INTERVIEW WITH ROBIN MOORE
by Ned Sublette
February 17, 2004

Robin Moore is author of Nationalizing Blackness: Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940, (Pitt Latin American Series) and a professor at Temple University.

Ned Sublette: Tell me a little about your book - what the basic thesis of the book is, what the ideas of Cuban music that you propose are?

Robin Moore: In my book I was essentially focusing on the 1920s and 30s in Cuba, which was a very interesting moment, from a cultural perspective. It was a moment when a lot of different kinds of what had been pretty entirely marginal working-class forms of music in the black community started to suddenly surface and get recorded and make a splash commercially and grab a lot of attention. And it was also a period in which African-influenced culture received some sort of legitimization in the minds of mainstream cuban society for the first time. So the book was about debates over what cuba was in a cultural sense, and what role Africa played in that mix, and the boundaries between what was considered positive and Cuban, or backwards or negative and African, were shifting all around. And so it's just interesting to focus on the press and the critics and see what folks had to say about that.

NS: How do we see the image of Africa in Cuba and Afro-Cubans changing from, say, the beginning of the republic of Cuba through the early 1940s?

RM: Well, at the end of the 19th century - or in the 19th century -- I don't have the impression that African culture was considered culture at all. I have the impression that, as in the case of most of Europe and in the United States, Africa was considered a place that was just entirely primitive, that didn't have any culture, that had nothing worth studying. On the island itself, there was very little interest in focusing on what was going on culturally with these folks who were being brought from Africa. I think all that started to change with the revolutionary wars, beginning in the late 1860s, primarily because Cubans of color were pretty central in liberating the country from Spain. So the revolutionary decades towards the end of the 19th century had to involve kind of a discursive reversal on the part of the white leadership, and they had, at least in social terms, to recognize the black population as Cuban, but even through that period, and even into the early 20th century, African culture was rejected, even as Cubans of color themselves were accepted as part of the nation. Actually, I think beginning in the 1840s and 50s, the white dominant classes were quite nervous, were quite upset, about the strong demographic presence of Cuban blacks on the island, and they did everything in their power into the 20th century to change that. One of the things was that they started subsidizing white immigration from Spain. And another manifestation of the same phenomenon was that to the extent that Afro-Cubans were accepted, it had to be on European cultural terms. So for many years, at least until the mid-1920s, if you wanted to be an artist or a musician in Cuba, you had to be playing the violin or the piano, or you had to be doing a music that within a very circumscribed space that was acceptable and those parameters were defined on very European terms.

NS: And how did that change?

RM: The period I was writing about was this large artistic movement known as Afrocubanism, and it was kind of an odd moment on some level. it was this first moment in which different kinds of African-influenced music, and African imagery and subject matter, suddenly became in vogue. It was suddenly of greater interest to the entire country. It had a lot to do with jazz, and it had a lot to do with different artistic trends in Europe. But essentially there were some real fundamental contradictions in the ideology of the movement from the beginning. It was a movement whose major proponents were white middle-class conservatory-trained artists, and they had a particular take on black working-class culture, which obviously wasn't the real thing, and then sort of to complicate matters even more, some of the most well-known interpreters of, for instance, the musical repertoire of the period were middle-class, conservatory-trained black Cubans. So you had sort of refractions on refractions and interpretations on interpretations of what black working-class culture was. And the cultural forms from this period are really fundamentally ambivalent, I would say, in their depiction of blackness and Afro-Cuban culture and aesthetics. They can be read as something positive, something that is valorizing this tradition for the first time, and in fact they were valorizing it, on some level, for the first time. But they can also be read as very shallow, very racist, very stereotypical in their depictions and in the ways that all of this first entered into the mainstream.

NS: Can you give me an example where this contradiction comes into play?

RM: I think for me one of the examples of music that most exemplifies that whole period from my perspective is the recording of "Messie' Julián," sung by Ignacio Villa. It summarizes all the weird contradictions of this movement. It's essentially riffing off of a 19th-century figure in Cuba known as a negro catedrático, who's sort of like a minstrelsy figure.

NS: This is a figure from the popular theater, from the teatro bufo, right?

RM: Yes, this is a figure from the Cuban vernacular theater, which is essentially a comic blackface theater form that got started more or less in the 1860s. So here we have a conservatory-trained pianist who knows all kinds of classical repertoire, speaks a couple of different languages, interprets all kinds of art compositions, but early in his career, along comes this afrocubanismo movement, and he becomes one of the best-known interpreters of this music that sort of celebrates, but sort of pokes fun at a lot of black expression.

NS: I think it's interesting that when Rita Montaner went to the U.S. to appear with Al Jolson in Wonder Bar - here are two performers who had made their big impression in blackface.

RM: Definitely. There were certainly all sorts of depictions of black Cubans by whites in blackface, and there was a history of that going back a hundred years, I guess, by the 1920s and 30s. But here the situation in the 20th century got a little more complex, because here we had a black Cuban who was trained in classical arts, and yet he got most famous interpreting songs by a white middle-class Cuban about black working-class culture and essentially playing a bumpkin or an Uncle Tom-like figure, consciously slurring his speech and speaking in this sort of grammatically imprecise way, so as to represent the white perception of what was cute or picturesque about black working-class culture.

NS: Like the dialect songs of the American south.

RM: Yes, you can put Stephen Foster songs, or the Al Jolson repertoire into the same category.

NS: Meanwhile, you had a couple of very authentic Afro-Cuban expressions that were both coming out of their shell and encountering resistance. I'm talking about the son boom of the 20s and the curious history of the conga. I wonder if you could talk about each of those a little bit.

RM: Sure. I think you're pointing to another real fundamentally problematic aspect of this whole afrocubanismo moment, which is the fact that at the same time that certain kinds of Afro-Cuban culture were being celebrated by the intelligentsia and well-known artists, those same intelligentsia and the society as a whole were aggressively persecuting the black community from a perspective of political rights and also from the perspective of trying to stamp out overtly African-influenced culture. So kind of fundamental tendencies going in different directions.

NS: This is the period when we saw raids on the Afro-Cuban religions, prohibitions against playing the drums in public, things like that, right?

