Envisioning Cuba

Cuban Musicians and the Making of Latino New York City and Miami, 1940-1960

Christina D. Abreu

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469620855
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Among the nearly 90, 000 Cubans who settled in New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s were numerous musicians and entertainers, black and white, who did more than fill dance halls with the rhythms of the rumba, mambo, and cha cha cha. In her history of music and race in midcentury America, Christina D. Abreu argues that these musicians, through their work in music festivals, nightclubs, social clubs, and television and film productions, played central roles in the development of Cuban, Afro-Cuban, Latino, and Afro-Latino identities and communities. Abreu draws from previously untapped oral histories, cultural materials, and Spanish-language media to uncover the lives and broader social and cultural significance of these vibrant performers. Keeping in view the wider context of the domestic and international entertainment industries, Abreu underscores how the racially diverse musicians in her study were also migrants and laborers. Her focus on the Cuban presence in New York City and Miami before the Cuban Revolution of 1959 offers a much needed critique of the post-1959 bias in Cuban American studies as well as insights into important connections between Cuban migration and other twentieth-century Latino migrations.

Chapter 1: Race and the Roots/Routes Traced By Latin Musicians

At first glance, Mario Bauzá and Marco Rizo had many things in common. Both musicians came from wealthy, well-connected families, both had received musical training in some of the best conservatories in Cuba, and both had left their homeland for New York City, determined to make it as professional musicians. Once in the city of their hopes and dreams, both musicians soon began making significant contributions to what was considered Latin music during the 1940s and 1950s: Bauzá as a trumpet player and arranger for Machito y sus Afro-Cubans and Rizo as pianist and arranger for the Desi Arnaz Orchestra and the I Love Lucy television program. They also shared a more dubious distinction. Throughout their professional careers, both Bauzá and Rizo achieved less celebrity than their more popular and widely recognized musical collaborators. Bauzá remained largely in the shadows of his more charismatic brother-in-law Machito, and Rizo never saw anywhere near the same level of stardom as his more business-savvy childhood friend Desi Arnaz.

A closer look at the personal experiences and professional careers of these two Cuban musicians suggests that, for the most part, the similarities end here. Soon after their arrival in New York City, their racial experiences and alliances, musical preferences, and personal friendships took them in quite different directions. Bauzá was an Afro-Cuban from Havana. He left Cuba in 1930, moving to Harlem, where he used his formal training and ear for music to emerge as a top trumpet player in African American jazz circles, playing alongside the likes of Cab Calloway, Dizzy Gillespie, and Chick Webb. Later, he and Machito formed one of the most popular Afro-Cuban/Latin jazz bands of the 1940s and 1950s, Machito y sus Afro-Cubans. Rizo was a white Cuban from Santiago. He came to New York City in 1940 and moved into his aunt’s midtown Manhattan apartment while he attended the Juilliard School. After a brief stint in the U.S. Army during World War II, Rizo agreed to work as the pianist and principal arranger for Desi Arnaz’s new band. Within a few years, Rizo moved to Hollywood where he continued in this position during the six-season run of I Love Lucy, one of television’s most popular situation comedies.

Bauzá and Rizo belonged to a remarkably large and diverse cohort of black and white Cuban musicians who lived, worked, and performed in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. These musicians’ personal and professional lives offer a better understanding of key moments of racial negotiation, ethnic identity formation, and musical development that took place within the city’s colonia cubana and colonia hispana. Self-narration is one of the key texts this book analyzes: the stories told by well-known and not-so-well-known black and white Cuban musicians and entertainers reveal that skin color produced significant differences in perspectives and experiences. In particular, this chapter explores these differences as expressed by these musicians and entertainers through their experiences in Cuba, their stories of migration, their insertion into the music scene in New York City (and Hollywood), and the production of racialized discourses and practices. Of course, skin color alone did not dictate the trajectory of the professional careers of the many Cuban performers who migrated to New York City. Social networks, intra- and interracial and ethnic tensions and alliances, and the politics of the mass culture industries also played key roles in shaping competing representations of Cubanness and Latinness in the 1940s and 1950s.¹

