Cuba Backstage

Mondavi Center goes in search of performing artists.

By Dave Webb

“My name is Amirical.”

“Say that again?”

“Like ‘a miracle.’ ”

A miracle, then. Like getting into—or out of—Cuba lately.

My spouse and I are standing on the curb outside the airport in Havana, talking with this young Cuban who is to serve as our translator and guide. I am in Cuba, in part, to look for performing artists on behalf of the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts—a minor miracle in itself.

The November air is sticky hot, more Oklahoma muggy than Sacramento scorch. Amirical and a driver pulled up in a car the size of a mini-coupe, a little taller than a bicycle, a little shorter than a surfboard. Melinda and I get in with two big suitcases, and off we go.

Rolling past us, Cuba is stunningly decrepit. The Spanish architecture is a raggedy suggestion of its graceful beginnings, both in structure and facade: The bright Caribbean reds have faded to pink; the dark blues are now a smoggy aquamarine.

Amirical’s English is impeccable, which is a relief—my Spanish is imbecilic, a cause for either mirth or concern—and he’s busily identifying the landmarks—the biggest hospital in Cuba on our left, the sports complex on our right—but I have a hard time keeping my eyes off the street. It’s so alive: people walking, alone, in pairs, in groups, or standing by the road in throngs, waiting. Bikes are everywhere, bold in the face of cars whirring by, spewing their black exhaust.

I have worked for the Mondavi Center (formerly UC Davis Presents) since 1993, and making initial contact with artists was well off my usual job description. Generally, the agents we work with bring their artists to our attention. Here I hoped to meet with a legendary rumba ensemble, a children’s theatre company and a couple of son groups (son is perhaps the most influential—and popular—form of Cuban music). I found myself looking out the window, excited at the prospect and feeling, frankly, a little daunted. This was new stuff.

But since the opening of Mondavi Center in fall 2002, there’s nothing new about “new.” Before, we had bounced between five different venues in two different cities. Now we have one: a glorious $60 million state-of-the-art facility, situated on campus just off Highway I-80.

Before, we were considered an important but mid-sized presenter. This year, we joined MUP—nothing to do with Sesame Street; it’s the acronym for Major University Presenters, a group that also includes UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, University of Michigan and others. We have been described as one of the largest presenters in the country.

Before, our offices were off campus, hidden away from the onstage work of the arts. Nowadays? Look out our office window, and you might see a tall woman in red tights standing outside of Mondavi Center’s backstage door. She stares off into the distance, smokes a cigarette. You don’t recognize her, can’t place her. Suddenly, her leg rises straight up, effortlessly, over her head. Her toe extends, points up at the sky. Then you remember—Dance Theatre of Harlem opens tomorrow night.

Everything has changed for us, from daily routines to national status, from the stage where our artists perform to the view outside our office windows. When he heard I was going to Cuba, Brian McCurdy, the director of Mondavi Center and the person responsible for programming the arts, said, “It’s not uncommon for presenters to go and see the artists for themselves. There is such a phenomenal level of training for the musicians in Cuba, and the country itself is such a dynamic cultural hotbed. . . . I’d be curious to see what you find there.”

He gave me a couple of names and phone numbers—contacts that might help me meet people in Cuba.

And here I am, scrunched beneath my own suitcase, in a rusty car so small it might blow off the road in a hard wind, driving through Havana.

Cuba is a socialist country lying 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Fidel Castro’s name is familiar to most; both America’s embargo of Cuba and the recent wave of human-rights violations are familiar to many. Less apparent is the government’s approach to education (free, up through graduate school), health care (a doctor on every block), and a guarantee of food and jobs for all. Cuba is still a desperately poor country, with people eking out their lives at a standard far beneath our middle class, but the literacy rates and life expectancy rival our own.

The country supports its artists through the education system and a demanding pyramid of expectation, at the top of which is membership in UNEAC, Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, a 6,600-member organization that confers distinction on its members and involves them in the national debate about matters cultural. “Just look at the training of the musicians performing with the Buena Vista Social Club,” noted McCurdy. “They are playing son in our hall, but they also play symphonic music at home, and have trained in some of the best conservatories in the former Soviet Union.”

Meanwhile, a family can attend a play for 5 pesos (about 20–25 cents American).

Artistic freedom in Cuba is different than in America and is perhaps best summarized by the oft-quoted phrase, “Within the revolution, everything. Outside the revolution, nothing.”

My spouse, the journalist Melinda Welsh, and I were in Cuba under an educational license (outlawed by the Bush administration in January 2004) from Global Exchange, a human-rights group that organizes educational delegations. Many of our tour mates were doctors and surgeons, involved in public health care. Amirical accompanied us on a number of our meetings with government officials, health-care workers and cultural attachés, serving as translator. Translating for Global Exchange was just one of his jobs.

I made time off the tour’s agenda to meet artists, during which my bad Spanish and I were pretty much on our own.

Perhaps no time was more memorable than the afternoon spent in Matanzas, when Melinda and I took a cab to the backstreets of this port town and met Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. I had been told we could attend a practice session of the popular rumba company.

