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Queens of Havana

Author: Alicia Castro

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 0802199100

“This evocative memoir is a joyous, rhythmic history” of the 11-sister dance band that broke musical and cultural barriers in 1930s Cuba and beyond (Publishers Weekly). In the 1930s, Havana was the place to be for tourists, ex-pats, celebrities, and excitement-seekers. Nights were filled with drinking, dancing, romance, and the roar of infectious music spilling from cafés into the streets. It was a time and place immortalized by Hemingway, and a macho mecca where only men took the stage. That is until Alicia Castro, a thirteen-year-old greengrocer’s daughter, picked up a saxophone and led her sisters into the limelight. With infectious melodies and saucy lyrics, the Sisters Castro—professionally known as Anacaona—became a dance-band of irresistible force. In her jubilant memoir, Queens of Havana, Alicia Castro tells of her incredible rise beyond her native city, to international stardom—swinging alongside legends from Dizzy Gillespie and Celia Cruz to Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. In an age that insisted women be seen and not heard, Alicia Castro and her unstoppable sisters grabbed the world by the ears and got it dancing to their beat. At eighty-seven-years old, Alicia’s stories are intoxicating and gloriously punctuated with more than 100 vintage photos, posters, and other memorabilia in a book that “reverberates with exotic echoes of a fabulous long-ago era” (Publishers Weekly).

Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba

Author: Moshe Morad

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1317135431

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The ‘Special Period’ in Cuba was an extended era of economic depression starting in the early 1990s, characterized by the collapse of revolutionary values and social norms, and a way of life conducted by improvised solutions for survival, including hustling and sex-work. During this time there developed a thriving, though constantly harassed and destabilized, clandestine gay scene (known as the ‘ambiente’). In the course of eight visits between 1995 and 2007, the last dozen years of Fidel Castro’s reign, Moshe Morad became absorbed in Havana’s gay scene, where he created a wide social network, attended numerous secret gatherings-from clandestine parties to religious rituals-and observed patterns of behavior and communication. He discovered the role of music in this scene as a marker of identity, a source of queer codifications and identifications, a medium of interaction, an outlet for emotion and a way to escape from a reality of scarcity, oppression and despair. Morad identified and conducted his research in different types of ‘musical space,’ from illegal clandestine parties held in changing locations, to ballet halls, drag-show bars, private living-rooms and kitchens and santería religious ceremonies. In this important study, the first on the subject, he argues that music plays a central role in providing the physical, emotional, and conceptual spaces which constitute this scene and in the formation of a new hybrid ‘gay identity’ in Special-Period Cuba.

When We Left Cuba

Author: Chanel Cleeton

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 045149086X

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Instant New York Times bestseller! In 1960s Florida, a young Cuban exile will risk her life—and heart—to take back her country in this exhilarating historical novel from the author of The Last Train to Key West and Next Year in Havana, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick. Beautiful. Daring. Deadly. The Cuban Revolution took everything from sugar heiress Beatriz Perez—her family, her people, her country. Recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Fidel Castro's inner circle and pulled into the dangerous world of espionage, Beatriz is consumed by her quest for revenge and her desire to reclaim the life she lost. As the Cold War swells like a hurricane over the shores of the Florida Strait, Beatriz is caught between the clash of Cuban American politics and the perils of a forbidden affair with a powerful man driven by ambitions of his own. When the ever-changing tides of history threaten everything she has fought for, she must make a choice between her past and future—but the wrong move could cost Beatriz everything—not just the island she loves, but also the man who has stolen her heart...

Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis

Author: Vincenzo Perna

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1351539086

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Cuban music is recognized unanimously as a major historical force behind Latin American popular music, and as an important player in the development of US popular music and jazz. However, the music produced on the island after the Revolution in 1959 has been largely overlooked and overshadowed by the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon. The Revolution created the conditions for the birth of a type of highly sophisticated popular music, which has grown relatively free from market pressures. These conditions premised the new importance attained by Afro-Cuban dance music during the 1990s, when the island entered a period of deep economic and social crisis that has shaken Revolutionary institutions from their foundations. Vincenzo Perna investigates the role of black popular music in post-Revolutionary Cuba, and in the 1990s in particular. The emergence of timba is analysed as a distinctively new style of Afro-Cuban dance music. The controversial role of Afro-Cuban working class culture is highlighted, showing how this has resisted co-optation into a unified, pacified vision of national culture, and built musical bridges with the transnational black diaspora. Musically, timba represents an innovative fusion of previous popular and folkloric Afro-Cuban styles with elements of hip-hop and other African-American styles like jazz, funk and salsa. Timba articulates a black urban youth subculture with distinctive visual and choreographic codes. With its abrasive commentaries on issues such as race, consumer culture, tourism, prostitution and its connections to the underworld, timba demonstrates at the 'street level' many of the contradictions of contemporary Cuban society. After repeatedly colliding with official discourses, timba has eventually met with institutional repression. This book will appeal not only to ethnomusicologists and those working on popular music studies, but also to those working in the areas of cultural and Black studies, anthropology, Latin American st

Next Year in Havana

Author: Chanel Cleeton

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-02-06

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0399586687

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A HELLO SUNSHINE x REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK “A beautiful novel that's full of forbidden passions, family secrets and a lot of courage and sacrifice.”—Reese Witherspoon After the death of her beloved grandmother, a Cuban-American woman travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity—and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution... Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba's high society, where she is largely sheltered from the country's growing political unrest—until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary... Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic stories of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with her family during the revolution. Elisa's last wish was for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the country of her birth. Arriving in Havana, Marisol comes face-to-face with the contrast of Cuba's tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate. When more family history comes to light and Marisol finds herself attracted to a man with secrets of his own, she'll need the lessons of her grandmother's past to help her understand the true meaning of courage.

Social Voices

Author: Levi S. Gibbs

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2023-09-05

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 0252054768

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Singers generating cultural identity from K-Pop to Beverly Sills Around the world and across time, singers and their songs stand at the crossroads of differing politics and perspectives. Levi S. Gibbs edits a collection built around the idea of listening as a political act that produces meaning. Contributors explore a wide range of issues by examining artists like Romani icon Esma Redžepova, Indian legend Lata Mangeshkar, and pop superstar Teresa Teng. Topics include gendered performances and the negotiation of race and class identities; the class-related contradictions exposed by the divide between highbrow and pop culture; links between narratives of overcoming struggle and the distinction between privileged and marginalized identities; singers’ ability to adapt to shifting notions of history, borders, gender, and memory in order to connect with listeners; how the meanings we read into a singer’s life and art build on one another; and technology’s ability to challenge our ideas about what constitutes music. Cutting-edge and original, Social Voices reveals how singers and their songs equip us to process social change and divergent opinions. Contributors: Christina D. Abreu, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Kwame Dawes, Nancy Guy, Ruth Hellier, John Lie, Treva B. Lindsey, Eric Lott, Katherine Meizel, Carol A. Muller, Natalie Sarrazin, Anthony Seeger, Carol Silverman, Andrew Simon, Jeff Todd Titon, and Elijah Wald