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October 24, 2001.
U.S. Farm community and corporations to sponsor major conference on
agricultural/wood products business with Cuba
Tuesday October 23, 1:01 pm Eastern Time. Press Release.
SOURCE: World Development Services.
ATLANTA, Oct. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- In an effort to expand communication
between the U.S. agriculture community and Cuba, hundreds of representatives of
the U.S. agricultural and wood products sector will convene in Cancun, Mexico,
from Jan. 30-Feb. 2, 2002, to exchange information and views with top- level
Cuban officials.
The conference, titled "U.S. Agricultural and Wood Products Sales to
Cuba,'' is being organized by a Coalition of U.S. State Farm Bureaus; the GIC
Group, a 22-year-old technical service and investment agribusiness company in
Virginia; Alamar Associates, located in Washington, the leading U.S. consulting
firm on doing business with Cuba; and World Development Services (WDS), a major
international business and economic development conference organizer in Atlanta.
Sponsors include State Farm Bureaus (including Illinois, Iowa, Michigan,
Montana, Nebraska, and North Dakota;) the States of Georgia, Mississippi, and
Wyoming; U.S. corporations, including DuPont's Pioneer SEED and RICHFOODS; wood
products manufacturers, port authorities, and the leading Washington, D.C. law
firm of Patton Boggs.
A high-level delegation of Cuban officials is expected to participate. "The
Cubans are looking forward to providing a straight-forward explanation of their
position with regard to potential sales of food to Cuba,'' said Alamar
Associates President, Kirby Jones, who just returned from meeting officials in
Havana. "They made it clear to me that they will reaffirm that Cuba would
like to engage in fully normalized trade with the United States.''
The conference, will provide neutral ground for a free and frank exchange.
Jones said, "The Cuban officials have informed us that this conference will
be the only such event involving agricultural products and U.S. firms and
organizations in which Cuba or its officials plan to participate.''
"Key U.S. government officials will be in attendance at the conference
to provide guidance on new procedures under the trade reform act, Rick Gilmore,
CEO of GIC, said. ''Given the broad-based interest from the agricultural
community, it will be a bellwether event for future U.S.-Cuban ag trade."
"We expect a large turnout with attendees representing over twenty
states,'' said Paul Golden, Vice President of Market Development for WDS. "We
believe this to be the largest meeting between Cuban officials and the U.S.
agricultural and wood products interests ever held,'' Golden said.
A senior official from the Coalition of U.S. Farm Bureaus will open the
conference, which will include private, congressional and government experts on
the issues involving the sale, transportation, financing and regulatory
procedures for the direct sale of agricultural and wood products to Cuba.
Additional information about the conference and the agenda is available on
its web site: www.WDSweb.com .
Contact:
Paul Golden
(1 770) 446-6996 switchboard
(1 770)
325-3433 direct line
(1 770) 263-8825 fax
paul.golden@conway.com
A collector bequeaths his huge archive of Cuban sound
By Ben Ratliff The New York Times. Wednesday October 24
08:56 AM EDT
The Fundación Musicalia, as Cristóbal Díaz Ayala's
collection is known, is thought by experts to be the largest collection of Cuban
music in the world.
SAN JUAN, P.R. To build his huge music library, it has taken Cristóbal
Díaz Ayala 25 years, countless missed family vacations, much of his
savings and every skill he has learned in a multifarious life.
His collection includes about 25,000 LP's, 17,000 78's, wax cylinders, sheet
music and a trove of books encompassing all of Latin American music, though its
strongest area by far is the music of Cuba, Mr. Díaz Ayala's native
country. The Fundación Musicalia, as the collection is known, is thought
by experts to be the largest collection of Cuban music in the world.
But Mr. Díaz Ayala, who has used his success in the construction
business to finance his personal interests, is now 71. And supervising the
Fundación Musicalia, in a two-story house on a quiet residential street
in the Santurce neighborhood, has become burdensome. His latest acquisition,
5,000 78's bought from a Puerto Rican collector, is stacked horizontally on
metal shelves; it is taking him longer than usual to catalog it.
