Freedom’s downside

When Cuban salsa star Carlos Manuel gambled his future on a run for the U.S. border this summer, the defection was documented closely by the nation’s Spanish-language media in a publicity barrage painstakingly orchestrated by the owner of his American record label.

A Telemundo news crew trailed the handsome singer even before his decision to request asylum in the U.S. was made public. There he was, one of Cuba’s biggest stars, ducking out of his Mexico City hotel before dawn to evade Cuban authorities. There he was, crossing the border at Brownsville, Texas, along with his mother and a small entourage. And there he was, arriving in Miami to a hero’s welcome, followed by a whirlwind week of interviews on TV talk shows and photo shoots for fawning publications, including People en Espanol.

But despite the attention, there was no payoff where it counts most for recording artists -- at record store cash registers.

During the week of the defection, reports from Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks national record sales at major U.S. outlets, show a minuscule bump for Carlos Manuel’s acclaimed 2001 album, “Malo Cantidad,” whose catchy, bad-boy title cut made him a superstar in Cuba. The album sold only six units nationwide, up from one the week before. Of those, three sales were tallied in New York, where the defection got prominent play on the national page of the New York Times. Only one copy sold in Miami.

As for the singer’s latest album, the recently released “Enamora’o” (“In Love”), national figures weren’t even available because the record wasn’t being tracked by SoundScan at the time of the defection and was unavailable in major stores due to spotty distribution.

Hugo Cancio, owner of Ciocan Music, which released the new album, dismissed the SoundScan reports as irrelevant because they don’t capture sales in independent record stores, important outlets in the Latin music business. Even so, Cancio concedes “Enamora’o” has sold only about 5,000 units, a paltry performance by any measure. The previous album didn’t even hit that low-water mark in two years, according to the singer’s former producer.

Still, Cancio emphasized the exposure Carlos Manuel received during that first hectic week in Miami, mobbed for autographs everywhere he went.

“We may not sell any records, my friend, but he sure is famous,” Cancio said.

Newfound fame aside, the dismal retail results underscore the serious challenges facing the hundreds of Cuban recording artists who have left their homeland and are trying to reestablish their careers in the United States. Once the news cameras are gone and the novelty of the new arrival wears off, they come face to face with the fickle and at times unfathomable realities of the free market.

For many, the land of opportunity can turn quickly into the land of disappointment. They discover that everything here is different -- especially tastes in music.

U.S. audiences have historically embraced Afro-Cuban styles now commonly lumped together under the catch-all term salsa, which encompasses the classic Cuban son, mambo and cha-cha-cha. Yet even many die-hard salsa fans have turned a deaf ear to the new and complex styles that have evolved in Cuba since the revolution, a bold blend of jazz and hip-hop grafted onto a foundation of dense and hyper-syncopated percussion.

Before making his move, Carlos Manuel was warned about the hard road ahead by Manolin, another Cuban singer who had defected two years earlier. In a phone call between Mexico and Miami, Manolin told his colleague that his past hits and his island celebrity would carry no weight in this country.

“Everything he’s going through, I already went through it,” Manolin said recently. “People put on a big show for you that has more to do with politics than music. But once it’s all over, nobody does a thing for you.”

Popular Cuban artists understandably undergo a cultural and commercial shock when they move here from a country where the music industry is controlled by the government, says Joe Garcia, president of the anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation based in Miami. Some exiled performers have found it so hard to adapt they’ve even urged his organization to launch its own record label to help promote them, an idea the group rejected as beyond its advocacy mission.

“Exile organizations cannot create the hits,” says Garcia, who appeared prominently at a news conference for Carlos Manuel. “People don’t buy music to support politics. Here, fans support an artist because they like his music. For better or worse, that’s how the system works. When the news cameras are gone, you’ve got to start singing. And if people don’t like what they hear, well, you’ll be singing to yourself.”

Earlier immigration

Carlos MANUEL and Manolin are the first major artists of their generation to defect, but the exodus of musicians from Cuba started almost as soon as Fidel Castro marched victorious into Havana in 1959. Nobody knows exactly how many of them have settled in the United States, which now has more than 1.2 million residents of Cuban origin, according to the 2000 census. But it’s easy to tally the number of exiled musicians who became major pop stars in their adopted homeland -- they can be counted on the fingers of two hands.

Cuba’s most famous celebrity exile, the late Celia Cruz, became an instant refugee from the infant revolution when she left on tour in 1960 and never returned. Other big names who came here in earlier waves of immigration include mambo bassist Israel “Cachao” Lopez and jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.

Although personally painful, their transition was relatively smooth from a commercial and artistic standpoint. Trade and travel between Cuba and the U.S. were wide open in the pre-Castro era, when Americans had been swept up by big-band dance crazes coming from Cuba, such as the mambo and cha-cha-cha. Audiences here were already familiar with the traditional dance music of Cubans like Cruz. And jazz musicians like Sandoval speak a musical language understood everywhere.

But as the U.S. economic boycott of Cuba took hold, the island’s artists were cut off from fans and colleagues in the States. By the time the boycott thawed in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Cuban pop music had evolved radically in relative isolation. The island’s progressive style even had a new name: timba. And it was flourishing, producing a wave of world-class talent under a system of socialist patronage for the arts.

But in Cuba, that does not necessarily translate into record sales. In fact, record sales in that country are not the indicator of success that they are here. Artists measure their appeal much more by their live performances.

Popular musicians also live privileged lives in Cuba; many are permitted to travel abroad and even have been allowed to cut private deals for tours and recording contracts. Carlos Manuel says his main financial worry back home was trying to get his money out of the socialist island. When he left, he said, he had several people secretly carry cash for him, as much as $12,000 each.