We were ushered up a dark stairway to an enormous, shadowy room with paint peeling off cement walls and high windows that were wide open. In front is a line of percussion instruments—two jembes (African drums) and a spread of smaller handheld instruments.

In the center of this gymnasium-sized room are four stools. Two of them are for us. We perch and wait.

The members of the company wander in, some carrying bright clothing. Everyone’s moving slowly.
A slight, elderly man with gray hair, a beard and sharp eyes approaches. He is grandfather to this family of artists, and he speaks a little English. I try chitchat; he listens for a bit. Then, quite solemnly, he looks me in the eye, “Will we sign a contract today?”

Hoo boy, not by the longest shot. I’m here on reconnaissance, and I don’t sign the checks. I backpedal, explain how grateful I am to see Muñequitos practice and that this is the first of several things we have to consider in order to negotiate a possible. . . . He looks at me with tired eyes. “So. Step by step?” I nod, guilty as charged. He breathes out wearily, his head shaking “no” ever so slightly. “Always step by step.”

Still, he talks to me about the orishas, the African deities, each honored by its own dances, rhythms and musics, each represented by its own color: Changó—the spirit of fire—is red; Oshún—goddess of love and water—is yellow.

Two men take their seats behind the jembes. And it begins.

What follows in the next hour and a half is no practice. It is a full-blown performance for the gringos from California. Fully costumed in elegant silk costumes, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas walk us through a history of Cuban song and dance. First, Yoruba dance—very elemental, simple. Then the rumba, which is exquisite. Men and woman pair, hand to waist, fingers on shoulder, dancing with such precision, so knowingly sexual and so artfully restrained, elegance and sensuality in equal measure.

And, bit by bit, the intensity increases, the percussion focuses and the volume rises, the dancers intertwine or break away more and more forcefully. You can see the purpose of the dance in their eyes and facial expressions. And bam, it’s done; the dancers are stepping back, blowing us a kiss. An intense kiss, more a formal salute than a sign of affection. There was a rawness to this performance that was palpable, elemental, appealing.

Many of these dances were borne in Matanzas by Yoruba slaves, as resistance against their Spanish captors. Sitting in that large, shadowy room, I can feel it: The years have passed—Cubans and Californians are together in this room now, not Africans and Spaniards —and yet the chasm remains.

After the performance, I try chitchat again with our hosts. I like the performance very much, how splendid a tradition it is, how fine it must feel to be the grandfather of such a company. The older man turns to me, eyes still tired. His words are slow, “What . . . do you want . . . to say to me?”
He knew what was coming; he’d heard it before. Step by step was all I had.

There is a political dimension to step by step. The Cold War may be over, but—choose your poison: Florida politics, conservative ideology, human rights violations, Fidel Castro—
for Cuban artists looking to tour America, the bumps in the road begin at the customs window.

Bill Martinez, an immigration lawyer in the Bay Area and a seasoned veteran of the visa wars, states it flatly: “Since November, it’s a return to the Reagan proclamation of 1985: Most all Cuban musicians can be deemed agents of the Cuban government and, under Bush, are being denied entry. I have recommended that all tours of Cuban artists stop; it’s negligent to try to bring artists in. Omara Portuondo, Ibrahim Ferrer [both of Buena Vista Social Club fame], their tours were canceled. Los Van Van: I said, ‘Don’t try this year.’ In terms of cultural exchanges, it ain’t happening. It’s dead.”

Visa problems lead to cancellations, and cancellations are big trouble. An audience’s trust in a presenter relies, in large part, on the fulfilled promise that a given artist will appear in a given venue at a given time. “And as hard as cancellations are on us,” noted Director McCurdy, “cancellations are harder still on the agents. Imagine losing a 30-city tour due to a visa problem.”

Conversely, the real payoff in an audience’s trust comes as the presenter discovers new artists, emerging art forms and contemporary developments in the performing arts. The audience, on taking a chance on a new artist at the behest of the presenter, has a new experience, and an artist finds a new audience. The presenter lies at that intersection and lives for those epiphanies. “It’s the creative risk,” noted McCurdy. “A presenter creates credibility based on a confident programming vision, faith in the artist and the audience, and honesty. The trust factor is huge.” As the trust grows, so grows the ability of presenters like Mondavi Center to participate and influence the larger world of the performing arts.

But it’s step by step. And if you’re Cuban, the steps are further apart these days.

The other element of step by step is logistical. Flying artists from the Caribbean to California is expensive, thus any artist who fits into Mondavi Center’s programming vision becomes more viable still if she also fits both Cal Performances’ and UCLA’s program.

Obviously, tours are important—more performances for the artist, lower travel expenses for the presenter. And lowering expenses is critical in keeping ticket prices down—an important consideration (even though ticket prices do not cover all of Mondavi Center’s costs).

