Cuba Night: Pastors for Peace 20th Caravan to Cuba at the Unitarian Church July 8

download/view full-sized poster. For background music, start audio podcast below:

 

 Reese Erlich on the real story of the Buena Vista Social Club, Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner, WFMT, Chicago, March 16, 2009 http://www.wfmt.com/main.taf?p=1,1,41,25,2 [57:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Come celebrate the 50th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuba revolution and 20th Pastors for Peace Cuba Caravan

Ithaca has been a host city for the Pastors for Peace Cuba Caravan since the 3rd caravan in 1993. That year, mayor Ben Nichols signed a mayoral proclamation designation US-Cuba Freinedship week in the City of Ithaca. Though we have missed some years, the record has been consistent, though the scope of the annual effort has dropped since the early years. Here are some highpoints.

• 6th Caravan in 1996. What was supposed to be a mini-caravan on the west coast collecting medical computers to connect hospitals, schools, and clinics to the backbone of the the Cuban medical information system, INFOMED, was stopped by US Treasury agnets at the border with Mexico. The stand-off led to the 94-day Fast for Life. We drafted a pastoral letter to Treasury signed by area clergy. Immediately after the seizure, we mobilized and in a month’s time had collected a truck load of donated computers to replace those that had been seized. Peter De Mott drove our truck to the Canadian border in Highgate Vermont. The computers were seized, but in the end all were released to be sent to Cuba, with many times their value contributed to Cuba from supporter in Europe. As individuals, we participated in an amazing Grassroots campaign by phone and fax, with different targets each week of government officials, political leaders, and most importantly the media who had been refusing to tell the story.
• 7th Caravan In 1997. We sent six dialysis machines as a gift to the Cuban people from the Taino Nation of the Antilles. That may have also been the year that local artist John Ewing enlisted the help of volunteers for a banner painting project on canvas depicting José Martí and Martin Luther King, Jr. The MLK banner was not finished in time, but the Martí banner graced our truck on the caravan and currently hangs at the Martin Luther King Memorial Center in Marianao, the working class barrio in Havana, also known as the location of the original Buena Vista Social Club.
• 15th Caravan in 2004. Our focus that year was on freedom to travel and Cuban cinema. Mayor Peterson signed a a proclamation declaring June 18-24 Cuban Friendship Week in the City of Ithaca, which included screening Cuban films at night on the Ithaca Commons and working cooperatively with Cornell Cinema around their screening of Bolseros.

This year’s caravan is emphasizing tools and materials for hurricane re-construction as well as medicines and medical supplies. We haven’t done a full aid collection in many years, having found it simpler to raise funds for Pastors for Peace and thereby support the work of other communities collecting and send aid, as well as direct purchase and procurement of aid by Pastors. This year, Trumansburg artist Dan Burgevin will be a driver on the caravan for the third consecutive year. Though we have not organized an aid collection, the possibility is there for carrying a small amount of high value items. A tool chest, for example, packed with needed tools for hurricane reconstruction. If you have a donation, please contact Dan Burgevin and Cris McConkey.

The 20th Pastors for Peace Cuba Caravan occurs during the 1st year of the Obama administration, and on the 50th anniversary of the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Obama has relaxed restrictions on family travel and remittances, but we have a long way to go. Please come out and support the local effort and also consider what you might do as the year progresses. We really should re-form a local Pastors for Peace support and Cuba solidarity group. After 2004, we lost several key members who left the area.

Volunteers are needed for set, clean-up and kitchen.  ‘Catered pot-luck’ means that we are largely depending on ourselves to do the catering.  Thus far we will have tostones (fried plantains), yuca con mojo (yuca in olive oil & garlic sauce), a savory fish stew, and of course congrís (beans and rice).   If you need a recipe, just Google ‘Cuban recipe’  and you’ll have zillions to choose from.  Maybe you have a good picadillo recipe.  Of course we will need vegan dishes.  Google “Cuban vegan recipe”.   Please contact Cris McConkey 607/387-9830 if you can help out.

José Martí banner hanging in the cafeteria of the Matin Luther King Memorial Center in Marianao

Our entertainment this year includes master percussionist Hiram Jímenez along with Jonathan Kline, known locally as a craftsman who makes fine black ash baskets but who also has been studying with Hiram and has advanced to being assistant instructor with Hiram with the PROYECTO ¡PA’LANTE! Afro-Caribbean percussion classes iat Cornell. This will be followed by a demonstration of rueda de casino or “salsa circle” by members of the Palante Salsa en Rueda Dance Troupe to which we are all encouraged to try to learn some steps. We don’t know how it will all pan out.  Maybe we’ll have some “comparsa”.  thrown it. Regardless, it will certainly be a lot of fun.

On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement swarmed into Havana.   Fulgencio Batista had departed the night before and a new Cuban government was established ending Batista’s corrupt and oppressive regime, and with it the casinos and organized crime that became so emblematic of that regime.

‘Casino’ also happens to be a dance style known outside of Cuba as ‘Salsa’, but it’s origins really don’t have anything to do with the gambing establishments run by the mob that attracted such a large U.S. clientele.  (Of course that clientele needed to be entertained.  The film Mambo Kings deals with the brutal exploitation of musicians and entertainers at that time in Cuba.)

