CUBA NEWS The Miami Herald 5wx6w

Jailed Cuban writer receives press award

By Frank Davies. [emailprotected]. Posted on Fri, Nov. 21, 2003

WASHINGTON - A Cuban writer who has been imprisoned since March, Manuel Vzquez Portal, is one of four recipients of the international press freedom awards of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

''He's in jail for the stories he wrote about the grim reality of life in one of the world's worst dictatorships,'' said Ann Cooper, executive director of the group.

The other recipients of the award were Musa Muradov, editor in chief of Chechnya's only independent publication, who has been threatened by Russian authorities; Abdul Samay Hamed, an Afghan writer who was recently attacked because of his stories; and Aboubakr Jamai, publisher of an independent newspaper in Morocco that had been shut down by the government.

Vzquez helped establish an independent news agency, Grupo de Trabajo Secoro, in the late 1990s.

He smuggled out a prison diary via his wife in June.

David Laventhol, board chairman of the committee, said of the four journalists: "None of them set out to be heroes, but to us that's what they've become.''

He's delivering 'a new concept' in Cuban music

By Fabiola Santiago. [emailprotected]. Posted on Thu, Nov. 20, 2003.

Juan Carlos Formell says his tunes "speak about the stuff of everyday life in Cuba, from the way a Cuban sees love in general to the way he sees the future as well." ENID FARBER 2003

Jamming at New York's Knitting Factory one night five years ago, Juan-Carlos Formell couldn't resist the urge to step out of history.

He was belting out Mango Mang, an AfroCuban tune based on pregones, the calls used by street peddlers to sell their goods, an old favorite played by every Cuban-music lover from Celia Cruz to Charlie Parker.

Right then and there, in mid-song, the young singer/songwriter came up with new words, and instead of pushing mangoes, his rhythmic pregn called for a little thing called freedom:

" . . . Cuba one day will be free / my people, my song, my Obatal says so . . . .''

That's all Formell ever wants to do -- deliver his own take on Cuban music without the shackles of the past -- and that's what he plans to do Friday night when he takes the stage with his acoustic guitar at Little Havana's Hoy Como Ayer nightclub.

He's calling the show Son Radical.

''It's a new concept and it's radical because some of us Cuban singer/songwriters are like guerrilla warriors or missionaries,'' Formell says of his new music. "We come from a country that is different from the rest of the world and we feel a great need to express ourselves.''

Accompanied only by an electric guitar and percussionist Wicly Nogueras, Formell will play his progressive brand of son, the music of Cuban peasants and African slaves. He'll throw in boleros and filin (a jazz-infused bolero), but don't expect the dance rhythms of his two CDs -- Songs From A Little Blue House (Wicklow) and Las Calles del Paraiso (The Streets of Paradise, EMI Latin) -- nor the nostalgic beats of yesteryear, even if he might be persuaded to perform his version of Mango Mang titled A Cuba Nos Vamos (To Cuba We'll Go).

''The son is the root of everything,'' Formell says. "Working from that base, we have the credentials to break the rules of Cuban music and of the clichs established by the world of Cuban music itself.''

Formell, 38, belongs to a generation of singer/songwriters who were born under Fidel Castro's regime and grew up with the vigilance of its apparatus and the banners of combative slogans.

These musicians had parents who were, in the parlance of the Cuban regime, ''integrated into the system,'' and they, the inheritors of it, were supposed to be los nuevos hombres, the new and militant revolutionary men and women.

Instead, they became outcasts and made music that broke the mold. Their lyrics reflected a disgruntled society and their rhythms incorporated the modern world of hip-hop and the sisterly grooves of samba and reggae.

Among his contemporaries, Formell's story is more complicated than most because of his musical parentage.

His grandfather, Francisco Formell, was the arranger for famed Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona and a conductor with the Havana Philharmonic. His father is Juan Formell, leader of Los Van Van, Cuba's most popular dance band of the past three decades and a group publicly ive of Castro's government.

Although father and son are poles apart musically and politically, people often confuse them.

Formell, who was raised by his paternal grandmother, prefers not to talk about the relationship.

''If you want to know about my father, you have to ask him,'' Formell says. "Children don't talk about their parents. It's the parents who talk about their children.''

He'd rather talk music.

His songs, Formell says, are "simple and speak about the stuff of everyday life in Cuba, from the way a Cuban sees love in general to the way he sees the future as well.''

Other songs address the hardships of leaving everything behind and starting over. Formell wrote Flores (Flowers) after accompanying Nogueras, one of the founders of the hugely popular Cuban dance band NG LaBanda, to peddle flowers in the streets of Miami.

''To see a first-rate musician selling flowers on the street to survive was very touching,'' Formell says.

