RHYTHM FLORIDA : A Proud Cuban Community and an Exiled Movie Star Seek to Recover Their Cultural Roots

GUSMAN CENTER IS OVERFLOWING, THE GALA CROWD OF CUBANS AND OTHER LATINOS IN fancy dress who paid up to a hundred dollars for a scalped ticket to the highlight of the Miami Film Festival pacing up and down the rows, exchanging kisses and abrazos and warm nervous smiles as they wait for the star, their star, to arrive, anxious children of Spain gathering in a theater that seems a courtyard in a Mudejar castle, battlements on the sides, ogivalesque windows and a blue-domed sky where yellow lights feigning stars twinkle on the restless assembly. But this is Miami after all, the city that has come to be known as Northern Havana, where the norm is Cuban time, not Anglo punctuality, a half-hour to an hour behind, regardless of the occasion. And what could be more appropriate for tropical timekeeping than the premiere of a documentary on the father of mambo , Israel Lopez, once known to all of Cuba as Cachao, who has been rescued from the deadening rounds of birthday parties, restaurant lounges and quinceaneras , lifted from the halls of neglect into the pantheon of cultural icons?

There is a stirring at the stage and the once-angry, young wise-guy of Cuban letters, whom time and circumstance have conspired to make the greatest living Cuban writer, Guillermo Cabrera-Infante, steps out of stage left to address the audience. But it is not Cabrera-Infante they have come to see, great though he may be, not even Cachao himself, a short, beaming black man in shades with a grandfatherly smile who’s the supposed object of this tribute, no, they want to hang their hearts on the hometown hero, their muchacho, their Andy, who, like many of those gathered here, also fled Cuba in the first wave of exiles, dreamed of being a Hollywood star and then, against all odds, became one and now has returned as movie director to point the way to greater collective glory. And here he is, in the slouchy, baggy suit that is de rigeur on studio lots and fancy restaurants out on The Coast, and he tosses back his long, matinee-idol hair and says, in a choked-up voice that rings of truth and sentiment, “There is no place I’d rather be except for in a free Cuba!”

With that, the hall erupts in thunderous ovation as the creme of Cuban society, which is to say of South Florida, draws to its honeysuckle bosom Andy Garcia, born Andres Arturo Garcia Menendez, son of Miami and Havana, who in a single opening line has captured their hearts and, unwittingly, the dilemma all Cuban artists face in this country.

Amazing, I think, considering the man hates even the thought of politics.

In my memories of Cuba, politics and music are inextricably intertwined. I grew up proud, knowing that our music was among the most popular in the world, Cuba’s best-known product until the bombast of Fidel Castro’s revolution. One of my earliest memories of Havana is overhearing the plaintive sounds of La Orquesta Aragon rehearsing in the musicians’ local across the street from our house. The sunny mambos of Beny More and the brassy guaguancos of Celia Cruz were the musical aura that surrounded me in those crystal-clear days at the start of the revolutionary era. Yet I never asked myself where the songs, or the singers, came from; they were simply a part of Cuba, like the burning sun and the bomb blasts in the afternoon. Garcia’s documentary on the septuagenarian maestro who, with his brother Orrestes, wrote the world’s first mambo in the late 1930s, “Cachao . . . Like His Rhythm There is No Other,” filled in the gaps in my musical knowledge. A classically trained musician who played at the Havana Conservatory at age 12, Cachao and his brother derived the mambo from an earlier dance called the danzon, a fusion of African rhythms and European melodies. He estimates that he has written tens of thousands of compositions.

At first I thought it ironic that we needed a Hollywood star to show el exilio the musical treasures we had been neglecting. But then I realized it was all part of the process of maturation and self-definition Cubans have undergone during their tortuous road to prosperity in South Florida.

The Miami that my family and thousands of other penniless Cuban exiles first laid eyes on in the 1960s was a sleepy resort town, run as a fiefdom by a handful of Southerners. There were none of the tall gray and white limestone buildings of Havana. It was a low-slung town, with great swaths of verdant lawns and miles of stucco-and-wood buildings hugging steamy grounds. The tallest structure was the courthouse, a stone’s throw away from the City Hall steeple, where dozens of vultures waited patiently for their prey. The vultures are still there, but now it seems they are feeding on the body of the old Anglo-dominated world.

