Caribbean hurricane blows in

It's all about sex, says an elderly member of the Buena Vista Social Club. FEDERICO MONSALVE finds out more

Before going on tour, Guillermo Rubalcaba puts a shot of rum in front of a statuette of Chango - "the most effective Santeria deity".

He has a few tumblers himself, puts pieces of bread or other offerings before the altar, then spends anywhere up to nine months touring the world with the music he has been playing since the early 1940s.

If you grew up in Cuba back then, the term "dancing in the streets" was not used for a rare event during summer when you were excused to shake your money-maker in front of whoever might be watching; it was more likely to refer to one of the most common national pastimes.

The trend, which still continues, is part seduction, part exercise, with a hell of a lot of vertical foreplay thrown in to remind onlookers of that other national peccadillo the island is also so fond of practising.

"A lot of our music is about sex," says pianist and composer Maestro Guillermo Rubalcaba, who has been tinkling for many decades and is part of visiting act the Bar at Buena Vista (BBV).

"Prudes would say otherwise, but the thing is, sometimes the lyrics are talking about it in a metaphorical way and most of the times the dancers are imitating the act," the 82-year-old says.

Rubalcaba is one of the octogenarian hurricanes blowing in from the Caribbean to expose New Zealand to some of the original musicians from the Buena Vista Social Club and the "son Cubano", a style of music that combines salon and street dancing with a melancholy and often theatrical form of ballad.

Says band director Carlos Bustamante: "The son was music from the solares or what the Western world would call the projects. It came from the bellies of these large, Russian-styled buildings in the 40s where the norm was overcrowding and poverty.

"People were just looking for forms of self-expression and nothing came more naturally than music and dance. Nowadays it's not uncommon to see everything from an engineer to a surgeon living in those places, and the music continues.

"The dance is a little less flourished because it wasn't yet influenced by the rock'n'roll twist, so you don't get all the turns and whirls of modern-day salsa, it's more controlled.

"The two main dancers we are taking to New Zealand were actually people we found in the streets, dancing the stuff from the 40s as if they had been frozen in time."

Rubalcaba remembers a time when the twist wasn't the only thing their American neighbours were bringing into the island.

"Cuba was a playground for the gringos. There were herds of them driving around on convertible Fords with fins like a shark going to dance at the Tropicana [Havana's most renowned club]. There was also all this jazz filtering in which we began to incorporate into our own music."

Unfortunately for both nations, an American-led embargo on the communist nation meant a tougher cultural exchange between them (which included smacking Buena Vista Social Club producer Ry Cooder with a US$25,000 ($39,000) fine for breaking embargo rules).

Rubalcaba is quick to mention the continuing denials of visas into the United States, the latest in February when he was not allowed to stand on US soil to accept an award from the Recording Industry Association of America.

The denial came with a note pointing him to a law that applies to nationals of terrorist countries.

"It worries me that they are thinking I'm a terrorist when the only thing I have terror of is a badly tuned piano," Rubalcaba told Cuban newspaper Granma.

"This doesn't faze us," says the pianist. "Whatever they want to do is a matter of their internal politics, but it is sad because there are so many ways in which both countries could benefit each other."

The embargo has also meant that most of these musicians have been surviving through odd jobs.

"Some of them were shining shoes," says Bustamante. "Reynaldo Creagh [vocalist and founding member of the Bar at Buena Vista] was well known for being a travelling muso. He was conducting on trains for the national railroad company, and as soon as he set foot into a new town, and had the time, he would rush to local pubs or friends' houses to swap music and have jam sessions with them,"

The Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon, which began with the 1997 release of a self-titled album produced by Cooder, made Cuban music the hippest soundtrack to sip latte frappuccinos to or to add ethnic spice to dinner parties.

The album took traditional music to bicultural heights previously enjoyed only by pop icons such as Shakira or the Iglesias.

Yet Buena Vista is not without its critics.

Pedro La Hoz, one of Cuba's most outspoken cultural journalists, was the first to spell out the colonial undertones surrounding the crowning of Cooder as the discoverer of "a bunch of old Cuban musicians on the verge of being forgotten".

La Hoz says that Buena Vista is retro for Latin America.

"The son and danzon enjoyed an unprecedented popularity during the 30s and 40s and were heavily re-done during the 60s by everyone from jazz musos to protest singers from Nicaragua, Cuba and Colombia. The Buena Vista logo just won't stay in its straitjacket."

The sounds of the Caribbean have been infiltrating the East Coast of the United States for decades, bathing Brooklyn and Florida with everything from Tito Puente through to the now emerging Barrio Nuevo, which mixes 70s disco and funk riffs with the hip-shaking virus that is salsa, and its Dominican cousin, merengue.

"Cooder taught us the business part of it," reminisces Rubalcaba.

"He was there twiddling in the studio and doing all the marketing, organising performances, while Ruben Gonzalez was the musical director, the real music brain behind it."

So other than twangy Hawaiian guitars and his conga-toting son, Cooder was more a business maverick than the real creative force behind it?

"Yes and no. He polished what we had been doing for ages," says Rubalcaba.

Bustamante, with a tone of resignation, seems to disagree.

"All these guys are in their 70s and 80s - you can't tell them what to do. And even if you do, they go ahead and do their own thing. I am not complaining because they are all doing it amazingly.

"Reynaldo, for example, he had eye surgery the other day and a matter of hours later he was performing at a show in Darwin, where over 150 people rushed the stage to dance alongside the musicians.

"I was there, hoping no one would fall off and that there were no problems with the venue, while these guys were just dancing away, smoking cigars, sipping on rum and cracking up at the whole thing."


PERFORMANCE

* Who: The Bar at Buena Vista Tour

* Where and when: Hamilton Founder's Theatre, July 6; Napier Municipal Theatre, July 7; Regent Theatre, Palmerston North, July 8; TSB Showplace, New Plymouth, July 9; Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, July 10; Christchurch Town Hall, July 11; Aotea Centre, Auckland, July 13-15