RM: Yeah, instruments were confiscated, they were destroyed, folks were jailed, even, for brief periods for being associated with musical performance associated with the African religions. All sorts of nasty problems. At the same time that different kinds of representation of rumba music were first getting popular on the stages of theaters in Havana, like the Alhambra and other places, actual performers of rumba in the street were being persecuted by the police and had to scurry off and hide to perform their drums in their traditional forms of expression.

NS: We have this image of the Cuban son today, possibly in part because of the whole Buena Vista thing, as almost this cute, cuddly kind of music. But when you listen to the old Septeto Habanero records - first of all, that's a son with a lot of rumba in it, you could talk about a son rumbeao - those records are weird. I mean, they sound like you're at an Abakuá ceremony or something.

RM: Yeah, certainly those old son records really give you a feel for how closely the emergent popular music genre that the son was representing was linked to all sorts of music that hadn't achieved any commercial success and wouldn't for many decades to come. So, yeah, you listen to old recordings by Ignacio Piñeiro and he includes all sorts of Abakuá terminology or Yoruban terminology from santería, or references to other Afro-Cuban religions. Sometimes you'll hear those bramidos or little calls that are performed on the bongó in the same way that they might have been on the ceremonial Abakuá drum -- all sorts of ties, definitely.

NS: And also you could hear the echoes of the old coros de clave - those big choral groups - and, though we don't have recordings of the rumba, I always say that if you want to know a little bit about what the rumba sounded like, you can listen to some of those old son recordings and you can kind of get a sense.

RM: One of the things that's always struck me in comparing rumba and son is that in structural terms, the music is almost exactly the same, so you can see how son music seems to have developed out rumba, pretty clearly. So not only in terms of lyrical references and the occasional inclusion of a little diana introduction, but both rumba and son begin with some sort of strophic song-like structure, and then the piece gets a little faster and hotter, and ends up in a sort of cyclic, repetitive, call-and-response jam, and it involves a lot of improvisation on different instruments, and very obviously coming out of the same tradition. so if you think about rumba as being a fundamentally black working-class form of expression that was only listened to a lot by different members of the communities it was performed in, then son represents a pidgin language somehow, that was mixing some other elements from Europe like basic diatonic harmonies, and made the music more acceptable to mainstream society.

NS: Well, the son having emerged in Oriente, which was a much more creolized part of Cuba than western Cuba, which had been the heavy sugar concentration where the big barracones were, you can see that in the son of Oriente there was more time for the Spanish and the African to mix together.

RM: Yeah. And certainly there were all kinds of different syntheses in different spots in the island. I would consider Matanzas, especially, to be a site where all sorts of strongly African-derived traditions have been maintained in rather pristine form. It seems like there are different kinds of music there which date from the mid-19th century in Africa and maybe don't even exist in the same form in Africa anymore, and yet these things have been maintained in the New World. By contrast, Oriente - eastern Cuba -- represents a place where music and cultural forms -- and the inhabitants - were left a little more to their own devices for more centuries, and the culture represents a somewhat more complex synthesis or fusion from the cultural forms of various islands and the region itself.

NS: Could we talk about the conga for a minute - the conga callejera - and how the conga came from the street to the salon?

RM: I think different sorts of street processionals involving drumming and dance have been something that has characterized west African culture for a long time. Those traditions were manifested in Cuba beginning with the mass importation of slaves. Essentially, as you know, in the 19th century in Cuba there were distinct carnival traditions, for the European inhabitants and the African inhabitants. In the pre-Lenten carnival, we had mostly Europeans and European-influenced music being performed. And then the colonial authorities allowed different slave groups to perform their traditional music and dance on January 6th - Kings Day - so from the very beginning, this kind of carnival procession fascinated the colonial inhabitants, even though they considered it lewd and vulgar, and from very early on in theatrical productions there were representations of that kind of carnival processional music that made its way into parodies and sketches and music compositions. Most of that was known as the tango-congo, and eventually various versions of those rhythms and representations became what is known as the afro composition in the 20th century. That separate carnival tradition lasted up till about the wars of independence, and following that period, with the establishment of a new republic, the population of color wanted to participate in pre-Lenten carnival, which it hadn't really been free to do before. So it was really only in the early 20th century, or right around the turn of the century, that you have black Cubans participating in carnival for the first time with different drumming ensembles of their own invention. Initially this caused a lot of consternation, and it was met with a lot of resistance of the part of white middle-class Cuban society, and I think black middle-class Cuban society also. And in fact, there were problems on occasion, as in most forms of rowdy working-class culture: people tended to drink a lot, there were fistfights, people got stabbed on occasion, there were rivalries between different black carnival bands that performed songs and dances in the street. So the authorities used that sort of violence as a justification to outlaw the entire tradition. That happened about 1915.
But at the same time, those same carnival bands, and new sorts of rhythms and all, were used as fodder for new forms of parody and comic sketches in the Cuban blackface theater. So this is kind of the first commercial entry of carnival music, or comparsa music, into the mainstream. And that happened, I guess, in the early 20s, mid-1920s. And Eliseo Grenet was certainly one of the central figures in stylizing that music, although not the only one.

NS: But Grenet played a kind of a key role in terms of exporting that music, because of the political complications which came along.

RM: Yes. We had a situation where the whole afrocubanismo movement started heating up in the late 1920s, and it was precisely the same moment in which things politically in Cuba were also heating up and becoming rather unbearable and actually resulted in civil war in the early 1930s, and a popular uprising against the president of the country at that time. So a lot of artists who had been involved in these stylized representations of black culture decided that they had better leave the country for a while. and this, combined with the fact that Europe and the United States and other places were very interested in the vogue of blackness, just like some of Cuban society was, resulted in a pretty mass exodus of different performers, to Europe initially, and also to the United States, beginning in the late 1920s. Folks like Rita Montaner, Eliseo Grenet, Moises Simóns, there were even art music composers there, all kinds of painters. Europe was a serious cultural mecca, and it was somewhere that one could find validation for relatively radical or risky artistic innovations that might not even be accepted at home.
So, yes, Eliseo Grenet was really central in that whole process. He was one of the first folks who actually somehow studied different kinds of carnival music that was happening in the street in Cuba, and took that, first, to the vernacular theater in Cuba, and then in the late 20s took it to Europe, and put together different stage shows, and invented simplified dance steps to accompany the new rhythm, and wrote a number of new compositions in this style, which he called the conga, and ended up creating a huge splash, a big hit, that resulted in a conga craze for several years, until tensions surrounding the outbreak of World War II kind of put an end to it all.