Discussions about musical innovation, authenticity, and commercialism often took place among the many musicians who left Cuba for New York City at midcentury, and these debates disrupted “Cuban,” “Afro-Cuban,” and “Latin” as static or singular musical genres and identity categories. Racial ideas and practices and cultural traditions and expectations informed these conversations and, quite significantly, prompted individual and collective desires for social mobility and racial equality, especially among Cuban musicians of color. As we will see, the long-standing cultural hierarchy dividing classical music and highbrow tastes from popular music and lowbrow tastes not only reflected the social and racial divides of Cuban society before 1960 but also played a direct role in pushing musicians and entertainers, both black and white, to migrate to the United States in search of performance opportunities, artistic growth, and a secure livelihood. Historian Raúl A. Fernández argues that “as musicians traveled and sometimes settled outside of Cuba, they established ‘bases’ of Cuban music outside the island, even ‘colonized’ extensive territories.” New York City became one of these bases of Cuban music, and it was in downtown hotels and ballrooms before mostly white audiences and in uptown nightclubs and neighborhood joints before mostly Afro-Cuban, Puerto Rican, African American, and Jewish audiences that the lines between “popular” and “serious” music became less and less well defined as creative processes of innovation, borrowing, and co-optation produced musical styles and performers dubbed “Cuban,” “Afro-Cuban,” and “Latin.”²

XAVIER CUGAT AND THE LATIN MUSIC MODEL

Racial ideologies and the boundaries of social class affected the cultural production and profitability of both black and white Cuban musicians throughout the first half of the twentieth century. As rumba rhythms and colorful conga lines gained international fandom, opportunities to perform and profit increased for musicians. This was the era dominated by Xavier Cugat, and Latin musicians, especially those who wanted to get paid, played Latin music, not jazz, and certainly not classical music. Cugat, a formally trained violinist born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1900 but raised in Havana until he left for the United States in the late 1920s, failed to make a name for himself on the concert stage with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He found work instead as a cartoonist for newspapers and magazines in San Francisco and Los Angeles but eventually returned to music in 1928 at the height of the jazz era. “No jazzman, Cugat realized that he could not compete with Afro-Saxons on their own ground. So,” a report in Time explained, “he bravely cultivated a little Afro-Latin plot of his own.” Cugat abandoned his initial preference for the violin and classical music for what he saw as the more financially lucrative opportunity to perform Afro-Cuban popular music. By 1942, the bandleader was earning an estimated $500,000 a year performing Afro-Cuban music and other Latin rhythms such as tango for mostly white, middle- and upper-class North American audiences. Four years later, his annual income from record sales and radio, film, and nightclub performances had nearly doubled to a million dollars.³

Cugat frequently reflected on what he considered to be a demotion from classical to popular forms of music. He emphasized his role as a creative and innovative marketer and admitted to focusing on performance and excitement rather than technique and precision: “I knew that the American people was polite to an artist but crazy for a personality, so I decided to become a personality,” he told a reporter for Time in 1946, concluding, “I’d rather play Chiquita Banana tonight and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve.” That the Chiquita Banana act, which featured deliberate mispronunciations and two sidemen dressed in banana costumes, might seem foolish mattered little to Cugat because the novelty made him money. A reviewer for Billboard characterized Cugat’s role in popularizing Latin music similarly: “Take three parts showmanship, add two parts imaginative arrangements and one part good (but still second stature) instrumentalists, shake well to a rumba beat.”⁴ His many interviews in the popular press indicate that he resolved whatever ambivalence he may have felt about his Latin performance, especially given his self-concept as a classical virtuoso, by counting the dollars in his bank account. In the process, he created a performance of Latin that shaped ethnic experience and musical opportunity for others.