Quick to smile and exhibiting a wide- ranging curiosity, Mr. Díaz
Ayala has graduated from the collector's anxious hunger to deep contentment. "I've
spent such good times here," he said, relaxing in the air-conditioned top
floor of the Fundación. And so it is with some sadness that he has
decided to give up the collection. Over the last five years, he has sought a
suitable home for it, and in June he made his decision: Florida International
University, in Miami, the largest university in South Florida. Over the next
three years, he will donate the entire collection, with the provision that the
university finance the final stages of cataloging it in other words, cover the
operating costs, which include new computer software, electricity, water,
air-conditioning and Lysol. (The greatest enemy of most North American record
collectors is temperature change; in the tropics, where the heat holds fast, it
is mildew.)
"There is an old proverb which I learned reading Lin Yutang, the
Chinese philosopher who was educated at Harvard," he said. " 'You must
learn to get old gracefully.' You have to say goodbye to some things. I'm not
going to have the collection anymore, but on the other hand, I know that many
people will get to use it."
The bequest of the Díaz Ayala collection, recently appraised at
$825,000, is more evidence of increasing interest in Cuban studies. Now that the
mania sparked by the album "Buena Vista Social Club," or what Mr. Díaz
Ayala calls "Cubanitis," has subsided a bit, there are clear tasks for
musicologists, collectors, producers, writers and people like Mr. Díaz
Ayala, who is all of those.
The Smithsonian's traveling exhibition on Latin jazz, which is to tour 12
cities, will be unveiled next fall. Alejo Carpentier's fundamental study, "Music
in Cuba," published in Spanish in 1946, is finally available in an English
translation from the University of Minnesota Press. Two volumes of field
recordings made in the late 1950's by Lydia Cabrera, who captured Yoruban music
as it was played by Cuban religious elders, have just been released by the
Smithsonian-Folkways label. And A Cappella Books, an imprint of the Chicago
Review Press, is scheduled to publish Ned Sublette's sweeping, still untitled
history of popular music in Cuba, which will help provide English-language
readers with a historical context for Cuban music.
Mr. Díaz Ayala spoke to representatives at the Smithsonian, Miami
University (in Florida) and the Conservatory of Music in Puerto Rico, who were
all interested in his collection. But he chose Florida International University
for several reasons: its plans to transfer the collection to digital form
immediately and to his satisfaction; it was closer than Washington; and Miami
seemed the most central location for those interested in Latin music.
Giving the collection to Cuba, he said, was unthinkable; he explained that
valuable items were known to disappear from its museums, and that waiting to see
what happened after Castro is a risky venture.
"You have to be practical," he said. "At my age, you don't
know how long you're gonna live. And besides, I'm not leaving a collection I'm
leaving a system."
The Fundación Musicalia is a matrix of research as well as a music
collection. With the help of his wife of 48 years, Marisa, and one assistant,
Mr. Díaz Ayala has cataloged his holdings by performer, songwriter and
song; gathered an archive of newspaper articles about Latin music; answered 10
queries a week from international researchers; and drawn up discographies of
Cuban music from 1898 to 1960.
In the process he has become an expert on missing links, and there are many
in the history of 20th-century Latin American music. The Victor record company,
for example, lost a huge cache of mechanical prototypes for all the Latin music
it recorded from 1904 to some point during World War II. (According to one
widespread theory, the company gave them to the armed forces to be melted down
for munitions.)
In the early years of the century, Cuba had a rich recording history:
Zon-o-phone, Victor, Edison and Columbia had made 500 recordings in Cuba by
1905, Mr. Díaz Ayala estimated. Some are now in the hands of a few
collectors; most no longer exist. There is no telling how many of those records
could be crucial to understanding not only the development of Cuban music but
also all that was related to it, including Mexican, Colombian and Argentinian
music and jazz, he said.
Those gaps bedevil him, and they have also forced him into the realm of
philosophy and logic to answer basic questions, like who invented mambo and what
is the earliest recorded example of Afro-Cuban jazz. And this one's for you, Ken
Burns what did jazz come from?
Mr. Díaz Ayala's hypothesis involves three elements: the improvised
trio portion of a danzón, played by danzón orchestras as early as
the 1880's, involving cornet, clarinet and trombone; the music taken home by
black soldiers from New Orleans who went to Cuba during the Spanish-American
war; and the popularity of Cuban danzón records in the United States
during the first decade of the century.
"Now let's go to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917," he
said, turning professorial. "What do you have? The rhythm part is
completely different, but melody-wise, you have the same combination: the cornet
playing the melody, and then the trombone and the clarinet playing with him.
Where did jazz get that?" He laughed conspiratorially.
Mr. Díaz Ayala's long history of collecting falls into two parts.