NS: Grenet came and played in New York, right?

RM: Well, yes, he did. He was in Paris and then London, and shortly after that, must have been in the beginning of the 1930s, came to New York, and yeah, it was received with tremendous acclaim, and hooked up with Xavier Cugat and other folks, and proceeded to put Cuban music seriously on the map in the United States for the first time.

NS: And then it was popularized by a person with a rather ironic connection to the conga: Desi Arnaz.

RM: Yes. Desi Arnaz certainly has a fascinating history as an artist. This is an individual who grew up as the son of the mayor of Santiago in the early 20th century. And his father was actually an appointee of Gerardo Machado, the president of Cuba during this period of revolution that we were discussing a little earlier. And as a result of Desi's father's close association with this person who was a dictator, his whole family became personae non grata and were run out of the country by an angry mob. And he actually arrived in this country penniless and sort of starting from scratch again, and a lot of folks believed they were lucky to escape with their lives. And so this person who was raised in a fairly elite setting, and didn't necessarily have too much to do with traditional Afro-Cuban culture, in Santiago or anywhere else, ironically became a musician after a time and started becoming the face, one of the major proponents of the conga in the U.S. for a number of decades.

NS: His father actually prohibited the congas in Santiago.

RM: [laughs] Yes, during the 1920s, Desi Arnaz's father was one of many officials across the island who were very embarrassed by African-influenced culture, and were in fact doing everything in their power to marginalize it, stop it, keep it only exclusively in black neighborhoods, and just didn't consider it appropriate for public performance. And the idea that somehow you would play a drum with your bare hands was very difficult for people to swallow at this time. Again, this was a period when people had notions of cultural evolution, and people thought about Africa as a place that just didn't have culture in the same way that Europe did. They didn't understand it, they didn't know how to appreciate it, they couldn't listen to it with unbiased ears and appreciate all of the intense polyrhythms and the different structural forms that it had, and the different timbres, and the exciting improvisatory aspects that it incorporated. All they could hear was noise, and so they did everything they could to shut it down.

NS: Noise, and lascivious behavior - dirty dancing!

RM: Yeah, well certainly, most working-class culture around the world, and definitely a lot of traditional forms of African culture, do not conform to Victorian notions of propriety. So whether you're talking about blues songs, or r & b lyrics, or whether you're talking about comparsa or son, there's all sorts of double entendre, and yeah, it's a very sensual dancing style, and it's often associated with drinking and partying and having a good time and in addition, a lot of the dancing involved shoulder movement, hip movement, things that were derived from Africa that people coming from Europe were not accustomed to, and found shocking, and vulgar, and that they just couldn't accept.

NS: In the 1940 Busby Berkeley film Strike Up the Band, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland did a number called "Do the La Conga," and Bebo Valdés told me that once that movie was seen in Havana, not a gig ended without a conga line. It seemed kind of ironic to me, the idea that the success of the salon conga, as you called it in your book, in Europe and the United States, had an effect on Cuba.

RM: We've seen that kind of phenomenon in the United States too, right? People started playing jazz in New Orleans, and it had its origins among seedier elements of the working classes and in brothels, and in part for that reason, for entirely non-musical reasons, the music was really controversial at the beginning, and so it only really started to become legitimized when it became a big hit in France and other places. We don't necessarily appreciate the value of our own cultural forms, and whatever happens in Europe is always better, and of course if something from this side of the Atlantic gets valorized and appreciated, becomes a success in Europe, then all of a sudden it must be okay here.

NS: The congas had to be re-legalized in Cuba, right?

RM: That period in the late 1930s was an interesting one, because it represented the development of a pretty intense tourist traffic in Cuba. There were all sorts of folks going down there. And a lot of the tourism had been expanded and generated because of the internationalization of Cuban recordings and Cuban artists that had happened a little earlier. So we had the situation where all sorts of folks have been seeing stylized presentations of conga and rumba and other things, and get excited to go see it, and they go to Cuba and to their surprise they find that, yeah, forms like the conga have been banned by the authorities and haven't been seen in public for a decade and a half or so. And this naturally caused a lot of cognitive dissonance in the minds of the authorities there, and so - but, yes, it was mainly the result of foreign interest that sped up the re-authorization of the comparsa bands and their drumming and all, in the carnival celebrations, in 1937.

NS: In 1937, once the political situation had been pacified, and Machado was gone, and there was no longer a prohibition against the drums, the conga had been re-legalized, what happened?

RM: I think that period in the late 30s and 40s was really important for the history of Latin music. Essentially a lot of at least African-derived instruments and performance practices had finally been decriminalized, and so there was a lot of public performance of drums that hadn't been seen before. There was the experimentation of the incorporation of those drums into jazz groups, into various formats of dance music, a lot of fascinating innovation, a lot of collaborations between Cubans and North Americans and other people. It was a period when different kinds of drums, like the sacred batá drums were first incorporated into commercial performance and were first presented to the public. It's the period that witnessed the birth of Latin jazz, it's a seminal moment. It's the moment that gave rise to the conjuntos that incorporated congas and eventually set the style for later salsa music. Its importance really can't be overstated.

NS: This is the period that sees who, to me, are the two most important figures in Cuban music of the 20th century, with the third one being Benny Moré - Miguelito Valdés and Arsenio Rodríguez.

