Music Builds a Bridge to Cuba

There is bound to be no shortage of touchy-feely international cheerleading about this week’s Music Bridges Around the World event at the Hotel Nacional here, a grand old structure overlooking the turquoise waters of Havana harbor.

After all, Music Bridges, the brainchild of Woodland Hills songwriter Alan Roy Scott, has teamed 45 Cuban musicians with 48 American counterparts for a week of unprecedented collaboration, which will culminate in a concert Sunday at the 5,000-seat Karl Marx Theater.

While Americans such as Ry Cooder have produced recordings by Cuban bands, and American musicians have recorded existing compositions by Cuban artists, the 37-year-old U.S. embargo against Cuba has made it illegal until now for musicians from the capitalist superpower and the communist island the size of Pennsylvania 85 miles from Florida to create original work together.

The rules were loosened thanks to legwork by San Francisco attorney Bill Martinez, who has been instrumental in bringing Cuban groups such as Los Van Van to the United States for performances. Martinez represented Music Bridges before the U.S. government and was able to get permission for the event to take place.

“Times are changing quickly,” Martinez said. “It’s amazing even to me.”

So it is that both Bonnie Raitt and Cuban singer Fernando Becquer sat in the audience of a press conference here Monday, listening to Scott and others, including Alicia Perea Masa, president of the Cuban Institute of Music, hail music’s power to, as Scott said, “build bridges between different cultures as no other medium can.”

Scott should know; in the last 11 years he has organized five similar events in countries including Ireland and the former Soviet Union. The Cuba event is primarily financed by Northern California businessman Joel Gelderman. Donations also have been made through instrument companies and music licensing organizations such as BMI and ASCAP.

The musicians will spend several hours a day every day this week composing and rehearsing in groups, small and large, in practice spaces throughout Havana. In addition, the musicians will engage in a goodwill baseball game on Wednesday, and some American artists, such as Raitt, will spend free time helping dole out medical supplies donated through groups such as Los Angeles’ Operation USA to area children’s hospitals.

Nonetheless, there remain a few disturbing realities about Music Bridges, foremost among them the fact that few Cuban citizens, even those who live across the street from the Hotel Nacional, seem to know that once-forbidden musicians such as Gladys Knight, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, R&B; singer Montell Jordan, singer Duncan Sheik, Ziggy Marley, Mick Fleetwood, Peter Frampton and Lisa Loeb are only meters away, working with Cuban musicians such as Chucho Valdes, Silvio Rodriguez, Amaury Perez, Miriam Ramos and others.

“There has been no publicity here about it,” said a cabdriver from the wheel of his state-owned Mercedes. He asked that his name not be used, but added that he thought many Cubans would like to know the Americans are here.

Also befuddling: In a nation like Cuba, which spends much energy praising the advances Fidel Castro’s government has made for women here, only five of the 45 Cuban artists are female.

The U.S. balance is not much better, with only 12 women among the group of 48 artists. Additionally, Scott and other organizers seem stuck with 1970s notions of Cuba as the innocent victim of U.S. policies, and do not seem aware that the political crisis in Cuba at the moment is most deeply shouldered by the nation’s females.

Indeed, very young, usually black, prostitutes are visible here on every corner, a market that has exploded since Cuba lost its Soviet subsidies in the late 1980s. The island nation has made economic gains in the mid-’90s through state-encouraged tourism, but increased prostitution has also been a byproduct, according to a U.S. State Department report.

Then there is another theme that few will probably want to address: With all due respect to the artists involved from the States, ask a Cuban on the street for the name of their favorite American musician, and they are far more likely to say Mariah Carey or Smashing Pumpkins rather than participants Jimmy Buffett and Stewart Copeland.

The musicians have been matched by literally pulling names out of a hat. Cuban singer Amaury Perez said that this method had originally concerned the Cubans but, he added, “We know that Alan knows more than we do about this, and it has worked out fine.”

Finally, the near absence of U.S. Latino artists from the Music Bridges roster is alarming since Latin music is the fastest-growing domestic genre in the U.S. Of the 48 musicians, only one, drummer Horatio Hernandez, is Latino. When asked about this, Scott said he had invited “several people from that community,” but that “they thought it would hurt their careers to be here because of political reasons.”

Scott was likely referring to the protests of prominent Cuban exiles, such as jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, who said in an interview after his recent Grammy win, “This [project] sends the wrong message. It says we’re willing to accept what Castro is doing to my country.”

The pressure may have gotten to Raul Malo, the Cuban American lead singer of the Mavericks, who had been on a preliminary list of participants, but who ultimately dropped out.

But not all Cubans or Latinos are in agreement. In an interview Saturday in Miami, producer Emilio Estefan, a Cuban exile regarded along with wife Gloria as a pillar of Latin music in the U.S., said he did not object to the Music Bridges idea.

“I wouldn’t go myself, but things are changing here. People’s minds are much more open than they used to be,” Estefan said.