El Tumbao Cubano - El Blog de Cuba en el Exilio

Reclaiming Che Guevara

LINK  BY DAMIAN WROCLAVSKY.

WITH his picture on rock band posters, baseball caps and women’s lingerie, Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara is firmly entrenched in the capitalist consumer society that he died fighting to overturn.

The image of the Argentine-born guerrilla gazing sternly into the distance, long hair tucked into a beret with a single star, has been an enduring 20th century pop icon.

This combo image shows paintings, inspired by the famous photograph of late revolutionary hero Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, done by different Cuban artists. The image, captured by Cuban photographer Alberto ‘Korda’ Diaz in 1960, fired the imagination of rioting Parisian students in May 1968 and became a symbol of idealistic revolt for a generation.

The picture – taken by a Cuban photographer in 1960 and printed on posters by an Italian publisher after Guevara’s execution in Bolivia seven years later – fired the imagination of rioting Parisian students in May 1968 and became a symbol of idealistic revolt for a generation.

But as well as being one of the world’s most reproduced, the image has become one of its most merchandised. And Guevara’s family is launching an effort to stop it. They plan to file lawsuits abroad against companies that they believe are exploiting the image and say lawyers in a number of countries have offered assistance.

“We have a plan to deal with the misuse,” Guevara’s Cuban widow Aleida March said in an interview.

Immigrant Cigar Makers Fading Into Memory

LINK  04 September, 2005. By BONNIE PFISTER.
UNION CITY, N.J. - Jose Suarez is one of a dying breed, his Boquilla Cigar Shop possibly the last place in Union City where Cuban-style cigars are still made by hand.
Spanish still is commonly heard, but the accent is less often Cuban and the region‘s cigar makers are fading into memory.
The older customers who favored the $2 cigars most popular at La Boquilla are dying off. The new generation of aficionados favors fancier shops selling premium cigars at several times that price — usually hand-rolled in Honduras, the Dominican Republic and other places closer to tobacco fields and inexpensive labor.
"It‘s not surprising they‘re having difficulties," said Norman Sharp, president of the Cigar Association of America, which represents cigar makers, importers and suppliers. "It stopped being economical to hand-roll cigars in this country decades ago." ...

The Old House They Have to See

LINK
Visitors to Ernest Hemingway's former home near Havana were shocked to see it in such disrepair. Cubans and Americans are trying to restore the house.

HAVANA - Tropical fruit trees and manicured gardens greet visitors driving through Ernest Hemingway's sprawling estate on the outskirts of Havana, but the wooden home where the famed American novelist lived more than 20 years is falling apart.

Scaffolding covers the molding house, where much of the furniture has been removed due to moisture damage and to make room for restoration work. Americans in Havana for a forum on the late writer this week were surprised at the sight.

''It's not like what you see in the photographs,'' University of Pennsylvania professor Paul Hendrickson said as he peered through the windows of Hemingway's study, where a leopard skin still stretched across a couch but several other items were covered with plastic tarps. ``This is really in a more fragile state than I had guessed.''

Erosion, tropical humidity and botched repairs are threatening the house where Hemingway spent some of his happiest years and wrote the prize-winning classic The Old Man and the Sea. The hacienda that has served as a cultural bridge for Cubans and Americans has also fallen victim to politics...

To find tribute to Celia, follow the salsa sounds

LINK.   BY LYDIA MARTIN.
WASHINGTON - Celia Cruz is making a ruckus at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History -- and not everybody is doing a little rumba about it.
Whether you're checking out the walking cane Ben Franklin bequeathed to George Washington or you're wondering why you always thought Fonzie's leather jacket was black when it's actually brown or when you're on a different floor of the museum strolling through Julia Child's kitchen, you can hear that thunderous voice:
''Quimbara cumbara cumba quimbamba!'' -- the Spanish scat from one of Celia Cruz's biggest hits...

What He Saw at the Revolution

LINK     By ANNETTE GRANT.
IN 1955 a clean-shaven young man in a spiffy suit came to New York with the wild notion of raising money to finance a revolution in his homeland, Cuba. Even then Fidel Castro knew the value of a good photo-op, so he was glad to meet a countryman, Osvaldo Salas, who lived with his family in the Bronx and made a living as a photographer.

Four years later, when the revolution had become the Revolution, Mr. Castro sent a message to Salas: "Tell him to come back, we need him." Salas went, and with his son, Roberto, 18, documented the unfolding Cuban saga for 23 years. Osvaldo, who died in 1992, became the chief of the photo department of the newspaper Revolución, while Roberto was one of Mr. Castro's personal photographers.