Today’s Miami has a skyline that mirrors its world-class aspirations; its mayor is Xavier Suarez, who came out of Cuba the same year I did. Dade County, where Miami is located, has a Latino majority. Most of that population is of Cuban origin, with an aggregate annual income of more than $11 billion. Cubans know their weight and don’t hesitate to throw it around, to the point that the largest newspaper in Florida, the Miami Herald, can complain of attacks by Cubans when it prints opinions not shared by its exile readership. Cubans insist on setting the agenda in South Florida, which, in an odd echo of ‘60s radical cant, often comes down to the eternal question: “Are you for him or against him?” That is, are you part of the problem or part of the solution?

For the first time this century, an entire immigrant community has kept its focus on the old country, rejecting the the supreme American value of assimilation and creating instead its own hermetic universe. It should come as no surprise, then, that Cubans would think nothing of upending the traditional postulates of art and culture in America.

THE MORNING BEFORE THE FEBRUARY SCREENING, THERE IS A PRESS conference in Coral Gables at Yuca Restaurant, the most prominent of the nuevo cubano establishments, its name referring both to the edible root that’s a staple of Cuban cooking and to young upscale Cuban-Americans. Everything about Yuca conspires to refer to the ambitions of Miami Cubans--the Spanish-revival exterior, the elegant, white-napped tables, the postmodern decor. Seated at a table with Cachao are Garcia; the film’s co-producer, Fausto Sanchez; the associate producer, George Hernandez, and one of the performers in the documentary, flutist Nestor Torres.

Garcia, with the understandable emotion of a director who’s just delivered a very wet print to the festival the night before, describes the documentary as a work in progress, aimed at preserving the traditions of Cuban culture. Done as a three-camera shoot on a bare-bones budget of less than $100,000, the third cameraman wasn’t recruited until the very day of one of Cachao’s concerts.

“In a sense, it had to have a descarga (jam session) kind of feel to it, because of the parameters of what we were doing in terms of style and low budget,” Garcia says. “That was the style, let the music dictate what it is. I’m not interested in showing myself off as a director.”

It falls to Torres to articulate the real thrust of the documentary: “Cuban music is one of the three most influential musics in the world. It’s as valuable as jazz, as Bird (Charlie Parker) and (John) Coltrane, and it should be preserved.”

“Cuban music is classical music and it should be taught in schools in Miami as a (music) requirement,” Garcia says the following day at a conference in Miami-Dade Community College. He promises to give a copy of his documentary for use in all of Dade County’s public schools and then adds: “Why is there no conservatory in Miami to study classical Cuban music? Why does a Cuban symphony not exist in Miami? Cultural authorities should be asked why that is.”

It’s clear, then, what Garcia and his collaborators are working on: a stake in the cultural canon of the West. To these Cubans, Ernesto Lecuona, Beny More and Israel “Cachao” Lopez are the cultural equivalents of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. It’s a typically Cuban attitude, bringing to mind what a friend once said about Cubans: “They don’t think of themselves as a minority, they think of themselves as an elite.”

Throughout Latin America, Cubans are often compared to that other chosen people and called, not always complimentarily, the Jews of the Hemisphere. The analogy rings true in more ways than one. For it seems as though Cubans all belong to one church, the church of Cuba, membership in the temple endowed by birth, with the island standing in for Zion. Miami, then, in this scheme is the Babylon on the shores of which they weep. Fidel, of course, is the devil.

“THERE’S A VERY STRONG political bias (in Miami),” says Olga Garay, the director of cultural affairs for Miami-Dade Community College’s Wolsson campus. “To me, that’s one of the saddest aspects of the whole cultural scene here. I think even the most enlightened person is constantly faced with what the implications are going to be in terms of his and her own career, his or her own institution.”

But to Garay, who’s been a member of panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, an even more important issue than politics is the cultural marginalization of the Cuban-American artist. “It’s always fascinating to me that in the context of the U.S., because we are Latinos or Hispanics, we’re considered people of color.” She points out that one of the most important tendencies in Cuban-American art is anoramiento , or longing for the past--a past that can be traced directly back to Spain. It expresses itself in a liking for zarzuelas , Spanish light operas, and plays like “En los Noventa, Fidel Revienta”--”In the ‘90s, Fidel Will Burst,” a picaresque farce about Castro’s downfall that can be traced to Spain’s golden age. It’s the source of the predilection for pictures of white farmers driving oxcarts stacked with sugar cane, of swaying royal palms in tropical afternoons, which keeps many a tony Coral Gables gallery open. Anoramiento is, in its essential form, Spanish Colonial art, the Cuban version of Eurocentric art. And Spaniards are white, as are most exile Cubans, which becomes the central paradox of the Cuban experience in the United States, where to be Cuban is to be outside the white majority culture.

