one of which was an example of son jarocho called simply Son Jarocho.

I knew nothing about son jarocho, and my mind was completely blown. I didn’t know that you could play a harp like it was a mandolin. It seemed almost like Mexican bluegrass, and why no bluegrass band has pulled in a son jarocho harp player is beyond me.

I think it sings to me because it has a lot in common with Cuban son. However, its roots are in Veracruz, with elements of indigenous music, West African music, and Spanish fandango. I could listen to it all day. Starting right now, I think.