Chances are, he’s going to need his savings. When they come to the U.S., many Cuban musicians find they have to start from scratch in a world where all the rules have changed.

“Manolin is a fabulous composer and he had the common Cuban touch in a way that nobody had,” says Ned Sublette, a New York-based musician, author and owner of qbadisc, a pioneering Cuban music label. “His songs were quoted in the sports columns of Granma,” the official Cuban newspaper. “They were known to every taxi driver. He just had this gift. But you see, that gift doesn’t do you any good in a non-Cuban world.”

Nostalgia for a former life

Cuban singer Iris Sandra Cepeda, who defected to the United States five years ago, has yet to find her place in this new world. In Cuba, she was a star as the charming lead singer with the excellent folk-salsa ensemble Arte Mixto. In Los Angeles, she’s just another anonymous musician.

Cepeda never recovered from her fall from celebrity. The emotional bruises are evident during a recent interview at her spartan apartment directly overlooking the loud and busy San Bernardino Freeway.

Cepeda says she made her decision to defect on impulse, partly romantic, partly professional. Her band was on a U.S. tour when she met her future husband, also an exiled Cuban musician living in Los Angeles. She left the band in midtour and never returned to Cuba.

The vivacious, curly-haired vocalist turns quiet when she expresses nostalgia for what she left behind.

“I don’t have regrets,” she says. “But I’ll tell you one thing, now that nobody knows who I am and nobody asks for my autograph on the street: If I were ever to become somebody famous, I would always miss Arte Mixto. Even if I were a superstar some day, I believe that work will be the greatest accomplishment in my life.”

Cepeda appears to have lost weight since her days in Cienfuegos, the provincial Cuban city where the band was based. Everybody knew one another there, she says. Now, she barely says hello to her neighbors in Alhambra.

In her impeccable apartment, a single landscape painting decorates the bare living room walls. The furnishings include a small keyboard, a computer that doesn’t work and a glossy black entertainment center, where she stores clippings of her career and her defection, the last time she made news.

In Los Angeles, she has worked for a succession of local bands, including La Charanga Cubana. Currently, she sings with two groups, La Palabra and Odara. And she holds two day jobs, working part time for an afternoon recreation program and giving private voice lessons.

Though she once dreamed of a solo career, she’s had to face the fact that after five years here, she’s still doing backup vocals.

“But what artist in this country hasn’t had to sing chorus for somebody some time?” Cepeda says in that rhythmic, rapid-fire cadence of Cuban speech. “I’m not saying I don’t want to get past this point where I got stuck. But if my moment hasn’t come, I can’t fight against the world, or cut open my veins.”

Cepeda still yearns for the creative role she played in Arte Mixto, which never recovered from her absence.

“In Cuba, I always felt so sure about what I wanted, and how far I could go with my music,” she recalled. “There, you had the freedom to do whatever music you liked, and I was so happy with this work. So you have other expectations when you come to this country. You think people will let you follow the same course you were on. But when you get here, they say, ‘Listen, just get in line.’ ”

Freedom and pressure

It may seem contradictory that Cuban artists enjoyed artistic freedom, to some extent, within a dictatorial political system. Yet Cubans’ creativity flourished precisely because they were free from the tyranny of the marketplace. For decades, they didn’t have to worry about the demands of corporate label executives or the push to make the Billboard charts, since neither existed on the island.

They did worry, however, of running afoul of government censors, who monitored their musical content and their foreign contacts. Authorities had the power to ground an act, as they did for six months to the fabled Charanga Habanera, whose defiant, freewheeling concerts were deemed to be getting out of hand.

Manolin says his music was eventually banned from Cuban radio and television, in part because officials disapproved of a song he wrote urging better relations with residents of Miami.

Carlos Manuel says his departure from Cuba was spurred partly by the Cuban government’s recent crackdown on dissidents, which included an uncle who was jailed. But his main motivation was professional.

“My career was stuck in Cuba,” says the singer, whose full name is Carlos Manuel Pruneda. “I had hit a ceiling and wasn’t going to go any higher. I’m pretty ambitious when it comes to my profession. I really want to be somebody big.”

Cuba’s dynamic dance music scene of the 1990s -- which brought so much tourism, cultural prestige and so many dollars to the troubled country -- has hit a serious slump.

Some of Havana’s most famous dance venues have recently shut down or changed formats, partly as a result of the government’s crackdown on drugs and prostitution.

“It would be misrepresenting to say that nothing is happening in Havana,” says Ned Sublette who owns qbadisc, a pioneering Cuban music label in New York. “But it’s nothing like the wide-open scene of 1995.

“The scene that Manolin was part of is really gone forever.”

Some critics say musicians who leave Havana are like fish out of water, flopping around aimlessly until they expire. Their survival is especially difficult in Miami, which has a surprisingly weak club scene for live music, the lifeblood of Cuba’s dance band culture.

Not surprisingly, Manolin and Carlos Manuel have both altered their styles from aggressive timba to romantic Spanish-language pop in hopes of fitting conservative U.S radio formats. Early reaction indicates that the switch is winning no new converts.

Carlos Manuel says it will take him time for him to learn the ropes. He says he plans to study singers who are successful here and tailor his music to this market.

“I don’t think it’s more difficult for Cuban artists,” he says. “We’re not from some other planet. Building a career in the United States is difficult for everybody. But I’m fascinated by difficult things. That’s the problem. That’s why I came here.”