RM: I know a little less about Miguelito Valdés, but Arsenio Rodríguez definitely - an amazingly seminal figure. This is an individual who, first of all, found a way to incorporate the bongó and the conga into the same ensemble and worked really consciously to coordinate their sounds so that they would fit well together. That was a pretty revolutionary concept at the time, and one that was soon adopted by virtually all performers that were his contemporaries. He expanded the role of the bass in the ensemble, and not only established the conjunto format, but established the whole style of the son montuno, a dance composition with extended phrases in the bass. His group helped develop the style of bass that was linked to the clave, so it would have a 2-measure phrase in the same way that the clave did. He was the first one to invent the concept of the mambo or moña, "hot" instrumental break in the middle of the composition. And, interestingly, someone with very direct Congo roots who had a very strong Afrocentric consciousness and worked to include those kinds of references and that sensibility into his performances.

NS: That's interesting that you mention the bass, and I think that's a very interesting point, especially because, when we talk about that period, the bassist we talk about is Cachao.

RM: What brought me to that conclusion was reading a dissertation by David García. One of the points that he makes is that the phrasing of the group is really different than other ensembles, and he does some transcriptions so that you can see that both the tres lines that Arsenio himself is performing, and the bass and piano lines really hook into the clave rhythm in a certain way, and follow it. The lines tend to leave a little bit more space than in modern styles, especially on what we think of as the "2" side of the clave, and even the dancing - I'm not even sure who came up with this - but apparently even the dance style hooked a little more directly into the clave, so that people's step would change a little more on the 2 side or the 3 side of the clave, respectively. And his whole performance style, in terms of the music and the dance, was geared toward the working-class Afro-Cuban communities that he played for in Havana, and that's what made him such a tremendous success there, and so influential in later generations, and I think it's also what seems to have ultimately led to his downfall after he emigrated, because the folks that were listening to his music elsewhere didn't have the same sensibility, couldn't quite understand what was supposed to happen to the music in terms of dancing, were used to a somewhat different sound, and just didn't buy into it the same way that his original audience had.

NS: That's certainly what Mario Bauzá thought. He said that Arsenio's tempos were so slow that only people at La Tropical could dance to it, the people in New York couldn't grab hold of it.

RM: And maybe the fact that a lot of the new audience was Puerto Rican or Dominican or came from other places also contributed to it. Also, Arsenio was a little older by the time he got to the U.S., he was overweight, he wasn't the most attractive, charismatic figure to look at on stage. People say he was kind of grouchy and hard to get along with, so I think there were a lot of things that contributed to the fact that he ended up dying in relative obscurity and didn't have as much impact on folks in the U.S. as he might have.

NS: Do you have anything to add about this whole transformation that went on during the period?

RM: The Afrocubanist movement that I was writing about ended pretty fast. By the end of the 30s it was pretty much over with. A lot of the mainstream novelists and painters and poets, other people that had jumped on the bandwagon jumped off just as quickly. But even though all of the different artistic trends in Cuba didn't necessarily focus as directly on Africanisms after that time, I think that the period that you're focusing on really does represent a watershed, because it represented, as you say, the liberation of a lot of African esthetics in many different senses, and African instruments that had been prohibited prior to that time, and instruments and forms of expression that have been really central to Cuban music ever since, so from that moment forward working-class arts and instruments and performance would be central to everything that Cuba's really known for in terms of music.

INTERVIEW WITH NELSON VALDÉS
by Ned Sublette
February 18, 2004 Nelson Valdés is professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico and the Executive Director of Fundación Amistad at Duke University. He has written extensively on Cuban history and politics.

Ned Sublette: We're going to be talking today about a period that does not receive as much attention as perhaps it ought to when people look at Cuban history. There's a lot of material about 1959, and there's a lot of material about the Spanish-American war, but it seems to me like the '30s were less studied. Would you agree with that?

Nelson Valdés: Yes, that's certainly the case.

NS: And it seems to me like it's a very interesting and a key period to understand in Cuban history, if you want to understand what happened after that.

NV: For Cuba, anyway, the twentieth century in a sense begins in 1898, when the U.S. takes over the island, so the period from 1898 to 1933 is the most extraordinary period in the history of the island, in the sense of the most profound and dramatic and quite radical changes that took place at that moment.

NS: Could you explain what was this turmoil that shook Cuba in the early 30s? What happened?

NV: I think there are two different things to consider if we begin with the base point that by August and September 1933 a revolutionary upheaval brings to power a revolutionary government that will last one hundred days, from September 1933 to early January 1934. How did that come about? And I think there are two things to consider. One is the precipitant, that which sort of sparks this major revolutionary insurrection, and that of course is related to the Depression, which began in 1929, and Cuba of course had a huge unemployment by 1933, a regime that was led by what we now would call neoliberals, who had a policy basically of free trade, laissez-faire, the state does not intervene, sort of what like you had in the U.S. at the same time. And of course, whatever the upheaval was in the U.S., it was multiplied by a hundred in Cuba. So you had very high unemployment and all kinds of social dislocations going on because of the Depression. And there is a sergeants' revolt - the first in the history of Latin America - in which noncommissioned officers revolt against their officers and put a number of civilians in power. Now that is the event, but one has to actually be aware of what was happening in Cuba between 1898 and the time of the Depression.
And first is, of course, a frustrated nationalism. The Cubans had been fighting for independence. Spanish colonial rule ended in 1898, but the U.S. then seized and took over the island, and remade Cuba, in a sense, by changing everything from the language that those in power used, to changing the legislation, the property relations, even the very definition of what was beautiful and what was desirable in terms of clothing, and so forth. So you had a society that was going through major radical changes imposed from above by U.S. economic, political, and military power, and now there is an upheaval from below by 1933 reacting to the old institutions that the U.S. had created in the neocolony of Cuba at the time. So I think it's these two very long-term processes as well as the precipitant of the Depression and the Sergeants' Revolt that brings about that revolutionary government in 1933.

NS: Cuba was in a state of near civil war for quite some time prior to the Sergeants' Revolt, no?