Now Roberto Salas is back in town (he can travel here at will because he kept his American citizenship) for an exhibition of 40 to 50 pictures from the father-and-son archives, at the Cuban Art Space in Chelsea, through June 30. The Sierra Maestra mountain hideouts, Che Guevara, Raul Castro, Ernest Hemingway, Fidel Castro playing baseball, laborers in a sugarcane field, the Bay of Pigs - it's all there in black and white.

One recent morning Mr. Salas, who is now 65 and silver-haired, sat down with a group of pictures and downloaded some of his memories.

Buena Vista judge to visit Cuba

Story.     Wednesday May 25, 2005.

A high court judge in London today said he would travel to Cuba to hear witness testimonies in a dispute over the ownership of publishing rights to songs made famous by the band Buena Vista Social Club.

The US-based Peer International corporation claims its copyright to songs dating back to the 30s was unlawfully taken over by the publisher Editora Musical de Cuba (EMC), which is wholly owned by the Cuban state.

Pre-revolutionary Cuba Nostalgia Brings out Buyers on Both Sides of Straits

Story    BY VANESSA BAUZA.  South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

HAVANA - (KRT) - By the banks of Havana's Almendares River, the old Tropical Beer garden is the kind of place where time slows down and the present yields to a more innocent past.

Every Saturday morning vendors arrive early, arranging their wares under a leafy canopy of palm and banyan trees. Foreigners and diplomats who scavenge for modest treasures here every weekend call it a flea market, but Cubans know it by another name: the Nostalgia Market.

More than half a century of Cuban history can be traced in the clutter of the market's collectibles and tchotchkes. Tropicana swizzle sticks, Capri casino chips, 3-D comic books and 1950s lottery tickets recall Havana's heyday. There are rusted La Estrella bonbon tins and Pan American Airways flight maps advertising Miami-Havana trips.

Pocket watches from the pre-revolutionary Cuban jeweler Cuervo y Sobrinos are lined up near 1940s voter ID cards and 100-peso bonds from the Guantanamo Railway.

Each item carries the weight of its history, beckoning buyers to reclaim a piece of the past...

Smithsonian Hails Salsa Queen

Retrospective Traces Celia Cruz's Life From Havana to Stardom.
By Teresa Wiltz. Washington Post Staff Writer. Wednesday, May 18, 2005.

To describe Celia Cruz is to invoke hyperbole: She was La Reina de Salsa , the Queen of Salsa, she was thunder and lightning, she was a force of Mama Nature wrapped in chocolate skin, broad of nose and broader of smile, a woman for whom joy was everything and the only thing. When she growled her trademark " Azúcar! ", you knew that she was talking about much more than sugar, but referring as well to her ancestors, slaves who worked the sugar fields of Cuba, of escaping hard times, of an approach to living: The sweeter, the better.

Life was made that much sweeter by some ghetto-fabulous wigs, over-the-top duds and shoes that would do Imelda proud. So much so that at her wake in Miami, there were pauses in the action so that la Reina could make two final costume changes. She would've wanted it that way.

And now, nearly two years after her death from brain cancer, the National Museum of American History has launched a retrospective, "Azúcar! The Life and Music of Celia Cruz," spanning the Cuban singer's six-decade career as a much-adored singer. She made more than 80 recordings and collected five Grammys, the Presidential Medal of Arts and three honorary doctorates. Curated by Marvette Perez, the exhibition will travel the country....

The Smithsonian Institutions Celia Exhibit

In 1955, a prescient view of Cuba's future

VERBATIM
Below are excerpts from a speech Rafael Díaz-Balart delivered to Cuba's congress in 1955. He opposed the law that granted Fidel Castro amnesty for attacking the Moncada army barracks. Mr. Díaz-Balart died in Miami last week. L et it be very clear that I am decidedly in favor of any measure in favor of peace and brotherhood among all Cubans, from any political party or no party at all, whether in, for or against the government.

But an amnesty must be an instrument of pacification and brotherhood; it must be part of a process of moral disarmament of passions and hatreds; it must be a piece in the mechanism of well-defined rules accepted by the different protagonists of the process that a nation is living through. And this amnesty that we have just voted on, unfortunately, is all the opposite. Fidel Castro and his group have declared, repeatedly and heatedly, from the comfortable cell in which they find themselves, that they will leave that jail only to continue to prepare new violent acts, to continue to utilize all available means in the search for the total power to which they aspire.

They have refused to participate in any process of pacification and threaten members of government and opposition alike who seek the road of peace, who work in favor of electoral and democratic solutions that will place in the hands of the Cuban people the solution to the drama that our homeland is currently undergoing...

May First, 1961

1961: Victorious Castro bans elections
Cuba's prime minister, Dr Fidel Castro, has proclaimed Cuba a socialist nation and abolished elections. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans attending a May Day parade in the capital Havana roared with approval when their leader announced:
"The revolution has no time for elections. There is no more democratic government in Latin America than the revolutionary government."