Nogueras played with Formell in his first CD, Songs From A Little Blue House (Wicklow), which evolved from Formell's inaugural performances at Caf Nostalgia when the trend-setting Miami nightclub was launched in 1995 at the site of Hoy Como Ayer. The CD was nominated for a Grammy in 2000 in the category of best Traditional Tropical.

''It was there that I broke with what I had been doing in New York, which was performing with a big orchestra, playing dance music,'' Formell says. "When I returned, it was a revolution because that city -- used to Latin jazz, to salsa -- was not accustomed to a Cuban singer/songwriter exposing a new concept of Cuban music.''

In New York lately, he has been jamming with other Cuban singer-songwriters who come through town -- Pvel Urquiza of the duo Gema y Pvel, Alma Rosa of Havana's Nueva Cancin movement, bassist Descemer Bueno and guitarist Ahmed Barroso of Yerba Buena.

He recently jammed in a packed Living Room with Bueno and Kelvis Ochoa, fresh from performing in Miami with the Habana Abierta ensemble, in the tribute Tres Tristes Tigres, named after the famous Guillermo Cabrera Infante novel Three Trapped Tigers.

''We belong to the same generation and we are scattered around the world, so whenever we find each other somewhere we want to get together and play'' Formell says. "Many Cubans who left in the '60s, the '70s don't know this different Cuba and when we perform they ask us to sing what they know, but things are changing and people are now more open to hearing the new trends, the new artists.''

Unlike some of the Cuban musicians of his generation who temper their stance against the regime in public because they want to be able to visit the island, Formell is outspoken in his rejection of the regime.

''I left Cuba because I could not endure the censorship and the lack of freedoms,'' he says.

Formell points to the irony of a regime that sought to create egalitarianism and instead has produced a generation eager to embrace differences, to create new spaces.

''In Cuba, every person is a world, every barrio, every corner is different and the richness is in the differences,'' Formell says. "Our mission as singer/songwriters is to reveal all of that Cuban flavor. We are musicians creating democracy.''

Brass reunion

By Lydia Martin. [emailprotected], Posted on Fri, Nov. 21, 2003.

Generoso Jimenez inches his way across an unfamiliar Miami house, a bent old man visiting from Cuba with his legendary trombone. Back in the day, it set Cuban music on fire.

This is a trombone with a voice as unmistakable as Beny Mor's, the band leader it sang with night after night, stage after stage, vaciln after vaciln. It is a trombone so entrenched in the history of Cuban music that today it weighs heavy for the man who made it famous.

''The problem is that 46 is not the same as 86,'' Generoso says with a sigh about his gig tonight at the Fontainebleau Hilton's Tropigala. "I'll try to sound it, but we'll see what comes out.''

These days the trombone is almost taller than Generoso, an icon of that era when the mambo was the mambo and a son montuno -- (the son is to salsa what the blues are to rock 'n' roll) played the way el Beny's band played it, with all that brass and all that swing -- could raise the dead.

Generoso is perched on a kitchen stool in West Dade, reminiscing while his hosts fry fish steaks and warm a pot of chicharos. This is the first time he'll hoist his trombone in South Florida since a gig with Beny in the 1950s.

The gig is a recurring tribute to Beny, featuring Tropigala's own big band. Fronting is Israel Kantor, a former lead singer of Los Van Van (he moved to the States in 1986) who has found an uncanny Beny voice. But the big attraction is the rotating old-timers with names arguably bigger than Buena Vista.

POST CUBA REUNION

This time, Tropigala hit the jackpot, bringing together two masters who haven't been face-to-face in 46 years. Generoso, the lead arranger for Beny, hasn't seen Alfredo ''Chocolate'' Armenteros, Beny's first musical director, since the trumpet great left Cuba in 1957 to play with some of the biggest jazz bands in New York, including Machito's Afro-Cubans.

''Imagine everything we have to talk about,'' Generoso says. ''Music, life, more music. Cachao [Israel "Cachao'' Lpez], was here the other night visiting me. I hadn't seen him since, well, imagine. We talked for hours.''

Chocolate is credited with organizing his cousin Beny's band in 1953, bringing together a sound so innovative yet so true to the traditional it set the standard and the soundtrack for 1950s Cuba.

''We never worked, we partied,'' Chocolate said from his home in New York. "We would start playing without Beny, then he would show up and we would play another set, then the show would end and we would go to Tropicana with Beny to do another show that started at 2 in the morning. After that, we all went to the bars. We told stories, we jammed. Nobody went home before 10 in the morning.''

Generoso has his own recollections about the old days with Beny, who died 40 years ago, at age 43, of liver disease.

'Beny would be out drinking at a bar while the public waited for him at a show. At some point in the evening, he would he had a signed contract with a place and he would show up. The rest of us would be up there playing. He would come through the door and yell 'Hierro!' and we'd get cranking.''