NV: Yes, the U.S. had intervened on three different occasions in the island. In 1912 you had a very serious and bloody repression of the black population, and in fact it's called a race war, when the black population and mulattoes, who had not gained anything as a consequence of the neocolonial status that Cuba had achieved after 1898, created an independent Party of Color, as they called it, in which they were going to articulate the needs and demands of the black population. And it was repressed by military force, and of course all the racist fears and so forth that had been in Cuba, because it was a plantation economy based on black slave labor until 1886, all those fears of course now were exploited in order to make sure that that population did not challenge the power structure. And there had been numerous other revolts in which Liberals and Conservatives, in or out of power, tried to use the U.S., I may add, in order to preserve the control - or the control that they were allowed to have by the U.S. So you have a lot of social upheaval. The Spanish former ruling class that had been removed from power, many of those people remained. A black population, high unemployment, a situation in which something similar to the so-called enclosures in England, when the communal lands were taken by corporate foreign interest - all this created a lot of social disequilibrium within rural Cuba. And of course, rapid urbanization, this is happening as well, the emergence of labor unions, led either by Anarchists -- that's before the 1920s, and from the 1920s on, by the Cuban Communist Party, which was, I may add, by 1933, perhaps with the exception of the Mexican one, the most organized and well-developed, and quite a functional and effective political force in Cuba.

NS: Can you explain to me how the Cuban Communist Party got started? What its beginnings were? Was it formed at the behest of the Comintern like some of the other Latin American Communist parties?

NV: Well, the source, the roots, of the Cuban Communist Party, have to be traced first of all to the Europeans who had migrated to Cuba, particularly at the beginning of the 20th century. Although most of them were Anarchists, you have quite a few who were Marxists. Of course, you have to take into account as well, in terms of the radical milieu in Cuban politics, the Mexican Revolution in 1910-1911, so that by the time the Russian Revolution occurs in 1917, you do have in Cuba already that impact of the Mexican revolutionaries and what they have been doing in Mexico. So the source for what will become the Cuban Communist Party is Cuban nationalism on the one hand, the labor movement on the other, particularly labor unions, the influence of the Mexican Revolution, and of course, by 1921, four years after the Russian Revolution began, the establishment of the Communist International, the Comintern, which indeed fostered the creation of Communist parties throughout Latin America. But the Communist Party as such, the first cells are established in 1923, the Party is formally created in 1925, with Eastern European leaders, with some black labor leaders, as well as Cuban intellectuals, particularly from the city of Havana. And yes, they were from the very beginning very much identified with the Comintern and with the so-called "21 conditions" to be a member of the Communist International. One of those conditions was of course to identify the Soviet Union as the home of the socialist revolution, since it had been the first country that was seized and taken over by the Communist Party.

NS: Now, it's my understanding that the Comintern was a creation of Lenin, and Stalin was much less interested in it, and by 1925 Stalin was already in power. How did the change in the Soviet attitude toward the move toward "Socialism in one country," as Stalin called it, affect the Cuban Communists?

NV: Well, oftentimes the history of the Communist International is divided into what is called the first, second, third and fourth periods. By the time that Stalin is in power and controls the central committee of the Communist Party, Lenin is dead, Trotsky is going into exile, so we get between 1928 and 1937 what is referred to as the third period of the Communist International. Which is kind of interesting, because just as the Depression hit in 1929, the Communist International took the position - and Stalin of course was in charge of this, just as the development of the building of socialism in one country - the crisis of worldwide capitalism was such that it was considered - and keep in mind that at the time you do have the emergence of Fascist parties throughout Europe, precisely with the Depression as well - that the Communist International began to define the situation as one in which one had to make a choice, either with Fascism or with Communism. So the third period essentially tended to portray the situation of politics in almost any country as being essentially the same, and that is: this is the moment for Communists to seize power, and to do so without any kind of coalition politics. So by '29 and '30, and certainly when the 1933 revolution occurred in Cuba, social democrats were seen by the Communist party worldwide, but in Cuba as well, as if they were social fascists.
So the '33 revolution in Cuba, from September to '34, is interesting in the sense that the civilians who will be in power will be in fact dealing with three enemies at the same time: (1) the U.S., (2) the new Cuban military that just seized authority and handed over power to the politicians but who will end up making an alliance with the U.S., and (thirdly) the Communist Party, which in fact is taking over at that time because of their strength in the labor movement, and particularly in sugar mills, in the industrial sugar working class, they are taking over the sugar mills and creating soviets, so Cuba had soviets in 1933. And so this is a period during which the Communist Party certainly later on will define their own role as being somewhat sectarian, and it is from that moment, from '33 on, that you will see that the Communist Party of Cuba and the social democrats of Cuba, being the Auténticos, as they were called, or later on the Ortodoxos, were very anti-Communist. And it goes back to that clash that they had during this period. Which is, in a sense, a reproduction of the very clash that was taking place, for example, in Germany about the same time, between the Communist Party that saw the German Social Democrats as Social Fascists.

NS: Now, as I understand it, bombs were going off pretty much every day in Havana, certainly in 1933 prior to the September Revolution. That it had become a very unsafe place, and even after the hundred day revolution, that there continued to be a great deal of civil turmoil until 1935.

NV: That's correct. Actually that turmoil in one way or the other continues until 1940 and even after 1940, although it will be often referred to as bonchismo - gangs of people who were at first involved in the 1933 revolution, and when they were overthrown, the military committed many atrocities, and nothing happened to those who committed those atrocities within the military, so small groups of armed, highly politicized individuals came together to bring justice to those who had assassinated their comrades. And in 1947, the city of Havana in a period of 12 months had four different chiefs of police, and three of them were killed.

NS: But that's a later period than what was happening between '33 and '35. When the hundred day revolution ends, Batista takes power through a series of puppet presidents, and pursues Antonio Guiteras, who had been in the revolutionary government, and ultimately kills him in 1935, and it seems to me that the death of Guiteras was the end of an era. Would you agree with that?

