Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy, by Timothy P. Storhoff
2022; Brill; Volume: 96; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1163/22134360-09601010
ISSN2213-4360
Autores Tópico(s)Cuban History and Society
ResumoIn music, as in most things, Cuba and the United States are bound by "ties of singular intimacy," to cite William McKinley's tired phrase.From the big-band stylings of Cuban filin to the birth of Latin jazz, mutual influences run deep.But when the Cuban Revolution led to a breakdown of commercial and human contacts, cultural linkages also fizzled.Thanks to sanctions relief under the Obama administration, possibilities for collaboration improved significantly.Timothy Storhoff's book describes the results.Harmony and Normalization begins with a survey of U.S.-Cuban musical relations before 2009.Covering such a vast topic in one chapter leads to simplifications.Still, Storhoff captures the ways some U.S. and Cuban music lovers resisted being cut off from one another entirely after 1959.Pete Seeger made his way to the island in 1971.Thanks to the Carter administration and Columbia Records, U.S. audiences got to know Cuban supergroup Irakere in the late 1970s.The Buena Vista Social Club won a Grammy in 1998.Such examples were exceptions to broad patterns of isolation.But if Storhoff also widened his lens-to look at Cuban metalheads listening furtively to Miami radio in the 1980s, for instance-he would find even more evidence that cultural ties proved resilient.The advent of the Obama administration represented a game changer, as U.S. rules for visiting the island relaxed, access to the internet in Cuba improved, and Washington began a full "normalization" drive.Storhoff follows U.S. groups that performed on the island in this period as well as chronicling his own visits to Havana to attend percussion classes and a jazz festival.His final chapter discusses high-profile exchanges-including Havana concerts by Major Lazer and the Rolling Stones (whose operation was run out of the United States)-against the backdrop of Cuba's "Obamamania" in 2016.As Storhoff notes, these happenings had clear political implications given the bilateral context, notwithstanding their participants' naive protestations to the contrary.Storhoff acknowledges that his book largely focuses on U.S. musical journeys to Cuba.In that, it reflects the asymmetries that remained a part of Obama-era policies.It was, and still is, easier for U.S.-based performers and fans to visit the island than for Cubans to visit the United States.Still, Storhoff also devotes a chapter to the contentious history of Cuban performers in the United States after 1959.Here is where the book has a blind spot with regard to the Cuban-American community.The angry protests that greeted popular dance band Los Van Van's rare (for the time) visit to Miami in 1999 are part of South Florida lore.Under Obama-era cultural exchange policies, some Cuban-Americans similarly criticized the rising number of artists visiting from Cuba
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