While Generoso tells stories in his soft, deep timbre, one of Beny's biggest hits, Camarera del Amor (Waitress of Love,) blasts from the big-screen TV in the family room at the home of Recaredo Gutierrez, the Miami businessman who financed the just-released CD and DVD of the Tropigala show, by the Tropicana All Stars.

Generoso looks over, surprised by what he hears. That's not Beny singing, but Kantor.

''I have thought for a long time that someday somebody had to do something like this to honor Beny, but I would ask myself who would possibly be able to sing it,'' says Generoso. "In Cuba, we have nobody. Beny is a difficult voice. He had an amazing range, the lows, the highs. Then I heard Israel was doing it and I started ing his hits with Los Van Van and a door to the heavens opened up.''

Says Kantor, who is here this afternoon for the chicharos and the chance to have unplugged time with Generoso:

"Beny's singing was so textured. It's very hard to do it, but the more I study him, the more I understand and respect him. He was prodigious.''

Juanito Marquez, the master guitarist and producer whose work includes Gloria Estefan's Mi Tierra, gives a lot of the credit to Generoso.

''Generoso is a symbol,'' says Marquez, an arranger for the Tropicana All Stars. ''He established all kinds of things with his trombone. Until Generoso, the trombone didn't have that kind of role in the Cuban jazz band. In a big way, it gave the sound to Beny's music, and to Cuban music of that era.'' Generoso's name, if not his face, has been well-known to Beny fans through the decades thanks to one of the band's biggest hits, Que Bueno Baila Usted (How Well You Dance.) In it, Beny sings, '''Generoso, que bueno toca usted,'' (Generoso, how well you play).

Its joyous son montuno energy hides a dark truth: It was the beginning of the end for Beny, for the band, for the old ways in Cuba.

FALLING APART AT THE SEAMS

''It was 1956 and we were in Venezuela doing a TV show,'' says Generoso. "Several of the original musicians had already left the country, or had left Beny. It wasn't that great orchestra anymore, it was a guerrilla. We picked the six easiest songs because some of the people we had playing with us didn't know Beny's music. We finished and we had 10 more minutes on the air. We had nothing else to play.''

But if Beny and his band were known for anything, it was their improvisational genius.

'We start playing this riff and Beny comes in and sings to the guy who plays the guiro, who happened to really know the Cuban dances of the day, 'Castellano, que bueno baila usted.' (Castellano, how well you dance). Then he went on to 'Generoso, como toca usted,' (Generoso, how you play). And I followed it up with 'Beny Mor, que banda tiene usted,' (Beny Mor, what a band you have.) And we kept this up until credits rolled. It became a hit. But it happened because everything was falling apart.''

Beny was boozing and it was bringing everybody down. Especially Beny. Generoso made the mistake, he says, of calling him on it.

'We were on an other trip to Venezuela and he had to see a doctor. The doctor told me, 'When you get back to Havana, you have to get him serious medical attention.' But Beny said not to get involved in his life, that he knew what he was doing.''

There was an eventual falling out. But in February 1963, Beny showed up at Generoso's house.

''He came to ask forgiveness,'' says Generoso. 'He said, 'If I had paid attention to you, I'd be sound as a bell. But I'm dying.' ''

Liver disease claimed Mor's life just a few days later, on Feb. 19. There's a common rumor that Beny was intercepted at sea as he tried to escape the Castro regime and died from a beating in jail.

''I saw him right before he died,'' said Generoso. "There were no bruises. If he had been beaten, I would have seen it. Plus, he would have told me.''

Generoso stayed in Cuba, but he is not viewed as an artist who was with the government. In fact, he and his trombone were largely ignored by post-revolutionary Cuba. In 2002, a CD titled Generoso Que Bueno Toca Usted was recorded in Havana, featuring new compositions by the trombone great and played by a collection of 27 star musicians. Among those who contributed were Arturo Sandoval and Paquito D'Rivera, Cuban exiles who would typically not collaborate with the other side.

But this was Generoso. And that made all the difference. The CD was nominated for a Grammy in 2003.

And Generoso is still marveling at all the new attention.

"I went to this restaurant last night called La Bodeguita del Medio, like in Cuba. Seores, I could not believe it, everybody applauding. That has never happened in my country. Let's just leave it at that.''

What: Tributo a El Barbaro del Ritmo (Tribute to the Wildman of Rythm)with the Tropicana All Stars Orchestra featuring Generoso Jimenez on trombone, Alfredo "Chocolate" Armenteros on trumpet and Israel Kantor singing Beny More's biggest hits.
When: 9:20 p.m. today.
Where: The Fountainebleau's Tropigala, 4411 Collins Ave., Miami Beach.
Cost: $25.

For More Information: Call 305-672-7469

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