“There are different dimensions to touring,” said McCurdy. “Major University Presenters can anchor a national tour. That relationship is becoming increasingly important to us. Then there are sub-circuits for touring in specific genres.” An orchestral circuit ties Davis, San Francisco and Los Angeles together, for example. A dance sub-circuit includes Portland, Seattle, Mondavi Center and the Bay Area. The Mondavi Center will be anchoring some important dance tours in 2004–05. And then there’s the West Coast circuit, which can make or break a tour for a given artist.

It’s a long way from Cuba to California. Whatever artistry I find in Cuba not only must fit McCurdy’s idea of what he wants to present but must appeal to a few of the presenters between Seattle and San Diego.

And then I got to meet the Minister of Rap.

She has a business card: Susana Garcia Amorós.

She arranged to have eight rap groups perform on a beautiful outdoor stage in a park by a river.
This, because Mondavi Center had a hip-hop festival last season, which I mentioned to the tour organizers as—I thought—an aside.

Rap arrived in Cuba by radio, with teenagers putting up antennas on the balconies of their housing projects and capturing la moña, the rap and R&B music drifting over from Miami radio. Now, by some estimates, there are over 500 hip-hop groups on the island, with a weekly radio show, television exposure—and its own governmental ministry.

It was raining slightly when we arrived (I had brought everyone in our delegation under 30). We learned that only three of the groups would perform. The rest just didn’t make it, largely because it looked like it might pour rain any minute.

Still, it was great. The rain stayed on pause, and one by one, the three groups let it fly. To my untrained eyes, there was a charisma to it: The verbal rhythms surprised more than not, the guys were photogenic, smooth and enjoying themselves, and the requisite swagger had a Cuban elegance that made it different from the rap I see while wandering cable TV at night. And yet it was closer to the commercial variety of rap than what Danny Hoch and Rennie Harris brought to Mondavi Center’s hip-hop festival last year, which reflected the programming vision of Mondavi Center.

“[Hoch and Harris] represent that younger, more philosophical approach to hip-hop theatre that the mainstream of hip-hop is suppressing,” said McCurdy.

If rap was the exception, son was the rule. Son (pronounced with a long o) is the music you hear and say, “Yes, Cuban music.” A complex counterpoint of African percussion lays the base, with the overlay of Latin harmonic and melodic elements; it can be as simple as the work by Kiriba y Nengon, a straight-ahead rural ensemble, or as complex as Irakere’s meeting of salsa, jazz and Afro-Cuba cult music.

I saw two sides of son, Jovenes Clásicos del Son (“Undoubtedly the best septet in Cuba today!” boasts the group’s CD) and the well-established cultural mainstay Los Van Van, performing in the Habana Café, a beautiful Havana night club. Whereas Los Van Van was an almost communal gathering of 18 musicians, improvising before a dance floor that was more a study in happy claustrophobia than an opportunity to dance, Jovenes Clásicos del Son was six guys in a room at a cultural center, shirts off, windows open, humidity on high, playing with minimum amplification and working on their song endings. Very disciplined, and yet easygoing; they had played for Castro, Jimmy Carter and with Wynton Marsalis. Never had they been to America.

Son is what one expects to find in Cuba; La Colmenita was the surprise. A children’s theatre company that epitomizes the best of Cuba—its creativity, its revolutionary vision, its commitment to the young—La Colmenita performed Little Red Riding Hood for us, in a ballroom at the Hotel Nacional. The company consists of children ranging in age from 3 to 15, including some with disabilities.

The acting was superb—animated and authentic, rich in both grand gesture and subtle nuance. Their singing was exceptional, the dancing joyous and free (indeed, the energy lifted on stage when the children got to dance, their enjoyment was so irrepressible).

The company is directed by Juan Carlos “Tin” Cremata, a former television producer. Their process is uniquely Cuban. Rather than produce works written by children, La Colmenita integrates the children’s input with the broader experience of the company elders. Every child is assessed a fee to attend theatre practice: Each must contribute a creative work that addresses a theme of a future production. Maybe the child writes a song, draws a costume sketch, writes a scene’s dialogue. Over six months, thousands of ideas amass. The adults—all seasoned theatrical people—gather these suggestions into a play, and propose it to their young actors, who have to grant their approval.

It was an incredible trip, a beautiful country, a lovely people enduring wearying circumstances. A country of 11 million whose cultural impact belies its small size. An island filled with fine artists like the ones I met, who would like nothing more than to see Mondavi Center for themselves.

Step by step? Director McCurdy is considering the artists I saw; I’ll approach agents we know in the hopes the Cubans might gain representation here. But as of this writing, visas in and out of Cuba are impossible to come by. Amirical, like most Cubans who assist the American tourists, is finding much less work in the trade; his miracle is yet to come.

Step by step? Nothing’s more Cuban than a shrug of the shoulders. Will the visa situation change, as politics change, as international relationships change, as this post-9/11 world works itself out?
Who can say for sure? These days, Cuba is waiting to take that next step.

Dave Webb has worked at UC Davis Presents/Mondavi Center since 1993. He is the director of publications and oversees the programming of the center’s lecture series. In addition, he serves as a fellow for the Arts Marketing Institute, a project of the California Arts Council funded by Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds.

Illustrations by Jan Conroy, UC Davis Editorial/Design.