Growing up on the outskirts of Havana, he was a jazz fiend who logged all his
acquisitions in a three-ring binder, decorating each page with pictures of
musicians cut from books. On family trips to America, he bought jazz 78's
released on independent labels. (In Havana, fans could buy only Victor, Columbia
and Decca.) In his late teens, he and a friend had an afternoon slot playing
records on a radio station, and after he earned doctorates in both civil law and
social science (Castro was a law school classmate), as well as studied
journalism for three years, he wound up practicing law and running a record
store in Havana with his wife.
A year after the revolution, Mr. Díaz Ayala fled Cuba without his
records. In San Juan he became a partner in a construction company, eventually
taking control of the business. At the same time, he became even more interested
in Cuban music but found little research available to compare with the
discographies and nascent musicology that focused on jazz.
"Cuban music was at a very low ebb," he remembered. "Salsa
musicians were using many compositions of Cuban composers without putting their
names on it. People were talking about 'tropical music' but not Cuban music."
In the late 1970's, Mr. Díaz Ayala approached Vicente Baez, who had
edited a major encyclopedia about Cuba that lacked proper documentation of Cuban
music, and asked if he could write the encyclopedia's music entry for its second
edition. The answer, surprisingly, was yes, and he began his work. After the
publisher decided to abandon the second edition, he pressed on anyway, writing "Música
Cubana: del Areyto a la Nueva Trova," a one-volume overview of Cuban music
history.
"When that book came out," said Mr. Sublette, the historian of
Cuban music, "there was no other book out there to tell you this
information." Mr. Díaz Ayala's books, all in Spanish, are available
from online retailers like Amazon.com, or at Casa Latina Music Shop, at 116th
Street and Lexington Avenue, Harlem, (212) 427-6062.
Mr. Díaz Ayala then turned to compiling a discography drudgery, but
the kind of drudgery that entire fields of study rest on. "Although I had a
lot of answers, I had more questions that I didn't have answers to," he
explained. "It was like drinking a glass of water that never quenched the
thirst."
He came across the Latin-music volume of the ethnomusicologist Richard
Spottswood's "Ethnic Music on Records," which organizes into
discographical data the music of other cultures recorded in America. Mr. Díaz
Ayala was determined to respond with a discography of Cuban music. "Dick
Spottswood is responsible for my craziness," he said.
What followed was 20 years of trips to Puerto Rican and American libraries.
Mr. Díaz Ayala stood in front of copy machines for hours, pored over
RCA's catalog information on its history of Latin music recordings and pressed
his whole family into service.
"This is a martyr," he said, gesturing to his wife, who was
breezing through the office during another day of cataloging. "I took a lot
of the time that I should have spent with my family I have to recognize that."
So he was obsessed? "Yes," he said, considering the term carefully. "That
is the word."
Volume 1 of his discography, "Cuba Canta y Baila," spanning 1898
to 1925, was published in the mid- 1980's. He has recently plowed through the
rest of the 20th century and has come to believe that his work should not be
published piecemeal. He is looking for a CD-ROM publisher to issue its 3,500
pages.
Mr. Díaz Ayala isn't a musician or a trained musicologist, and his
research is usually based on discography. "I believe in the recording,"
he said. "If you're a researcher of Indian ceramics, all you have is
doubts. You'll dig and find some ceramic, and you'll call two other
anthropologists, and each of the three will have a different opinion of what has
been found we can be discussing it forever. But with a recording, it speaks for
itself. It tells its own story. It doesn't cheat you. You don't have to say,
'this might be' no, no, you hear it."
Woman charged for parental kidnapping
KEY WEST, Fla. 24 (AP) - A woman who took her 5-year-old son to Cuba without
his father's permission has been sentenced to three years' probation for
international parental kidnapping.
Arletis Blanco, 29, was sentenced Tuesday after pleading guilty in federal
court.
Blanco faced up to a year in prison, but U.S. District Judge James Paine
departed from sentencing guidelines at the request of Assistant U.S. Attorney
Benjamin Daniel and Blanco's attorney.
Blanco returned now 6-year-old Jonathon Colombini to his father earlier this
month. She has visitation rights.
"This is one of those lucky cases in which the child was returned back
to the United States. It happened because she cooperated,'' Daniel said.
Blanco, a Florida resident, fled to Cuba Nov. 12 on a fishing boat with her
boyfriend, her young daughter and Jonathon.
She still faces unrelated state charges of grand theft and forgery for
allegedly stealing from an employer and writing bad checks. | 
