Buena Vista Social Club

Buena Vista Social Club was a members club in Havana, Cuba that held dances and musical activities, becoming a popular location for musicians to meet and play during the 1940s. In the 1990s, nearly 50 years after the club was closed, it inspired a recording made by Cuban musician Juan de Marcos González and American guitarist Ry Cooder with traditional Cuban musicians, some of whom were veterans who had performed at the club during the height of its popularity.

The recording, named Buena Vista Social Club after the Havana institution, became an international success, and the ensemble was encouraged to perform with a full line-up in Amsterdam in 1998. German director Wim Wenders captured the performance on film, followed by a second concert in Carnegie Hall, New York City for a documentary that included interviews with the musicians conducted in Havana. Wenders' film, also called Buena Vista Social Club, was released to critical acclaim, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary feature and winning numerous accolades including Best Documentary at the European Film Awards.

The success of both the album and film sparked a revival of international interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American music in general. Some of the Cuban performers later released well-received solo albums and recorded collaborations with international stars from different musical genres. The "Buena Vista Social Club" name became an umbrella term to describe these performances and releases, and has been likened to a brand label that encapsulates Cuba's "musical golden age" between the 1930s and 1950s. The new success was fleeting for the most recognizable artists in the ensemble: Compay Segundo, Rubén González, and Ibrahim Ferrer, who died at the ages of ninety-five, eighty-four, and seventy-eight respectively; Segundo and González in 2003, then Ferrer in 2005.

Social club

Buena Vista Social Club members-only club was located in the populous Marianao neighborhood, in Cuba's capital Havana. According to Juan Cruz, a former master of ceremonies at the Salon Rosado Benny Moré nightclub in Havana, the club was located "on Calle 41 between 46 and 48". When musicians Ry Cooder, Compay Segundo and a film crew attempted to identify the location of the club in the 1990s, local people could not agree on where it had stood.

The club was run along the lines of a Cabildo, a community cofradía (fraternity or guild) dating back to Spanish colonialism. Cabildos in Cuba developed into Sociedades de Color, social clubs whose membership was determined by ethnicity, at a time when slavery and racial discrimination against Afro-Cubans was institutionalized. Sociedades de Negros (Black Societies) existed throughout Cuba, and Havana boasted a number of closely linked organizations including the Marianao Social Club, Union Fraternal, Club Atenas—whose members included doctors and engineers—and the Buena Vista Social Club itself.

According to American guitarist Ry Cooder,

Society in Cuba and in the Caribbean including New Orleans, as far as I know, was organized around these fraternal social clubs. There were clubs of cigar wrappers, clubs for baseball players and they'd play sports and cards—whatever it is they did in their club—and they had mascots, like dogs. At the Buena Vista Social Club, musicians went there to hang out with each other, like they used to do at musicians' unions in the U.S., and they'd have dances and activities.

Prominent musicians that performed at the club during the 1930s and 40s include bassist Cachao López and bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez. Rodríguez's pianist Rubén González, who played piano on the 1990s recordings, described the 1940s as "an era of real musical life in Cuba, where there was very little money to earn, but everyone played because they really wanted to.  The era saw the birth of the jazz influenced mambo, the charanga, and dance forms such as the pachanga and the cha-cha-cha, as well as the continued development of traditional Afro-Cuban musical styles such as rumba and son, the latter transformed with the use of additional instruments by Arsenio Rodríguez to become son montuno. 

Performances

The first performances by the full line up of "Buena Vista Social Club", including Cooder, were those filmed by Wenders in Amsterdam and New York. Other international shows and T.V. appearances soon followed with varying line ups. Ibrahim Ferrer and Rubén González performed together in Los Angeles in 1998 to an audience that included Alanis Morissette, Sean Combs, and Jennifer Lopez, Ferrer dedicating the song Mami Me Gusto to the Hispanic Lopez.

Performances in Florida, which has a large Cuban exile and Cuban American community, were rare after the release of the film due to the political climate. In the late 1990s, a concert by Cuban jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba turned into a near riot when concert goers were attacked and spat at by protesters opposed to the Cuban government. When "Buena Vista" musicians played for a music industry conference at Miami Beach in 1998, hundreds of protesters chanted outside and the convention center hall was cleared briefly because of a bomb threat. In 1999, Ferrer and Ruben González were forced to cancel Miami shows citing fears for their safety after fellow-Cubans Los Van Van drew 4,000 protesters at a previous show, and Compay Segundo was forced to cut short a 1999 Miami performance due to another bomb threat. When touring the U.S., the Cubans are only entitled to their per diem (transportation and lodging) and are not permitted performance fees due to the U.S. embargo. In 2001 a Buena Vista Social Club (with Ibrahim Ferrer) performance was recorded in Austin for PBS and broadcasted on Austin City Limits in 2002.

