September 2022

Early on in her masterful book Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer alludes to a double meaning embedded in her subtitle: “History in the first sense refers to what happened; in the second, to what is said to have happened.” Cuba’s history, Ferrer tells us, is likewise two histories. It is simultaneously a narrative of freedom […]

One day Artemio Morelia, a singer and maracas player for an obscure Colombian salsa band called Grupo Renacimiento, awoke and found himself transformed into a robot. Haunted by visions of HAL 9000, he was suddenly acutely aware of the coldness and the distractions of a constantly plugged-in world. “Memory is dying,” he sings on his […]

Last week actor John Leguizamo voiced strong opposition to the announcement that James Franco had been cast in the role of Fidel Castro in the upcoming independent film, “Alina of Cuba”, based on the life of Castro’s daughter Alina Fernández.  “How is Hollywood excluding us but stealing our narratives as well?” lamented Leguizamo on an Instagram […]

In the late 1990s, when Ricky Martin dominated the record industry with a new kind of Latin pop stardom, he captivated everyone with a song laden with postmodern irony. “Livin’ la Vida Loca” was more based on arena rock and Jamaican ska than it was on “Latin,” or Afro-Cuban music, and it gave a slightly […]

On New Year’s Eve 2020, the saxophonist Miguel Zenón and his longtime collaborator, the pianist Luis Perdomo, took the stage at the Jazz Gallery in Manhattan to perform a makeshift duet concert that would be recorded for a live album. The set list included a collection of classic Latin American boleros they were fond of, reimagined through […]