Garay breaks into Spanish, as all Cubans do when dealing with heartfelt matters. “ Que yo sepa, no hay moros en la costa ,” she says--”As far as I know, there are no Moors on the coast”--a veiled reference to her lack of mixed blood. She points at herself, the straight brown hair and rosy-cheeked complexion that would make an Irish mother proud. “When you look at me, as a human being, the veins that are flowing through me are Spanish. Yet because I’m in the American scene, I’m not considered that. You’re lumped with all these others. Well, f--- you, I’m Cuban, I’m not Mexican. Not to say that (Mexicans) are not a wonderful culture. But in essence you are marginalizing people by lumping them together. It abolishes individuality and individual strength.”

Yet, I think later, perhaps all of us white exile Cubans are being disingenuous when we insist so much on the purity of our blood lines. Does it really matter how white you are if your culture is basically a mulatto culture? If the first national poet, Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdez, or Placido, was a mulatto, if the leaders of the Cuban War of Independence were white and mulatto, if the musical heritage of the country is European melodies married to African rhythms, if one of the national symbols of the culture is the mulatto woman, what does that make you? A white Negro, like the hipsters Norman Mailer wrote about? Or a cultural schizophrenic? One thing is for certain: You are bound to be misunderstood by the prevailing Anglo culture.

Take the case of the Scull sisters. Haydee and Sahara Scull (pronounced “school”) have been a fixture on the Miami art scene for decades. Graduates of the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, they are small, cheery, cafe au lait twins of, as the French once said, a certain age. Their work, cunningly naive recreations of Cuban and Miami scenes, has been compared to that of Red Grooms. England’s Queen Elizabeth has commissioned pieces of theirs for Buckingham Palace. Yet for all that, their stature in the American art world is that of minor artists. Garay declares that the National Endowment for the Arts and other large cultural entities do not consider them on the same level as Anglo artists. “They’re considered folkloric artists,” says Garay. “I already looked into that.”

The question comes naturally to mind: “So if an American does it, then it’s universal, but if a Cuban does it, then it’s folkloric?”

“That’s pretty much it,” she says resignedly.

The Scull sisters also seem to have resigned themselves to their status, even after 41 years in the art field: “We have never been chosen for any public art works, for the airport, for the Miami Arena, nothing. Never a fellowship. But we are artists, very optimistic people. You have to leave a trail of love and kindness behind you. If it didn’t turn out that way, maybe it was for the best. Perhaps our time hasn’t come.”

OF COURSE, NOT ALL OF Miami is longing, hard work and politics. Just across Biscayne Bay, there is Miami Beach, the latest capital of the kingdom of hip, where European models, New York photographers and assorted South American entrepreneurs are turning the area known as South Beach, a motley collection of run-down Art Deco rest homes and hotels, into a fantasy land of pastel buildings and dazzlingly white beaches, where the forbidden is just next door and the undreamed of is walking down the street at this very moment, where traffic jams of BMWs, Cadillacs and babemobiles of every stripe on Ocean Drive are as common as the smell of garlic and fried plantains on Calle Ocho, the heart of Little Havana, which seems so far yet turns out to be so close.

Sitting at a table in Larios on the Beach, the Cuban restaurant partially owned by that other Cuban-American luminary, Gloria Estefan, watching the crowds throng the sidewalk at midnight on a Wednesday, hearing locals say it’s like this every night, this strange combination of St. Tropez and Greenwich Village, I ask myself what relationship all this could have to those fractious people on the other side of Biscayne Bay, with their ceaseless devotion to feverish political plotting.

“The core people who made (South Beach) truly happen were Cuban-Americans,” says Louis Canales. In the endless roundelay of introductions and recommendations that precedes practically every acquaintance in Miami, the interconnected universe of a small town hitting the big time, Miami Beach Mayor Seymour Gelber has referred me to Canales, calling him the unofficial historian of the latest boom. Canales sips his cafe con leche at an outdoor table at the Raleigh, the hotel Life magazine once featured as having the most beautiful swimming pool on the Beach. Recently renovated, the hotel still has a canopy that bears witness to a previous incarnation: “The Kosher Raleigh Hotel, supervised by Rabbi Bernard Levy.”