At the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, Cugat’s group first appeared as the Latin relief band, but by 1942, his eleventh season at the luxury hotel, his was “the main band, and the Latin name band of the nation.” Reports in newspapers and magazines noted that Cugat was the top performer of Latin music in the United States, focusing on the appeal and spectacle of his “tropicalized” performances. Cugat’s success rested “not so much in the importing as in the processing of his hip-cajoling products,” and that “processing” included dressing his band in “lustrous Cuban silks and colored lights” and producing numbers with “just enough subtle tropical pounding and gourd rattling to give it pith, not enough to ruffle the polite suavity of an expensive hot spot.” Nicknamed the “The King of Rhumba,” Cugat presented audiences with the “fast and furious” rhythms of rumba, mambo, and tango as the front man for a band he “dressed in colorful garb of the South Americas.” A review of the Xavier Cugat Orchestra in Billboard summarized the band’s widespread appeal: “And the band dishes out a please-everybody variety of show tunes, standards, pops, waltzes, tangos, rumbas and sambas. Cugat, too, makes sure his Latin rhythms are easy-for-dancing, without permitting them to lose that air of authenticity.”⁵

During World War II, Cugat’s recordings such as “Mexico” and “Viva Roosevelt!” carried messages laden with “good neighborly incentives,” and this patriotic positioning also played a role in popularizing his music among North American audiences familiar with the rhetoric and practices of hemispheric solidarity. Using the conga line as a metaphor, the English-language lyrics of Cugat’s “Viva Roosevelt!” urged listeners and, by extension, the twenty-one nations of the Americas to come together in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the war effort: “Viva Roosevelt! Viva Roosevelt! / Oh what a señor! / Ladies and Gents, get in the conga line of defense / Come on and follow this leader, give him a vote of confidence.” The festive conga line transformed into a “line of liberty” as the dance itself shifted from a “conga” to a “Panamericonga.” Part of what made “Viva Roosevelt!” and other songs that came out of Tin Pan Alley during the war years popular was the overt message of Pan-American solidarity. In this particular example, Cugat’s performance of (Afro-)Cubanness, by way of the conga line, becomes representative of a certain kind of Latinness, one that is intentionally inter-American, patriotic, and optimistic.⁶

RACE, SABOR, AND THE LATIN MUSIC MODEL

For Latin rhythms to triumph on Broadway, in Hollywood, and elsewhere in the United States, especially in the early 1940s among white audiences, the personality had to be nonblack. Sociologist Vernon Boggs explains the process by which Cugat and other light-skinned performers like him were racialized as nonblack: “Cugat wasn’t seen as black. Both Carmen Miranda and Desi Arnaz, well-known Hispanic musical performers of the time, were known to be Hispanic, but their antics on stage made the public tolerate their ethnic affiliation.” Afro-Cuban musicians such as Arsenio Rodríguez and Alberto Socarrás, however, “did not please the racial sensitivities of the time.” Fernández makes a similar argument: “During the 1930s and 1940s, some musicians faced not only the travails of the poor but the obstacles set down by a society where the local racial codes separated people not so much into blood-based ‘white’ and ‘nonwhite’ categories as into perceived ‘nonblack’ and ‘black’ skin pigmentation.”⁷

Though historian Adrian Burgos Jr. focuses on Latino baseball players in the United States throughout the twentieth century, he offers an important model for understanding how migrants from the Spanish-speaking Americas experienced race in the United States. Like Latino baseball players, Cuban musicians “did not enter the U.S. playing field as simply black or white. Rather, most occupied a position between the poles of white (inclusion) and black (exclusion).” Lighter skin, European physical features, class status, and education in U.S. schools helped well-known Cuban musicians such as Cugat and Arnaz and, as we will see, lesser-known performers such as Rizo, José Curbelo, Arturo “Chico” O’Farrill, and Horacio Riambau gain entry into nightclubs, hotels, and ballrooms that initially excluded their darker-skinned compatriots. These practices were not entirely unknown to these Cuban musicians, Burgos argues, because “by Cuban tradition, social class and wealth combined to effectively lighten how others perceived an individual’s skin color and racial status.” Inclusion, however, did not mean that musicians such as Cugat and Rizo were accepted as fellow whites, nor did it guarantee equality.⁸

