Yahoo! August 15, 2000
U.S. to Appeal For Ex-Cuban Kayaker
By Tim Dahlberg, Ap Sports Writer.
INDIANAPOLIS, 14 (AP) - U.S. Olympic officials will go to the International
Olympic Committee in a last-ditch effort to allow former Cuban kayaker Angel
Perez to compete for the United States in Sydney.
Cuba's refusal to allow Perez on the U.S. team will be appealed to the IOC's
executive board when it meets in two weeks in Sydney, said William Hybl,
chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee.
"We would hope that sport on an international basis will rise above
what tension is between our two countries,'' Hybl said. "That's what the
Olympic movement is all about.''
Cuba rejected a request for a waiver needed by Perez to compete on the U.S.
team in canoe-kayak because he has been an American citizen less than three
years mandated by IOC rules.
Perez, who competed for Cuba in the 1992 Olympics, defected to the United
States the next year. He became a U.S. citizen nine months ago and made the U.S.
team in Olympic trials in June.
Hybl went to Cuba early last month to try and convince Cuban sports
authorities to allow Perez to compete, but was turned down.
Cuban Olympic Committee president Jose Ramon Fernandez said last week that
his country has the right not to allow Perez or long jumper Niurka Montalvo, who
wants to compete for Spain, to be on any other country's team.
"Faced with the theft of athletes, our position is a legal, just and
ethical position,'' Fernandez said.
The United States faced a similar situation earlier with race walker Yueling
Chen, who won a gold medal for China in 1992 and is now a U.S. citizen. Chinese
officials first refused to sign a waiver, but relented last week and will allow
her to compete.
"We're appreciative of what China has done,'' Hybl said. "We're
hopeful the Cuban Olympic Committee and their government will reconsider the
position of Angel.''
Hybl said if Perez is rejected, the rest of his four-man kayak entry could
be in jeopardy. The United States would have to get approval from the
international canoe-kayak federation to replace him and keep the kayak as an
entry in Sydney.
Cuba blocks
Montalvo's appearance at Sydney for Spain / IAAF
Buena Vista Vet Omara Portuondo Talks Music and Barriers Saturday August
12 05:47 AM EDT
Andrew Dansby. RollingStone.com
There comes a moment in Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club documentary,
during a performance of the beautiful bolero "Silencio," where Omara
Portuondo is overcome by the tune. Tears fall. "That kind of lyricism, that
kind of romantic approach to the song is something that is very emotional in
our culture and specifically for me," the seventy-year-old Cuban singer
says. "I didn't want to cry. But there was something about the intensity of
the love poem that makes me feel that way."
Portuondo has been nicknamed the "fiancée of feeling," but
don't even think of painting her as the wounded-bird brand of fragile crooner.
Her spirit is quite vibrant. When asked how she is doing these days, she quickly
quips "Fat!" in an unexpected ice-breaker.
She relays most of her answers through a translator, but when Portuondo
sings, her eloquent, emotional phrasing makes her native Spanish understandable
by any listener. She is unlike anything we have in Los Estados Unidos;
comparisons fail as she embodies so many disparate qualities from a century of
divas. Holiday? She can work a song with the same effect of an emotional train
wreck, but she radiates positivity instead of personal tragedy. Piaf? Her voice
is as large, her persona warmer. Wynette? There's more than a little country,
but ditto Holiday for the inability to separate woe-is-me between song and real
life. She has dashes of Aretha's presence, Bessie Smith's bluesy gusto and
Emmylou Harris' class. As for her voice, phrasing and approach to a song, well,
that's all her own.
"I grew up in a house where none of the people were musicians per se,"
Portuondo explains, but notes that, typical of many Latin households, hers was a
home where music was always being played by someone. "My father was a
popular baseball player [he played for the Cuban National team], but he was
friends with many composers and musicians and singers who would come and share
with them in an atmosphere of calm and sharing everything. My family was very
poor. So basically we shared the poverty. But music was a way to transcend the
material limitations. Music is one of the most important things in life for a
human being. I feel that music is one of the things that keeps the spirituality
and the human fiber alive in this world."
Portuondo took her love of music to the clubs of Havana in the Fifties,
first singing with her sister and then helping to form the influential group
Cuarteto Las D'Aida with whom she performed for more than a decade. She issued
her first solo album, Magia Negra, in 1959. After that, her name and career
vanished from American consciousness as relations between America and Cuba
simmered up. Fast forward to 1996 and a sneaky little plan to circumvent the
embargo against Cuba. By licensing a series of Cuban recordings from England,
Nonesuch found a way to sneak Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club production
into the states, resulting in the most unlikely of hit records.
Portuondo added a much-needed dose of female brass to the randy codgers of
the Buena Vista Social Club on their album of the same name. With the release of
BVSC in 1996 and Buena Vista Social Club Presents Omara Portuondo this year,
suddenly the singer found herself picking up where she had left off three
decades earlier. Portuondo is quick to find the silver lining in what must have
been a disappointing career phenomenon and offers up a logical explanation as to
why a group of elderly Cuban musicians became the most unlikely international
pop stars of the millenium.
"I'm very happy that [the BVSC phenomenon] is happening because again
the music nourishes the spirit," she says. "Basically there are two
elements that have always captured the sensitivity of the world: happiness -- in
the rhythm, dancing, and performing -- and love. And it seems to be that people
need to feel connected with them and share that happiness and love that the
Cuban music is bringing."
Portuondo has toured the U.S. with the BVSC as well as with Ibrahim Ferrer
last year (in support of Ferrer's own BVSC release), but this fall she returns
for her own tour, the first since she left a Miami hotel in the midst of the
Cuban Missile Crisis four decades ago. The feeling at Ferrer's performances
last year was bittersweet. An acute connection was established between the
musicians and the fans, a connection that transcended the music alone. But
following the inescapable public stink that emanated from this year's custody
battle over a Cuban boy, the cries of "Thank you, America!" from last
year's performances feel more complicated. But Portuondo makes an important
distinction between the feelings shared over culture and over political
diplomacy.
"There is not a bad feeling in general toward the United States people,"
she says, "because [Cubans] understand that the reason trade has not been
opened yet has basically nothing to do with the regular North American person on
the street. I feel the reason why the connections have not been opened is that
the people who make the big decisions have never gone to see [fans and
musicians] dancing and performing. If they will go to see what we are bringing
-- the spirit of the Cuban people -- they may change their mind. They will feel
happier."
Buena
Vista Social Club at RollingStone.com
Discography
Copyright © 2000
The Associated Press.
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