Canales, who moved down from New York in the 1980s, is the owner of Byblos, one of the trendiest nightclubs on the Beach. He lights another of his incessant Marlboros, ponders the raison d’etre of his adopted home. “The Cuban community in Miami is hyper-conservative and Miami Beach is its safety valve. In Miami, if you don’t toe the party line, you’re not a person, so most of those non-persons came over to the Beach.” Many of them were political liberals and/or homosexuals who didn’t fit into the narrow confines of their polemical city.

Canales points out Isabella Rossellini entering the Raleigh like some priestess of fashion, perfect posture, gazing downward, sultry breeze ruffling a diaphanous robe. He says that David Geffen, Sean Penn, Robert De Niro, the younger set of Palm Beach including John F. Kennedy Jr. and assorted Eurotrash, all have been sighted on the Beach recently, in the biggest scene to hit the country since . . . hippie San Francisco in the ‘60s? Disco New York in the ‘70s? Glitzy L.A. in the ‘80s?

IN A WAY, IT’S ONLY FITTING that Andy Garcia, himself a product of Miami Beach when it was the modest haven of the refugee and the retiree, should become its most prominent son. “Miami as the hippest city in the world?” He smiles when asked the question at his office on the Paramount lot. On the walls are pictures of Havana in the ‘50s, photos of Che Guevara, Cesar Romero, Anthony Quinn, Rossellini, all visual inspiration for the look of his future movie, “The Lost City.” “It’s no news to me. I grew up in that area. South Beach was always hip when supposedly it was a forgotten town. I did my first play at the Community Center on Ocean Drive. It’s my playground.” Nowadays he owns a second house not far from the old sandlot.

Garcia’s father was a prominent attorney and farmer from Bejucal, a small town in Havana province; the elder Garcia even developed his own breed of avocado, the Garcia No. 1, specimens of which occasionally can be found in Florida. The future actor left Cuba with his family when he was 5 years old; he has never returned to his birthplace.

Garcia considers himself fortunate to belong to two cultures, the Cuban and the American, yet it’s been the Cuban sense of exile that has driven him through the years, from the youthful days when he picked up empties on the beach for spare change to his acting apprenticeship in Los Angeles and the concomitant dead-end day jobs--waiter, dockworker, truck loader. “The tragedy of exile is exile,” he says. “When you’re a young child and you’re stripped from the womb, which is the country that I was born in, there’s a vacuum there. The aesthetic aspect of your own country--the soil, the atmosphere, the sounds--is engraved in your subconscious by the age of 5, and it has an appetite to cater to. If it’s not immediately around you, you have to search for it, in a sense, to ease that pain. I find my own solace in the people of my culture who are in exile and some who are not in exile. Music crosses boundaries but music to me has always been the link to my heritage.”

A tape of traditional Cuban music-- sones, mambos , danzones --plays throughout the conversation. Garcia says he needs music around him constantly, and friends describe him, even as a teen-ager, as always going through the record bins of stores in Miami, searching out old 33 and 78 rpms of Cuban bands and singers. A clave and piano player, he thinks of himself as a musician, “a closet one, but I think I’m coming out of the closet,” he adds with a grin. Standing in the corner, in momentarily silent witness, are the two tumbadoras , or conga drums, he plays during a jam session in the documentary on Cachao.

“Cuban music has been one of the most influential musics around the world, the Afro-Cuban sound and the clave have influenced music all over the world, from be-bop to rock ‘n’ roll. I mean, modern jazz is the infusion of Afro-Cuban sounds. The marriage of Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie changed jazz. That is a fact. We’ve had people like (George) Gershwin and (Igor) Stravinsky and all those people coming to Cuba to study the Cuban sound.”

So then a mambo is like a waltz, I ask, or a sonata or a rondo or any one of those iconic musical forms of Western civilization? Garcia is emphatic, for practically the only time in the conversation. “The son, the rumba , the cha-cha-cha and the mambo , this is classical Cuban music. The mambo is not a casual sound, it’s a classical musical form. The cha-cha-cha is not just a dance thing. People can turn to composers like (Ernesto) Lecuona and recognize that he’s one of the great composers of this century. That’s just musical fact. Now, whether some people are turned on to him or not . . . . (Noted Cuban saxophonist) Paquito d’Rivera said something about Cachao: ‘Those who need to know who Cachao is, know who he is.’ And that’s what’s important.”