NV: Well, yes and no, because Guiteras's followers actually end up creating all these so-called "action groups". There is an Acción Revolucionaria Guiteras, and there is a TNT that continues, but it is true that you begin to see the consolidation of a new political regime in Cuba. It will now be the Cuban military that will intervene in politics to try to stabilize the system rather than having the U.S. military send in the Marines to do so, as they had done before 1933.
So certainly, although the '33 revolution comes to an end by January 34, and Batista seizes power and will rule through a series of puppets, you do have that type of violence continuing, but now it's under a new political game that is being created by Batista. A very interesting new political game, I might add, in which we end up seeing that Batista himself, although persecuting Communists between 1934 and 1937, yet by the spring of 1937 the Communists and the Batista forces make a political coalition. Which brings us to the Comintern, which of course a month earlier will begin what is called the fourth period of the Comintern, which is that is necessary to create a popular front to fight Fascism, and that consequently alliances can be established with all those forces that are considered by the Communist Party democratic forces. So you will see from '37 on a participation of Batista and the Communists in coalition politics.
Interestingly, the social democrats - the Auténticos and later on the Ortodoxos - will denounce such coalitions, but certainly by 1937 we find such things as, for example, in April 1937, the Communist Party is attempting to mobilize the population against Batista, yet by May of '37 the situation has changed, and by June '37, Batista allows the establishing of the Partido Unión Revolucionaria, which was a front for the Communist Party at that time. By May 1, 1938, the Cuban Communist Party's newspaper - by that time, the newspaper of the Partido Unión Revolucionaria became legal, the newspaper Hoy. By September 1938, the party changed its name to the Communist Party of Cuba. And by January '39 the Cuban Communist Party is having - the first in the history of Latin America - an open Communist Party congress, in which openly 23,000 members acknowledge that they were members of the Communist Party as such. And that is quite unique. In fact, the Cuban government at that time was the first to establish a coalition with the Communists and to run for office and actually to win power by October 10, 1940. In those elections Batista and the Communists came to power. The first Communist Party in Latin America to have two ministers in the cabinet was the Cuban Communist Party. The Communists also had a very unique role to play in the constitutional convention of 1939, which created the 1940 constitution. Out of 41 elected members to the constitutional convention, six were members of the Cuban Communist Party - open members of the Cuban Communist Party. Which is why that Constitution had so many progressive features in it.

NS: And that constitution was part of, also, a changing sense of race relations in Cuba, no?

NV: Certainly. It proclaimed not only that all the races were equal, but also established legislation to the effect that if there was any kind of institutional discrimination, that steps should be taken to put an end to it. Of course, that depended on who was in power. But this brings us to something else, which is, interestingly enough, by 1940, we have the situation in which the man who rules Cuba is a mulatto who has black as well as Chinese ancestry. And the second thing is that the Cuban Communist Party is also led at the time by a number of figures who also were black and mulatto. In fact, the Communist Party in Cuba at that time, it was reported, that at least 50% of its members were nonwhite.

NS: Not incidentally, of course, we were approaching the entry of the U.S. into World War II at this time, so we see Stalin becoming an ally of Roosevelt. So suddenly the United States's reflexive anti-Communism was probably as moderated as it ever would be. In the U.S. and Britain they were talking about Stalin as "Uncle Joe."

NV: That's right, and moreover, by December 1939 after the Cuban Communist Party had been made legal, after Batista had announced his coalition with the Communist Party and running for office, Batista went to Washington, D.C., and the relations between Cuba and the U.S. at that time were quite friendly, interestingly enough. Even though there were some politicians that were denouncing the role of the Communists in Cuba and so forth, Washington DC at that time saw that kind of coalition as totally acceptable.

NS: Now what was Mil Diez?

NV: That was a radio station - a very unique radio station - established as well by the Cuban Communist Party. As part of this period - the early 1940s - we see this radio station, which was in Havana, but it could be heard outside the province of Havana. It was a radio station that will do such things as read articles and editorials from the Communist Party paper. It will introduce, interestingly enough, American jazz to a Cuban public. It will make famous numerous people in the world of music, like César Portillo de la Luz, Omara Portuondo, and, incredibly enough, Celia Cruz became famous in Cuba because she used to sing in the Communist Party radio station.

NS: And not only those figures! Arsenio Rodríguez was on at five, and Arcaño came on at seven!

NV: Yes, what we now consider the heyday of Cuban music, Mil Diez was a very important institution. I may add, it also transmitted theater - that is, drama, not just the soaps, the novelas, which they also did - but also classics. Raquel Revuelta, a very famous actress in Cuba, became known through Mil Diez as well.

NS: You have another process beginning in 1937. It's about 1937 when things kind of get back to normal. The university has been closed for years, the university has been reopened. People go back to work to some degree. Music explodes. Recordings had not been made in Cuba in the early 30s. Recordings start to get made again in 1937. And you had the relaxation of the prohibitions against the drums. You have the comparsas in the street being re-authorized again. And you have this whole new level of visibility of black culture and black creativity in Cuba at this time.

NV: Yes, and Mil Diez is the main instrument by which the poetry of Nicolás Guillén became known to the average Cuban. And people like Guillén, and speakers like Juan Marinello, the intellectual, and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, and so forth, and consequently, the whole negritud movement that we see throughout the Caribbean in the 1920s and so forth, well, now, that gets connected as well in Cuba. The black is beautiful, which is related to Motivos del Son in Guillén's poetry. You begin to see the establishment of institutions which will study those cultures from Africa, and the importance of the Bantus and the Yorubas, and other groups as well. So you have a revival, a renaissance, in Cuba, in which a number of political leaders have risen to positions of authority who are indeed coming from the black working class.

NS: So at this time you have a sort of alliance between very different political and social tendencies that during the period of World War II, effectively, have made a kind of domestic truce, and at this time culture flowers . . .

NV: Yes.

NS: How does this come unraveled?

NV: Well, let me just mention one last point, and that is: the kind of political party that Batista ends up creating and the kind of alliance that he makes with the Communist Party in order to have a social base is something that will be emulated by the other political parties. In other words, all the parties will end up having a labor section, and a peasant section, and a section for women, and a section for blacks - not in the sense that black will be separated, but rather a sort of affirmative action: we are going to recruit blacks for the political party that I belong to. That kind of thing begins during this period as well.

NS: How did it come apart? How did this alliance come undone?

NV: With the end of World War II, the alliance comes to an end.

NS: Simple as that?

