Politics and the Pianist : Jazz: Gonzalo Rubalcaba has been caught in the cold between the U.S. and Cuba, but his talent makes him a hot property.

Rarely do politics and art become so inextricably entangled as they have in the career of Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba. To get his recordings released in the United States, this 30-year-old jazz prodigy must use a legal sleight of hand to get around Washington’s long-standing trade embargo against revolutionary Cuba. And it took years of tortuous negotiation before he was recently granted permission to perform in this country.

When Rubalcaba finally made his U.S. debut last Friday in New York, the political contradictions of the event were well-evident. Onstage at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the pianist cooked up a fervid Pan-American blend of jazz and Latin rhythms with the help of both Cuban and American accompanists. Yet outside the hall, six uniformed police officers were on hand in anticipation of a protest by Cuban expatriates who are angry at Rubalcaba’s cozy relationship with Fidel Castro’s government in Havana.

As it transpired, the protesters never turned up. But the security underscored how the three-decade standoff between Communist Cuba and the United States has become the political backdrop of Rubalcaba’s career.

“It’s absolutely impossible to forget about that,” Rubalcaba said with a sigh the following day, speaking through an interpreter in his New York hotel room. With his soft brown eyes, unprepossessing air and warm smile, Rubalcaba seems an unlikely candidate to be caught in the center of such heated political debate. He plays music to help build a cultural bridge between the two countries, yet his Cuban citizenship is a constant source of criticism.

Rubalcaba’s politics may spark debate, but his prodigious musical gifts are not in dispute. The son of Cuban pianist Guillermo Rubalcaba--who himself was the son of a renowned composer and conductor--Rubalcaba was so immersed in the family’s musical history that he cannot remember a time when he seriously considered another career.

His father was a pianist with bandleader Enrique Jorrin in the 1950s, when Cuban jazz was exploding on the American scene thanks to the cha-cha and mambo crazes. With the help of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, Cuban bandleaders such as Machito and Arturo (Chico) O’Farrill had become enormously successful in the United States. When Rubalcaba was born in 1963, four years after Castro came to power, nurturing Cuban artists was an article of faith in the nascent revolution.

“It was very intense,” he says of his musical upbringing. “My father was always a very dynamic person, a very neurotic musician, very serious. Now he is a little older and he’s retired, but he was a very hard worker and my house was a place to practice for any project that any musician might have. That was basically the environment in which I was raised. . . . Since I was a kid, I’ve discovered all the tricks of this career. And the main trick is to be rigorous and constant in your work, and I learned that very early on.”

After graduating from a Havana music conservatory, Rubalcaba toured Africa and France with the Cuban dance band Orquestra Aragon. As an artist, he enjoyed many of the comforts of Cuba’s state-run cultural apparatus. He turned professional while still a teen-ager and by the age of 24 he had toured Europe and Latin America with his jazz-fusion band Proyecto.

It’s as an acoustic pianist, however, that Rubalcaba has staked his name outside Cuba. The overheated lyricism of his playing--staccato Latin phrases suddenly rippling out into rivulets of notes; ballads delivered with a limpid purity of tone--has often been compared to American pianist Keith Jarrett.

When bass player Charlie Haden first saw Rubalcaba perform in Havana seven years ago, he urged Blue Note Records boss Bruce Lundvall to sign him up. The result has been three acclaimed trio albums backed by Haden, bassist John Patitucci and drummers Paul Motain and Jack DeJohnette. Rubalcaba’s latest Blue Note release, “Suites Four and 20,” features his Cuban quartet.

To get around the 32-year-old Treasury Department trade embargo against Cuba, Rubalcaba is signed to a Japanese label that licenses his records to Blue Note in the United States. But securing permission to perform here proved impossible until the Clinton Administration took office this year. Even then, Rubalcaba was issued a visa to play one concert only, on the condition that he not be paid.

Last year, Rubalcaba successfully petitioned the Cuban government to let him move to the Dominican Republic with his wife and two sons. In effect, he asked to be cut loose from the benevolent grip of the Cuban government, which had paid for his education and his wages up to that point. But the special status he now enjoys is a sore point among Cuban expatriates like Paquito D’Rivera, one of the many Cuban artists who became an American citizen because of objections to the repressive nature of the Castro government.

D’Rivera, who was once one of Rubalcaba’s musical mentors in Havana, regards the pianist as the pawn of an oppressive regime, accusing him of enjoying all the benefits of his star status while dissidents in Cuba are persecuted.

For his part, Rubalcaba seems wounded by the vehemence of his old friend’s criticism. “The last time I remember that we were close was in Spain last year in the summer,” he says, “and he was not aggressive at all. I remember him saying to me that he was sad and melancholic about Cuba, about the things he left behind in Cuba. At that moment I was very open and I felt he was being open also, and obviously I was sympathetic to the fact that he was separated from his real values down in Cuba. But this time he has been deeply unrespectful--with himself.”

Did Rubalcaba ever feel compromised by the support he received from the Castro government, given its documented abuses against dissidents?

“Well, I’m a Cuban citizen and I have to be honest with the things that are really well done in the country that I am a citizen of,” he responds. “I am free to do the music I want to do. I could study as much as I wanted to study. I could get all the experience I wanted to bring out in my work. And I am strong enough, and I hope to be strong enough in the future, to encourage favorable positions toward Cuba. Even if those favorable positions invite criticism--and I am also critical sometimes. What I want is to help Cuba.”

Rubalcaba professes that he is uncertain whether the Clinton Administration’s decision to let him perform indicates a softening of the cultural freeze between his homeland and the United States. But casting his mind back to the previous night’s concert, he sounds just a little more optimistic.

“Hopefully,” he says, “when we came here last night we made politics kinder.”