Thoughts of the cabala and the elect dance through my mind as I ask about his stance on the whirligig of Cuban politics. “I have a distaste for politics. It’s been one destructive force in my culture and my country over the last hundred years. The only pure moment was the Spanish-American War, the liberation of our country. Immediately after that we began a series of dictators to this day. I mean, look at Cuba today. Where have we progressed? Now economically we are probably one of the worst countries in the world, the human-rights situation is one of the most atrocious in the world, we have still a dictator who’s been in power for 35 years, fulfilling his egomaniacal dreams, and where are we a hundred years after the Spanish-American War, the War of Independence?”

So, like other Cubans before him, Garcia has turned to music as his solace, which, in the serendipitous fashion of art, leads to the movie project closest to his heart, “The Lost City.” With a script by Cabrera-Infante, it tells the story of the owner of the Tropicana nightclub in Havana, who flees Cuba after discovering that ordinary people like himself are being crushed in the intersection of revolution and desire. In the end, Cuban music is the only thing that can assuage the pain of his exile.

Garcia will direct the movie, which he sees as being in the tradition of both “Doctor Zhivago” and “Casablanca.” He hopes it will dispel the Hollywood stereotype of Cubans. What is that, I ask, curious how a Hollywood star thinks he’s perceived. “In the case of the man, kind of the macho Latin lover, and the woman, the hot potato. That’s the image that Hollywood has given to the culture. But as you know, there are Cubans who are humble, blue-eyed with blond hair, Chinese, Poles. I’m interested in that kind of eccentricity in the script, the variety of characters from period movies of the ‘40s, things like ‘Gilda’ and ‘The Red Shoes.’ ”

As we talk, I sense a contrast between the apparent reticence of Garcia and the exuberant elan of the Cuban music he so loves. I think of hidden demons, of the horror behind the public mask. Garcia explains that he dislikes interviews almost as much as politics, that publicity “is detrimental to you as an actor. You should be an enigma. People won’t accept you if they get to know you.” He says that now he probably won’t talk to the press again for a year.

But is that really it? Does he really fear that people will reject you if they get to know the pain of your exile? The loneliness of displacement? I find myself wondering if there isn’t something else.

I’ll tell you what I think it might be--the fear of not belonging. Of being told: “You’re not one of us. You are the Alien, the Other, the one from the loony, balmy shores.” Well, then, our attitude is, the hell with them. Yes, that must have been the spirit behind the growth of South Florida. Burned by the failure of the Bay of Pigs and the CIA excursions that never amounted to spit, Cubans said: “We will rebuild the world right here in our own image. This is one people the Anglo culture will not vanquish.”

I RECALL PALM BEACH and an interview on a radio talk show during a book tour. Caller after caller lashed out with vicious invective over what Cubans had done to South Florida. I can still hear one man--I picture him in his ‘30s, sandy hair, mustache, a wife, a pickup and a dog, like my neighbors in L.A., yet so different in place and attitude--”It’s getting to the point you can’t get a job in Miami unless you speak Spanish!” he sputters. “They won’t even help you in the stores unless you speak their language! That’s not America, that’s not my country!”

The host rushes to the aid of Cuban honor and enterprise, pointing out how Miami has changed from being a tourist town that shut down after the season to an international city with a booming economy, an opera company, a dance company, franchised sports, all the trappings of late 20th-Century urbandom and the skyline to go with it. But I think of the statistics and I realize this is the voice of Anglo flight, of the people who continue to migrate north, from Dade County to Broward County to Palm Beach County, trying desperately to escape the swarming tide of prosperous Latinos. That is, trying to escape history.

As I leave Miami, my friend, Mily Soberon Cruz, of the Soberons of Varadero Beach in Cuba, who has just moved back from Los Angeles, says, “Alex, this is just like Los Angeles was 20 years ago. This town is happening!”

But on my way to the airport, easing down I-95, stealing one last look at the architectural fantasies in glass and steel lining the filled-up crocodile farms that once were Miami, the periwinkle bay with its man-made lotus islands of wealth and leisure, the festooned cruise ships docked at harbor, the scudding cotton clouds against the clear tourmaline sky, I realize there is a vast difference. Twenty years ago, the boom in Los Angeles was for the Anglos, the freckled-faced children of the Midwest and the querulous Easterners who remade their lives in the smoggy sun. It wasn’t happening for the children of East L.A., of Watts, of Chinatown.

Los Angeles was, and for the time being is still, culturally, an Anglo town. Once, Miami was that too, but that time is long gone. Now it’s running on Cuban time.