NV: That's right. As soon. It's extraordinary. By 1945, the war comes to an end. By 1944, the Auténticos come to power. They initiate Red-baiting, getting the Communists out of the labor movement, the government seizing Mil Diez, the radio station, for example. So you begin to see a movement. The same thing is happening in the labor movement. The Cuban Confederation of Labor will be "clean" of Communist influence, and consequently the Auténticos will be taking it over. Once elections are held, Batista is no longer president. He goes to the U.S. for a time, and then World War II ends. From that point on, you begin to see the Red Scare in Cuba as well as in the U.S., and consequently the removal of Communists from newspapers, from labor movements, not so much from universities.

NS: And what happens in Cuban culture during this second half of the 40s?

NV: Well, I think, in a sense, the culture - those institutions that have been created continue, but no longer are able to operate as they did so openly for political purposes. The people who were doing their singing, and their performance, in Mil Diez and so forth, that will continue. You will have Fernando Ortiz writing about the black experience and so forth. But it no longer will be doing anything, I would think, new in terms of opening - the period from '37 on is one in which there is a massive opening of Cuba to black experience, black culture. That continues, but is no longer opening new arenas, I think. It's just maintaining what had been achieved.

NS: There was something else, I think, that happened, at least in terms of music. During World War II it wasn't possible for Cubans to emigrate to the U.S. But with the end of World War II and with the increase in violence in the street in Cuba making it less desirable also, you start to see more talent leaving Cuba for the U.S.

NV: Yes, but there is something else as well. During World War II, in a sense, Cuban music takes off, and although there is the American influence, it is not overwhelming Cuba. After 1945, that upsurge of Cuban music now has to compete with what is coming from the north, and what you find consequently is that some people even are coming to the U.S. in the hope that that would be the way that they would be rediscovered in Cuba.

INTERVIEW WITH HARRY SEPÚLVEDA
by Ned Sublette
February 16, 2004

One of the best-known record collectors in Latin music, Harry Sepúlveda has compiled and consulted for numerous CD (and vinyl) reissues, including Cuban Gold v. 1-5 (Qbadisc). For many years he managed the Times Square Record Mart in Manhattan Poncho Sánchez dedicated a tune to him, "Subway Harry" (on Afro-Cuban Fantasy, Concord 4847.)

[note: dumb Ned screwed up with the pause button on the minidisc recorder, so this interview begins in progress, talking about the Miguelito Valdés-Machito sessions of 1942.]

Harry Sepúlveda: That was a very, very important session, that 1942 session with Miguelito and the Machito orchestra, where [Mario Bauzá] puts together a special band to back up Miguelito, you know, he wanted to do something that had not been done for Miguelito.

Ned Sublette: It seems like one of those things where everything was in the perfect balance. It's even well recorded.

HS: Oh, yeah, that was something very special. Special arrangements were done for those sessions. I don't know if Puente was brought back into the band to record, or if he was still with the band. Because Tito Puente was in and out of that band, the Machito band.

NS: He's only on a few numbers, right?

HS: Exactly, so Puente maybe he was already out of the band, and was brought back in to do those sessions.

NS: When you think of those sessions, what's the number that most jumps to your mind?

HS: The great "Sarabanda."

NS: That was a Chano Pozo tune. We haven't talked about Chano.

HS: [laughs] Chano Pozo. An extremely knowledgeable individual. From Cuba. In the late 30s and early 40s he was better known as a dancer. Mongo [Santamaría] got to work with Chano a number of times. Miguelito Valdés loved his writing. He was the first one to use Chano as a composer.

NS: Already with Casino de la Playa.

HS: Already with Casino de la Playa, writing tunes like "Ariñáñara". In the early 40s he became the leader of a band that was working out of Cadena Azul, Orquesta Azul, where Chano would come in and introduce his tunes and back up different singers that would go through the station.

NS: There's 4 sides that he did with Conjunto Azul that are known to exist. Supposedly they recorded ten. They're amazing.

HS: Oh yes. Those were recorded right in Cadena Azul, around 1944. There were ten numbers that were recorded and Chano brings those numbers with him when he comes to New York and he sells the rights to those tunes to Mr. Siegel, who was the president of Seeco Records, and those are the only 10 existing numbers of the Conjunto Azul. Chappottín was in the band. And also may he was probably the musical director of the group.

NS: Well, Chano and Chappottín grew up together in the same household.

HS: Exactly. They're around, there are people who have them, the complete session.

NS: There are?

HS: Oh yeah. They're around. Black label Seecos. And of course Chano arrives in New York around 1947. It was Miguelito Valdés who helped him to make that trip possible. And it was Miguelito who introduces him to Gabriel Oller, president of Coda Records, Spanish Music Center, SMC. And there was a session, maybe a week after Chano Pozo arrives in New York, where the Machito band, led by Mario, they do like 12 numbers, you know, Chano and Arsenio tunes. Some of them were big band, with the Machito orchestra, some of them were reduced groups, like a conjunto. And there were others that were just a rhythm section.

NS: And Chano basically made the conga into a solo instrument in the public mind, which it hadn't been before.

HS: Especially when Mario introduces him to Dizzy, where he becomes part of the Dizzy Gillespie band, right! He was able to bring that instrument up front and showcase la tumbadora.

NS: The way Lionel Hampton made the vibes a solo instrument, or Coleman Hawkins made the tenor sax a solo instrument.

HS: Exactly. Chano was so creative. I've heard Dizzy speak about Chano so many times, where he says that Chano spoke no English and Dizzy spoke no Spanish, but they would just get together and come up with a number. That's genius. The way all those numbers were arranged - "Manteca," "Algo Nuevo," "Tin Tin Deo," - he was a musical genius. It was sad that Chano was only here a little longer than a year. Quick temper, Chano. Never reached the top. It was just beginning to happen when his life was taken away.

NS: When you think about this period, let's say 1937 to '45, what are the numbers that jump to your mind?

