MISTY MEMORIES
Where do they reside?
How should one experience a work of art?
I experienced the Buena Vista Social Club musical with my heart— eyes and ears proved insufficient to absorb it.
Why do we often attempt to discern art with our mind? Why block art from drenching every sensory organ, especially the heart?
I allowed myself to experience this musical outside of my intellect. Its storyline, dance, music, all freed within me waves of emotions. I was too young to experience Havana nightlife when exile took me away. But Cuban music is deep in the genes of my soul and I allowed my body to move to its rhythm from my theatre seat. I allowed my eyes to reconnect the tear ducts to my heart, the eternally wounded heart of the exile. I grieved for my loss but perhaps more for the suffering that I know exile caused my parents and other emigres— a deep nostalgia that I believe each carries deep within.
With every fiber of my being I reject any attempt by world powers to interfere in Cuban politics. Outside intervention has attempted to commercialize Cuban culture, and in many cases has divided Cubans in that process.
My family was oppressed on the island by successive authoritarian regimes alternatively supported by capitalist and communist powers. The Cuban people were thrown into opposing camps manipulated by outsiders guided by Og and Magog— power and greed. But the music gives us common ground and arouses dreams of a Cuba free from rapacious foreign “liberators”.
How can a people be truly liberated except through its own efforts? Only fools trust the swan song of outside help.
It was fitting to end the evening at a Cuban restaurant. As I entered with my family, a music group was playing Cuban rhythms. Shamelessly, I danced my way to our table.
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This is a such a great point, Manuel! Art should be like an out-of-body experience.
"Why do we often attempt to discern art with our mind? Why block art from drenching every sensory organ, especially the heart?"
I've always been fascinated with Cuba. In the early 1960's I was a little kid attending a newly opened Catholic school in the Los Angeles archdiocese. The powers that be arranged for a group of nuns who had been exiled by Castro to be assigned to our parish. They became my teachers from 3rd through 8th grade. These women came to LA speaking only Spanish and were in the classrooms at the school within a year. And, in this case, the classrooms were very full. No classroom had fewer than 45 students. Remarkable. Frankly, I'm not sure how they did it. How did they manage the language and the cultural change (all in the name of God, I'm sure). They did talk aobut Cuba with students and they wove Spanish into the curriculum when possible. As a good little Catholic kid, I looked up to the teachers and developed that interest in Cuba.
I 100% agree with you that foreign powers have no business interfering in Cuban politics. I hate that the WH currently thinks it can manipulate anything it wants on the world stage.
So glad you were moved by the Buena Vista Social Club performance!