Velazquez Spanish-English dictionary defines ‘casino’ as “a room or building used as a public resort, for dancing, social, or club meetings”.  It is from roots within the Cuban social club that the Casino style emerged, where steps were named and called out to dancers on the floor.  Rueda de Casino is a form involving at least two couples, exchanging partners and responding to calls.  Rueda means wheel or circle, and so Rueda de Casino might be translated as “salsa circle”.

Jacira Castro has an summary editorial article on the origins of  Rueda de Casino on salsapower.com, What is Rueda de Casino? Why do some call it “Casino Rueda”?

The Spanish language entry in wikimapia.org for “Casino Desportivo” says of the pre-1959 club in Havana often associated with the origin of the Casino dance style that it was “not for rich, as many think.  Working and average class could be associates”.   After the truimph of the revolution, many of these social clubs were shut down.

In an unattributed  “Letter from Havana” re-published on jewishcuba.org, there is an interesting account of the Casino Desportivo as a focal point for the Jewish Community at that time:

The very wealthy did discriminate against Jews, as they did against the poor, blacks, Chinese or anybody of mixed parentage, the latter constituted at the time somewhere around 40 % of the population of Cuba.

What this meant was that Jews were limited to attending the poor man’s Club: Casino Deportivo de La Habana. Clubs were very important to the resident of Havana. It was not only a place of social life and activities, but also the only easy access to beaches, or swimming pools, a dire need in our long hot summer.

The owner of the Casino Deportivo de La Habana, Alfredo Hornedo, an unsavoury Cuban politician, was originally the owner of a newspaper, El Pais, and later on a Theatre, which included an ice skating rink, named Blanquita, after his first wife, and later on renamed Karl Marx and a Hotel, Rosita, named after his second wife, much visited by the mob, later on renamed Sierra Maestra and now being refurbished

As his was not an exclusive club, and required of no large initial fee, some working class Cubans were members. I remember on Saturdays and Sundays the large Jewish membership, which kept very much apart, they did not want their girls and boys to fall in love with non Jews, and also because in many instances they carried their kosher lunch. The only members allowed to bring in food, the rest were expected to attend either the restaurant, cafeteria or bar managed by the Club.

After the revolution these clubs were turned over to the different unions but for lack of adequate maintenance, some collapsed, some are closed and others are still open to the public at large. But they do seem to be en route to disappearing in the near future as they are located in an area in which a lot of real state development is going on. One of the most luxurious, which catered to the very wealthy and exclusive society, the Havana Biltmore, has just been beautifully refurbished and turned into the Havana Club, catering to foreign business men and diplomats residing in Havana. It is also open to tourist. Cubans come in as guests.

This is a similar story to that surrounding the Buena Vista Social Club movie. The podcast toward the top of this post explores some of the faulty conclusions and fabrications coming out of the movie’s construction. “Critic’s Choice”, is a radio interview program on WFMT, Chicago’s Fine Arts and Classics station. WFMT’s Critic-at-Large Andrew Patner spoke with Reese Erlichon the mythology surrounding BVSC which is the subject of Erlich’s recent book, Dateline Havana. What I find interesting in the Jewish account of the Casino Desportivo is that class as much race enters into the picture, and the characterization of the club’s owner as an “unsavory politician”. Neither is the mob out of the picture.

The Buena Vista Social Club story as depicted in the movie is really a rather clever construction. Ry Cooder did not in truth rescue some extremely talented but starving musicians whose music had all but been totally forgotten. As Reese Erlich explains, Cooder met them at Cuba’s Artex recording studio. That the phenomenon of the CD and movie brought much renewed world-wide attention to some of the older styles is something appreciated by and validating for many in Cuba who have an equal affection for those older styles. But what is seriously wrong is the implication that the Cuban Revolution somehow stopped this rich cultural and artistic expression. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The status of the old social clubs may be in question, but the Cuban public’s access to their culture is a top priority and indeed the arts have flourished. Cubans congregate more than ever around music and dance and their culture.

Dare I say that the social aspects of Cuban dance may reflect a national character of social interaction that helps explain Cuba’s success in all sorts of areas of community organization from medicine and education, to hurricane preparedness?

The mission statement for Projecto Palante, the local group that is helping with Cuba Night, concludes as follows:

Proyecto ¡Pa’lante! promotes some of the most exciting Latin and world music nightlife happenings at Cornell and in the Central New York area. We engage nightlife and culture not as a distraction and antithesis to the grind of exploitative labor regimes and ascetic cultural norms, but as integral to a social endeavor that extols cooperation, connection and sensuality as cornerstones of an alternative society. As alternative to mainstream cultural production and its drive toward commercial monopoly, gender, racial and sexual categorization, and the destruction of artistic diversity, we offer an experience of high-energy Latin and world music and dance in a collective and non-pretentious atmosphere open to everyone. Our productions serve as community benefits and mobilizers and in so doing highlight the oneness of collectively created pleasure and social justice.

I think that sums it up pretty well.

¡Baila!

Rueda de Casino