HS: Septeto Nacional was very strong during that period. They had made a comeback during that period, with Marcelino Guerra, Bienvenido Granda. There was also still Habanero still strong. There was also Sexteto Cauto, early recordings, with a very young Cheo Marquetti. And of course, my favorite recordings from that period were the Casino de la Playa recordings with Miguelito Valdés. There was Habanero - there was a great session of Habanero, where they got back together with Chappottín in the late 30s, and there was a session where they recorded 8 numbers with some of the greatest trumpet solos by Chappo.
Oh yeah, there's a lot of great recordings - in Cuba and in New York. There was a very important group here in New York that's hardly spoken about, and that was the great Cuarteto Caney, led by a Cuban tres player by the name of Fernando Storch. That group came about when Cuarteto Machín disbanded in 1935, and another Cuban sonero had just arrived in New York -- Panchito Riset. And there are some great recordings of that group with Daniel Sánchez, segunda voz, with Panchito. Machito's first recordings in New York were with the Cuarteto Caney. And Alfredito Valdés. They had another singer, a Puerto Rican singer named Johnny López, who was also excellent. Manolo Suárez. And that was probably one of the most important groups here in New York from the mid-30s. Even Marcelino Guerra, when he first came from Cuba, there are a lot of sessions with Cuarteto Caney.

NS: You're right, nobody talks about them now.

HS: That group was probably on its way out by the mid-50s. The group was already starting to fade away. But there is one of the last sessions by Caney, done for Tico Records, I would say in the mid-50s, and that was probably the last we heard from them. Excellent group.

NS: Now, how would you explain what was going on in terms of New York and Havana communicating with each other during this time? It wasn't completely free, because the Musicians' Union stopped people from working. People didn't just bop back and forth all the time. People kind of had to choose one or the other, as I understand it. But there was a lot of mutual influence. What was the effect of New York and Havana on each other at this time?

HS: There was always a relationship. It goes back and forth. A lot of the early Cuban recordings were recorded here in New York. Trío Matamoros used to come to New York in the 20s to record for RCA Records. Brunswick used to bring in some of the early sextetos to record for them here in New York. Columbia Records. And those groups used to do dances in New York. Up in Spanish Harlem, they would do dances. And a lot of the Cuban musicians, they loved New York. Cachao used to come to New York during his vacation. He would come to New York just to spend a couple of weeks. And Mario and Machito, they used to go back and forth. Sure. That's how Mario brings in René Hernández. He took a trip to Cuba, looking for a piano player. So there was always that back and forth, from Cuba to New York and vice versa.

NS: Now René Hernández, although he doesn't really show up in New York until 1945, he did a lot of Machito's hits. And the band he was in in Cuba, Julio Cueva's band, when he was writing those charts, was the first to play a big-band mambo in Cuba.

HS: René was ahead of his time. In Cuba he was already considered one of the top three arrangers. But when he arrives in New York in the mid-40s, and here he is listening to the Count Basies and the Ellingtons, his musical horizons just grew even further. He became the arranger. Every band at one time - including Tito Puente - every great band, all the singers, that's the man they would go to. He was a genius.

NS: What do you think of as the great René Hernández charts?

HS: Definitely with the Machito band. His collaboration with Mario Bauza, you know, here are two geniuses at work. Machito with his jazz experience and René Hernández - the genius that he was - can you imagine those two minds at work? "Zambia" - all those numbers. The boleros that he would arrange for Graciela. You listen to them today, they were recorded 40 years ago, and they stand the test of time. And those great sessions with Vicentico Valdés, where he would do string arrangements for Vicentico. And for Miguelito Valdés, the big-band arrangements. Here in New York, all the younger arrangers, [René Hernández] would be the man they would go to for advice.

[interruption; pause]

NS: You look at the Congo thing in Arsenio's work, and it's always there.

HS: He was the roots, he stood connected. I mean, Spanish was a second language to him. Africa was first. Really. That's how you should put it in the right perspective.

NS: The first instrument he learned was the marímbula . . .

HS: Wow.

NS: . . . which is an African instrument.

HS: He knew all the drums. There were concerts where he performed - I think it was at the Smithsonian Institution - where he was just performing with his brother Quique and himself playing the drum and singing at the same time.

NS: And when Arsenio and Arcaño played gigs together - they had this league, Los Tres Grandes, with Melodía del '40 - that must have been a real meeting of the worlds, because they were very different.

HS: Can you just imagine that? Everybody's checking out everybody. Cause it was Arsenio that everybody was listening to. He would set the new standards. But then Arcaño had some of the greatest musicians in that band, who were also very knowledgeable. I mean, the López brothers, Cachao and his brother. I could just imagine those two bands -- they were rivals for a number of years, and I can just imagine those two bands at a dance! There was another great band during that period, the Orquesta Ideal de Joseíto Valdés, who was Arcaño's rival, they were at that level.

NS: What about the Melodías del 40?

HS: A great band! Melodías del 40 - real guapería in charanga, a real macho charanga band. With some of the greatest soneros in Cuban music - you could hear in their recordings with René Álvarez, who was one of the original singers with the band. When they would lock in in a mambo, forget about it, they were out to kill. I still go home and I listen to my recordings of Melodía del 40 -- especially the later band, the band that recorded for Puchito, where René Álvarez comes back into the band, and there is a number where he shares the vocals with Roquilli. Roquilli was the other lead singer in the band, and you hear René Álvarez and Roquilli soneando, and it was just amazing. And the drive! You know, the way the bass player used to lock with they timbalero, they would go for a ride.

NS: And the violinist.

HS: Brindis! "El Niño Prodigio." Recordings I grew up listening to with all my buddies.

NS: There's something else that happened during that period, which was that that's when Cuba began to get for the first time its own record label, because all the Cuban music had been recorded by Cuban record companies. But in '44 Panart appears.

HS: Exactly. And there were other labels - there were a lot of small independent labels here in New York that were recording a lot of Cuban bands, like there was Margo Records, a gentleman by the name of Mario González, who had an almost exclusive contract with Conjunto Gloria Matancera. He also had another label called Bolero Records. And there was also the Musicraft label would also release a lot of recordings here in New York, and even some of the American record companies like Decca used to license a lot of the Panart recordings, and even Mercury - I have a lot of early Cuban recordings on the Mercury label - Sonora Matancera, on Mercury Records, a label that in the 50s was known for all those great hits by the Platters. But the '50s was when there was really a record boom in Cuban music. You had some great independent labels, like Puchito Records.

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