By Bernard Holland, The New York Times. January 2, 2000
HAVANA -- The Milwaukee Symphony's recent mission to this city looked different to different people. Was it a gift of musical culture to the Cuban people? Well, Cuba has its own symphony orchestras, and the players I came across were good indeed: lots of technique, lots of style.
Maybe if we close our eyes and imagine a colonial superpower steaming across the Gulf of Mexico, bent on reinforcing a stranded enclave of classical music, then the trip makes more sense. The word "colonial" is big in Cuba, defining the island's long history of occupation and
exploitation. And classical music in Cuba could, from this point of view, use a little rescuing.
The breakup of the Soviet Union deprived Cubans not only of heavy machinery and export credits but also of a link to Central and Eastern European musical tradition. Czech and Soviet teachers came here to teach; Cubans went to them to study. Music education is big in Cuban schools, but the
instruments are 30 years old and in disrepair.
Before the Milwaukee concerts in Havana, the closest thing to an American orchestra visiting here was a youth ensemble from New England a year or so ago. So complex is the ritual of cultural exchange that it has generated a whole new industry, namely Canada-Cuba Sports and Cultural Festivals,
with offices in Toronto and Havana. This is not a sideline enterprise; it is based on Cuba alone.
Canadians have an easier time of it here: officially friends, not enemies. Jonathan Watts, president of the company, reports that officials here are no harder to deal with than any others but that telephones and telecommunications are in bad shape. Canada-Cuba has responded by building its own
private network of phones, faxes and e-mail, and hiring people here to run its office.
Arts exchanges are only part of the business. The University of Colorado sends archaeologists; the University of Wisconsin, nurses and nursing know-how. Mr. Watts's worst Cuban-American experience was the recent visit of the Baltimore Orioles. "They tried to politicize everything," he
said. "There was arguing whether Fidel Castro would get the proceeds of the gates at baseball games. The tickets were either free or cost 5 cents. This added up to about $50."
One more way to describe Milwaukee in Havana is this: picture an American orchestra with Liszt and Strauss as its imports and set it against the much larger picture of musical Cuba as a whole. Anyone who has succumbed to "The Buena Vista Social Club" -- either the movie or the
recording -- has to wonder whether we shouldn't be listening to the Cuban popular tradition rather than Bernsteinian syntheses of it in "West Side Story."
Maybe the classical European tradition arriving by way of North America is a marginal affectation. A more paranoid Cuban might find here the latest colonialist plot to impose the will of foreigners on local sensibilities. The divide between cultures is more vivid in Cuba, given its recent
isolation and its ethnic core heavily based on the black slave population sent long ago to work the country's lucrative sugar cane.
Europe came to this island, and the genetic memory of that coming survives. And, of course, any "native" music, with a little historical digging, can be shredded into many musics, all of them originally from somewhere else. But in the drums, bongos, claves and maracas that underlie the
Cuban music that one hears performed in nearly every bar, restaurant and cafe, there is something distinctive. The distance to Spain and Britain seems far, and to Africa just a brief hop.
Whose music is whose becomes more complicated in the United States. German, Hungarian and Polish immigrants in the 19th century didn't import classical music; they brought it with them. Maybe European music has as much a proprietary claim to original Americanness as the country's own black
tradition. Or is the real America in sound the beating drums and ritual whoops of Iroquois and Sioux?
The last argument may be in trouble. Recent anthropological musings suggest that some form of Caucasian may have beat the Indian to America after all, a possibility that sits uneasily with tribal lawyers suing for the return of, or compensation for, confiscated lands. For who knows from whom, if
anybody, tribes got their territory in the first place? Did some prehistoric Bach once sound through the canyons of New Mexico? To anyone interested in the question of aborigine and interloper, I suggest "The Enigma of Arrival" by V. S. Naipul.
Similar questions can be argued in the public spaces of Havana, all teeming with live popular music. Trios and quartets of guitarists and singers seem to go with every place that sells a drink or food to eat. My bus passed by a big curbside band including oboes and a cello; I wish I had heard
them play. Next to the gritty intricacy of "The Buena Vista Social Club," most of these musicians seem bland. Rhythmic complication is smoothed out; the rough edges of singing style are sandpapered clean. But the basic impulses of Cuban music are there to be heard.
The Milwaukee Symphony did have its grateful audience of conservatory students, older music lovers and children, but with the incessant hum of another music all around it, the image of a small and isolated enclave was not far off. Liszt and Strauss played by a major orchestra made a nice change,
but the next important music of this world may arrive not by way of New York or Vienna concert halls but from the streets of Latin America.
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