This column from 1999 recalls a trip made in 1974.

Homecoming in Havana

By Edward J. Boyer

I had seen him watching me for several days. The driveway leading out of Havana’s Hotel Nacional might have been 50 yards or more, and he seemed to be standing there at the end of it every day.

​Then one day he pulled his heavy frame up to his full height and shouted in Spanish from about 10 yards away: De dónde vienes? Where are you from?

​When I answered, “estados unidos,” he immediately switched to English and wanted to know where. I told him Detroit, and he grabbed me in a bear hug and lifted me off my feet as though I were a long lost brother.

​“Man, I know so many people in Detroit,” he said. “Joe Louis used to come down here every winter with about 50 guys.”

​​By now his eyes were glistening with faded memories given new life. His name was Orlando Cardenas. He had been a cab driver in pre-Castro Cuba, and when Louis, the heavyweight champ, and his entourage would make their annual sojourn to the island, Orlando knew he would make more money in a month than he would for the rest of the year.

​He looked as though he could have been a member of my family. He was not a revolutionary. He worked in the archives of a museum. But every day he came to a small restaurant across the street from the Nacional to eat dinner with some of his old buddies who now drove cabs for the state.

​A few years ago I was thinking about Orlando when I told a group of friends in Los Angeles that a small publication we had launched would write pieces about “Greater Central Los Angeles.” And just how do we define that territory, they wanted to know. We finally reached a consensus that it meant wherever people of African descent lived.

​So if we wrote about Cuba or Brazil or Puerto Rico, those pieces were about Greater Central Los Angeles. The perspective was very much like the famous Steinberg New Yorker Magazine cover showing Manhattan as the center of the universe and everything else was just kind of “out there” somewhere.

​But that perspective was also an embrace, a recognition of the ties that bind Africans and African Americans, regardless of which America they come from—North, South or Central America.

​Those ties were driven home for me recently when Taibou Drame, a friend from the West African country of Senegal, called practically in tears of joy, demanding that if I see no other movie this year, see “The Buena Vista Social Club.”

When I first went to Cuba, Castro’s revolution was 15 years old. This year it turned 40. So much has changed. And so much has remained the same.

​The Cuban musicians in “Social Club” are nearly all in their seventies and eighties, but the beauty of their sound is timeless. My friend Taibou was transported back to her native country listening to them. They reminded her, she said, of so many musicians in Dakar, Senegal’s capital, who are bound by the poetry they create in sound.

​The musicians in “Social Club” had their heyday in the 1940s and 50s. They are the legendary entertainers Orlando Cardenas would have taken those high rollers and big tippers in Joe Louis’ entourage to see.

​They had been all but forgotten until Ry Cooder went there and made the recording which inspired the film. But they have lost none of their magic, none of that power to captivate and transport.

​When Ibrahim Ferrer opens his mouth to sing, you know that his work as a shoeshine boy in revolutionary Cuba had not robbed him of his music. The same is true of Omara Portuondo as she walks through a crumbling Havana neighborhood and is joined in a duet by a woman who walks up to her on a street.

​I have walked those drab Havana neighborhoods where the shops have no merchandise. I have seen block after greenish-gray block of houses reduced to uniform blandness because Cuba has no paint. Back in the early 1970s, not that many American reporters were getting into Cuba. So when I had a chance to go, my editors at the Detroit Free Press jumped at the opportunity.

​Cuban neighborhoods are more grim than poor neighborhoods in this country. But there are parallels. Whether the neighborhood is here or there, there is something triumphant and reassuring about people who will not be defeated by their circumstances—people who will not let go of their song.

​I am not so naïve to propose that music can substitute for bread. Or medicine. Or paint for that matter. Revolutionary Cuba has its problems. And its successes.

​That seems to be the nature of Greater Central Los Angeles.

​When I first went to Cuba, Castro’s revolution was 15 years old. This year it turned 40. So much has changed. And so much has remained the same.

​I spent several months there on two trips in the 1970s. I met young people who were willing to follow Fidel into the sea if he asked. Their spirits were so high. But I always suspected that Fidel did not trust his own people. Rather than trust them, he regimented them.

​I don’t know how Orlando Cardenas survived the regimentation. He was not handling it very well the last time I talked to him, more than 20 years ago. He told me about a Cuba I never saw. And the “Buena Vista Social Club” gave me a taste of what it must have felt like. ◼︎