"Buena Vista Social Club" continue to tour throughout the world as Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club, and despite the deaths of six of the original members, the collective performs with many of the remaining ensemble members including Barbarito Torres and "Guajiro" Mirabal. Ry Cooder's guitar parts are handled by Manuel Galbán, a former member of Cuban vocal group Los Zafiros, who played on Ibrahim Ferrer's first solo record with Cooder and appeared in Wim Wenders' film. Following a 2007 performance in London, a reviewer at The Independent described the ensemble as "something of an anomaly in music business terms, due to their changing line-up and the fact that they've never really had one defining front person", adding, "It's hard to know what to expect from what is more of a brand than a band.

Impact and analysis

The international success of the Buena Vista Social Club generated a revival of interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American music as a whole. Musical director Juan de Marcos felt that the recordings serve "as a symbol of the power of Cuban music, and which to a certain degree have contributed to Cuban music regaining the status it always had in Latin American and world music.

Cuba's burgeoning tourist industry of the late 1990s benefited from this rebirth of interest. According to The Economist, "In the tourist quarters of Old Havana it can seem at times as if every Cuban with a guitar has come out to sing the songs that Buena Vista made famous. It's as if you were to go to Liverpool and find bands singing Beatles songs on every street corner. Although the songs Buena Vista sings are not their own compositions, but actually they sing some popular songs in Cuba, which people have always performed in the street. Despite the appeal of the "Buena Vista" ambience to tourists, Cubans themselves were less aware of the "Buena Vista Social Club" than international music listeners. This was due to the foreign nature of the production, and the dominance of modern Timba, Songo and other musical forms such as reggaetón on the island by luminaries Raul Zeballos the creator of the genre. Some explain that Buena Vista did not impact the Cuban audience, as they were not creating anything new, they were just playing the same songs, Cubans know and have been playing for many years.

Mari Marques, a Cuban American who leads cultural tours to Cuba, contests that the preponderance of traditional musicians was not solely a consequence of the "Buena Vista Social Club". Marques believes the notion that son music had been completely neglected in Cuba is "a romantic exaggeration that was propagated by U.S. media coverage", and the reality is that son trios have existed "everywhere in cities such as Santiago de Cuba in the east of the island. British world music record label Tumi Music, who had worked with de Marcos and many of the ensemble musicians prior to Cooder, asserted that Cuba has over 50,000 musicians all as good as, and some as old as the "Buena Vista" participants, "but these people hardly ever have the opportunity to share their talents with the outside world." The label lamented that, "for the West to pay any real attention and consume the product, you needed someone like Ry Cooder to give it a stamp of approval first.

Writer and academic Mike Gonzalez believes the ensemble provoked a backward glance to "timeless, sensual places where dreams and desire merged in a comfortable, evocative music". Gonzalez asserts that the aura evoked did not represent "the real Cuba" before the revolution of 1959, nor Cuba in the modern era, but that the Cuban government were happy for the tourist industry to "enjoy the fruits of this confusion.The American Historical Review suggested that the Buena Vista Social Club's mise en scène fueled nostalgic, idealistic feelings not only of many Americans and Cubans in the United States who remember the Havana of the 1950s, but also of Cubans in Cuba. The result was a reminiscence about the pre-revolutionary era—dominated by the politics of Gerardo Machado in the 1920s–30s and then General Fulgencio Batista until 1959—which "no longer seems so bad.

Furthermore, given the history of Cuban and American politics the underlying subtext of the film seems to lend itself to negative, condescending view on Cuba. When looked at in simplistic terms, the Buena Vista Social Club can easily be interpreted as the story of the Yankee who travels to Cuba, brings long-forgotten national treasures from obscurity and gives them the long overdue success which evaded them due to cultural abandonment of the Cuban Socialist Revolution. In analysing the implications of the documentary, with its shots of old, run down Havana contrasting the musicians arrival to the modernized city of New York and the overbearing presence of Cooder, it seems Wenders is more than catering to Anglo audiences. Cooder acts as the Anglo connection, visually and aurally, as he gives his narrative and can be heard on the album, on music that would otherwise bear little or no relevance to Anglo audiences. A large part of the romantic mythology behind the making of the Buena Vista Social Club can be attributed to his presence, and the little known facts that go unmentioned in the film. Ruben Gonzalez, for example, was a piano player for a ballet school; he was not without a piano for the numerous years implied. Singers such as Eliades Ochoa, Omara Portuondo and Compay Segundo were in fact well known in and outside of Cuba prior to recording the album or the release of the documentary.