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Hugo has been dealing with Cuba since 1998,

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/20/arts/critic-s-notebook-cuban-bands-find-us-fans-as-curbs-relax.html
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Cuban Bands Find U.S. Fans As Curbs Relax
By PETER WATROUS
Published: April 20, 1998


As the sun went down on another sluggishly blissful Miami day, a few dozen demonstrators yelled insults at the 700 or so people who had come to see a screening of Hugo Cancio's movie on the Cuban doo-wop group Los Zafiros. The audience, young and old, black and white, filed into the Guzman Theater in downtown Miami on Thursday night as the underwhelmed police contingent, perhaps 10 in all, watched the demonstrators to see they didn't cross the street. None did.

Inside, the extraordinary Cuban vocal group Gema 4, an a cappella quartet, sang a song, ''Habana,'' originally sung by the Zafiros in the early 1960's. Mr. Cancio, 33, a Cuban American, shot his film, ''Zafiros, Locura Azul'' (''Blue Madness''), in Havana with Cuban actors.It had the audience moaning with laughter and remembrance. In Havana it has broken all attendance records and won a prize at the Havana Film Festival. For the Miami audience, it was like going home.

Mr. Cancio brought the film's actors to Miami in from Havana, along with Gema 4 and members of Havana's hottest band, La Charanga Habanera, on their way to play in Northampton, Mass., as part of the Fiesta Cubana of the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts. Their appearance would have been impossible even a year ago because of pressure from right-wing Cuban exile groups. After the film, the actors and musicians went to a Miami club, Starfish, where the musicians played for dancers with a local group, just as they might have anywhere else in the United States.

''A lot of things, big and small have happened over the last year or so,'' said Manning Salazar, a young Cuban American music promoter who is active in the Miami underground's effort to promote Cuban culture. ''Jorge Mas Canosa, the leader of the right-wing Cubans died. The first Latin Midem last year, a music convention, was controversial about its caving in to the demands of local government to ban Cuban music. This year's Midem will have a Cuban band playing. And the singer Carlos Varela played here in a semi-public performance recently with no problems at all.

''So Hugo's movie, and the lack of response from the right wing, is more proof how far Miami has come. Now many institutions are open to things like this. It was an unthinkable event a year ago, and now it seems like the future.''

The event's success has emboldened Mr. Cancio, a businessman who also runs a music production company, to throw the first full-fledged post-revolutionary Cuban pop music concert in Miami. Tomorrow night, the Cuban singer and band leader Issac Delgado will perform at Club Onyx in Miami Beach with full government approvals from both sides of the mango curtain that divides the United States from Cuba. There have been no bomb threats; there were no demonstrations waiting Mr. Delgado's arrival at Miami International Airport on Friday, nor were there any for the arrival of the three bands that were on their way to play in Northampton, and continue on their limited tours.

''The concert needs to be done,'' said Mr. Cancio. ''A concert done in Miami by Cuban musicians means that things are changing in Miami, things that need to be changed. A concert is a normal thing, it's not out of the ordinary, and people should be able to go out and enjoy some of the best music on earth.''

And on Friday night at the Academy of Arts in Northampton, where the idea of a right-wing demonstrator was thoroughly beyond the pale, another kind of history was being made and another kind of future predicted. The Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts convened Gema 4, Jose Maria Vitier's group and Charanga Habanera to give a three-day demonstration of the great variety of Cuban music. Playing to a mostly English-speaking audience drawn from the five colleges that inform the intellectual life of the area, the 30 or so musicians were meeting one of their logical future target audiences. Nothing like this had ever been done since before the Cuban revolution, and there was a sense among the people who had put it together, along with the musicians, that history had been made.

Gema 4 opened the show with a series of ballads and Afro-Cuban songs that brought the North American vocal group traditions of groups like Take 6 and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross to the Caribbean material. Gema 4, an all-female group whose sheer excellence, musicality and range of techniques brought the material to life, had the audience going wild. The group received three standing ovations at the end of its set, and had people who hadn't heard of the group stunned.

Mr. Vitier, the pianist and composer, used a small group of two percussionists, a violinist and a cellist to rework Cuban forms like the danzon in the same way that the Argentine composer and arranger Astor Piazzolla reworked the tango. Mr. Vitier, who is best known for his film scores (like ''Strawberry and Chocolate'') along with an Afro-Cuban Mass, used jazz ideas and Afro-Cuban montunos. When the singer Xiomara Laugart came out to sing a poem by the poet Virgilio Marti, the audience broke up again, with continuous standing ovations.

If Gema 4 and Mr. Vitier played with suggestions of the street and the African in Cuban life, all filtered through the rigorous Cuban musical education, the Charanga Habanera brought the Cuban street to Massachusetts. The band plays as hard a form of dance music that has ever been played, a sort of Afro-Cuban version of the George Clinton's funk aggregations, and it uses an endless stream of choreographed tricks, with wild wordplay and dancing. The group is hard and loud, and by midnight the aisles were filled with people dancing.

''I went to Cuba recently,'' said Donald Sanders, the executive artistic director of the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts, and a playwright. ''I was knocked out by the depth and range of Cuban music, how varied it is, and how little we know about it. Because of politics, it's been concealed from the American public. So we decided to do the Fiesta Cubana, and our audience is perfect for the music, inquisitive and intelligent and open minded.''

The festival had also planned for the groups to play in Springfield, Mass., half an hour down the road, which has a large Hispanic population. On Saturday night there, at Symphony Hall and at a club called Razzls', the bands performed again.

After the concert at Symphony Hall, a Hispanic resident of Springfield, a judge, came up to Mr. Sanders and said: ''Don, you've changed, in one evening, the perception of our people. Thank you.''

Mr. Sanders asked her what she meant.

''The music had so much sophistication, so much power,'' she said. ''And remember, we Hispanics are known in America at large as the ones that throw trash out the car window. So things like this make a difference.''

But at Razzls', after Charanga Habanera finished up, history wasn't so much the point. And the audience's reaction was no less telling: people, having loved the show, wandered off to the disco in the club, or had a beer, and treated the event just like any other Saturday night spent listening to a good band and dancing.

Photo: An education in Cuban music: The singer Xiomara Laugart with Jose Maria Vitier at the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts in Northampton. (Alan E. Solomon for The New York Times)