* Ο κύκλος έκλεισε: Η τουρνέ αποχαιρετισμού των Buena Vista Social Club
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A Havana Farewell to the Buena Vista Social Club
HAVANA
— “The revolution is invincible,” say the painted walls along the
streets of Havana, as if they could banish doubt through the act of
insisting, in red block letters.
But what really is invincible in Cuba
is Omara Portuondo, the 85-year-old diva of the Buena Vista Social
Club, in a red dress, vamping and shimmying on a stage, showing a
roaring audience that fading and dying are of no interest to her.
She
is the same singer whose face stares out in torchy glamour on the
tattered, Batista-era LPs sold to tourists on the Plaza de Armas in
Havana. She is still here, still able to get an entire theater to leap
to its feet and sing with her, to “Besame Mucho” and “Quizas, Quizas,
Quizas,” with a simple wave of her arms.
Ms.
Portuondo, a legend to Cubans, was an original member of the recording
phenomenon known as the Buena Vista Social Club. For the last two years
she and her surviving bandmates Barbarito Torres, Eliades Ochoa and
Guajiro Mirabal have been touring with a new version of the old group,
called Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club. They called it the “Adiós
Tour,” and it ended on Saturday and Sunday night at the Teatro Karl Marx
in Havana.
The
band members were already old two decades ago, when the outside world
first discovered them, which is part of what made the project so
amazing. Time and memory seemed to have eclipsed the musicians when Ry
Cooder and a British music producer, Nick Gold, brought them together in
1996 to make a record. That collection of antique Cuban dance music of
the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, made by a makeshift group of musicians from
across the island, was so popular it led to a world tour, some Grammys, a Carnegie Hall concert, a film, then spinoff records and spinoff tours: a phenomenon far easier to savor than to explain.
At
the Karl Marx concerts, scrapbook images of the departed Club members
were shown on a screen behind the musicians, lending a spirit of sweet
sadness to the evening. But the living headliners, with accompanists
young enough to be their grandchildren, showed how death can be made
irrelevant where music is concerned.
Still,
it was hard to escape a sense of imminent loss. The same might be said
of the country for which the Buena Vista Social Club has become an
important cultural export. In the era of President Obama and Raúl Castro,
warming relations have brought new concerns. When the Americans
descend, when the cruise ships seize Havana Harbor, when decades of
hostility are replaced by a warm embrace, then what? Never mind the
strain on infrastructure, how might the new tourist onslaught affect
Cuba’s soul?
No
one else can speak for Cubans, but I imagine many would say their
national soul will be just fine, not least because of the pulsing health
of their music. The abundance of hipsters and young parents and
children dancing in the aisles at the Teatro Karl Marx made it clear:
The Buena Vista Social Club is not exactly an oldies act.
If
you go as a tourist to Havana, you may hear that they perform Tuesdays
and Saturdays at this hotel, or every night at 9:30 at that supper club.
But don’t be fooled. Music of all kinds pours from the streets in
Havana, but the Buena Vista Social Club is no more.
Saturday’s
concert was the first in Cuba in many years by core members of the
group. Sunday’s was to be the last. Any future hello-goodbyes will have
to fit the musicians’ schedules. Ms. Portuondo, for one, is going out on tour again this summer.
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