This process of racialization is perhaps made more complicated when seen in a broader Cuban context and from the perspective of these Cuban performers. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, Afro-Cuban popular culture, in the form of comparsas (carnival street bands), sones, and rumbas, gradually achieved acceptance among whites in Cuba and became central symbols of Cuban national identity. Ethnomusicologist Robin Moore has argued that whites and middle-class blacks in Cuba initially tried to limit and repress black popular expression. The increasing popularity of Afro-Cuban popular music abroad and among North American tourists in the hotels and nightclubs of Havana, however, allowed these forms to move from the cultural margins to become the central symbols of authentic Cuban nationalism. This “nationalized blackness” suggests that the point is not simply that black and white musicians received different treatment.⁹ Rather, they conceived of themselves as playing black music and received different treatment while doing it. Among Anglo audiences in the United States, it was Cugat’s nonwhiteness that lent him authenticity as he performed Afro-Cubanness. At the same time, it was his nonblackness that allowed his performance of Afro-Cubanness to be seen as Latinness. What was once considered vulgar, sinful, and degrading by polite, white society in Cuba and the United States, now took top billing at “ultra-swank places” such as the Waldorf Astoria, thanks to Cugat and novelties such as the Chiquita Banana act, rumba sleeves, and the exaggerated conga drum.

African American writers and artists noticed the disparity between the welcome white audiences gave to the performance of black music and the small number of black musicians given the opportunity to perform on stage. Cugat, whose band members came from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, told a reporter for the Chicago Defender that “under the American standards my band would be considered a mixed ork [slang for orchestra] for the members therein vary in complexions” and admitted that “a large percentage of my materials are Negro composed and arranged.” He promised that he would “include at least one colored performer in his appearance in theatres throughout the country” in the hope of convincing Broadway producers to present “mixed” productions. He even stated that “given an opportunity to present themselves before the entertainment public[,] Negro artists, in many instances, excel white artists.” One writer for the Baltimore Afro-American complained, however, that Cugat and other nonblack musicians made a “fabulous salary” because of this “cold-blooded exploitation,” while “the black man can’t follow his stuff and collect the gravy.”¹⁰ Here was an early mention of the contrast perceived between innovation and popularization as a matter of racial difference.

As a result of Cugat’s effective marketing, his popularity was related in many ways to his Cubanness. Described by both Spanish- and English-language newspapers in New York City as Cuban, American, Catalán, and Catalán-Cuban, the Spanish-born Cugat did little to clarify his national origin. Instead, he often spoke of his passion for Cuba, noting that he “loved the land of sugar, tobacco, rum, and above all else, land of rumba,” for it was there that he had learned “that musical style, that energizing and elegant rhythm that has given him so many triumphs.” On his first visit to New York City in 1942, Cuban president Fulgencio Batista “made three specific requests: To visit the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Plaza and hear Cugat’s music.” The Cuban government appreciated Cugat’s efforts so much that in 1942 it awarded the “salesman” and “ambassador of culture” the title of Commander in the Order of Honor and Merit of the Cuban Red Cross.¹¹

Writers for La Prensa also took notice and credited “the popular musical director” for what they described as “the big boom of tropical rhythms in the United States.” Within the colonia hispana, reports suggest that Cugat enjoyed an admiring public throughout the 1940s and 1950s. In 1957, when he was past the prime of his professional career, Cugat performed at the Domingo de Pascuas (Easter Sunday) festival at the Manhattan Center not only “at the request of the hispanic p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Rhythms of Race
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Race and the Roots/Routes Traced By Latin Musicians
• Chapter 2: Cuban Musicians and New York City’s Cuban Social Clubs
• Chapter 3: A Place for Nation in the Diaspora
• Chapter 4: La Prensa’s Musical Popularity Contests and Fund-Raising Festivals
• Chapter 5: Real and Imagined Representations of (Afro-)Cubanness and Latinness
• Chapter 6: Cubans in Miami’s Pan-American Paradise
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index