Cuba
Bolet on Communism​
Jorge never returned to Cuba after the revolution of 1959. In an interview with the Dutch newspaper Leidsch Dagblad (5 December, 1983), Jorge became quite animated.
'I remember my homeland as a paradise, why would I want to see it again, now that it has become a hell?' When the interviewer apologised for asking whether he is exaggerating, Jorge replied: 'Have you ever been in a Communist country? I was in Poland for a month [May June 1961]. I met the most wonderful people, they are so wonderful. But in secret, they tell you how they really are, it made my heart bleed. In Cuba, everyone is just a prisoner and living like a prisoner - that's what I call hell.'
Jorge claimed that the tales of massacres under Batista were grossly exaggerated [Moordpartijen onder Batista, dat ist allemaal schromelijk overdreven]. When questioned about the role of an artist in society, he replied that the artist only has to do what he needs to do to gain a large audience. 'He should not poke his nose into other things. At least that is what I think for myself what I think, and believe has nothing to do with my work.'
Jorge was interviewed by The Door County Advocat (northeastern Wisconsin, USA) in August 1973: '"The US allowed the Cuban situation to develop," Bolet states firmly. "This is due to a national reluctance on the part of American to look the problem of Communism straight in the eye. Americans tend to think Communism is not as bad as it really is. I am a rabid anti-socialist." As a final remark, Bolet recommended reading The Fourth Floor by Ambassador Smith. The book records the progress of Castro's rise to power.' The book to which Jorge refers is The Fourth Floor. An Account of the Castro Communist Revolution, by Earl E. T. Smith (New York, 1962)​
Before a recital in Windhoek, South West Africa in February 1976, The Windhoek Advertiser (16.1.76) reported that there was a strong possibility theatre-goers would boycott the recital of the 'Cuban pianist' as they felt strongly about Cuban involvement in Angola. (In November 1975 a massive and wholly unexpected airlift of Cuban troops to Africa turned the tide of a South African invasion of newly independent Angola, inevitably heating up cold war quarrels.) An interview this morning Dr E Grobbelaar, Director of SWAPAC (South West Africa Performing Arts Council), stressed the fact that Mr Bolet had left Cuba before the regime of Fidel Castro and was now an American citizen. The paper quoted a New York journalist who had reported Jorge's words:
"I am a hero to the Cubans in exile and I am a hero to my former good friends who are still living in Cuba. Now the name of Bolet is very, very much on the black list in Cuba. I always felt that if I ever got on a plane that was highjacked, I would be separated at once and would probably be grilled and put through the third degree."
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'Musicians aren’t politicians, but they still have a voice,' it might be claimed, but some caution is needed here: Jorge Bolet was of white/Hispanic origin in a country of great (ethnic) inequality; he had received honours and support from the régime of Batista, and from the President personally. In what sense was he unaware of -or blind to - the corruption of that régime? This does not entail, however, that what came after was better.​​​
The longest-serving non-royal head of state in the 20th and 21st centuries, Castro polarized world opinion. His supporters view him as a champion of socialism and anti-imperialism whose revolutionary government advanced economic and social justice while securing Cuba's independence from American hegemony. His critics view him as a dictator whose administration oversaw human rights abuses, the exodus of many Cubans, and the impoverishment of the country's economy.
Paul Hampton wrote in 2006: 'The Fidel Castro Handbook by George Galloway [a British politician, neither a historian nor an academic, born 1954] is a hagiography about one of the last grand Stalinist autocrats by one of its most loquacious apologists. It is the modern equivalent of the biography of Josef Stalin by Albanian tankie Enver Hoxha. Cold Warriors and apologists alike have traditionally agreed that Fidel Castro was always a “Marxist-Leninist”, whereas the evidence suggests he turned to Stalinism only under the external pressure from the US, after receiving help from the USSR and because of the sympathies of his closest associates, his brother Raúl and Che Guevara, who certainly were Stalinists before and after 1959 [*this is subject to debate]. The idea that Castro’s Cuba is socialist is a fairy tale that can only be believed if you rub out the conditions of the Cuban working class – something Galloway manages to do completely – for example simply by ignoring the take over of the trade unions in late 1959 – early 1960.'
Mario Vargas Llosa
Like many other Latin American intellectuals, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was initially a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. He studied Marxism in depth as a university student and was later persuaded by communist ideals after the success of the Cuban Revolution. Gradually, Vargas Llosa came to believe that socialism was incompatible with what he considered to be general liberties and freedoms. The official rupture between the writer and the policies of the Cuban government occurred with the "Padilla Affair", when the Castro regime imprisoned the poet Heberto Padilla for a month in 1971. Vargas Llosa, along with other intellectuals of the time, wrote to Castro protesting the Cuban political system and its imprisonment of the poet. Vargas Llosa identified himself with liberalism rather than extreme left-wing political ideologies thereafter. After he relinquished his earlier leftism, he opposed both left- and right-wing authoritarian regimes.
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa (28 March 1936 – 13 April 2025) was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the most significant Latin American novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".
From Castro's obituaries, 26.11.2016
Text from Richard Gott, Guardian 26 November 2016 with additions
He became a player on the global stage, dealing on equal terms with successive leaders of the two nuclear superpowers during the cold war. A charismatic figure from the developing world, his influence was felt far beyond the shores of Cuba. Known as Fidel to friends and enemies alike, his life story is inevitably that of his people and their revolution. Even in old age, he still exercised a magnetic attraction wherever he went, his audience as fascinated by the dinosaur from history as they had once been by the revolutionary firebrand of earlier times.
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The Russians were beguiled by him (Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan in particular), European intellectuals took him to their hearts (notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir), African revolutionaries welcomed his assistance and advice, and the leaders of Latin American peasant movements were inspired by his revolution.
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Only the US itself, which viewed Castro as public enemy No 1 (until they found an “axis of evil” further afield), and the Chinese in the Mao era, who found his political behaviour essentially irresponsible, refused to fall for his charm.
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​Castro was a hero in the mould of Garibaldi, a national leader whose ideals and rhetoric were to change the history of countries far from his own. Latin America, ruled for the most part in the 1950s by oligarchies inherited from the colonial era, of landowners, soldiers and Catholic priests, was suddenly brought into the global limelight, its governments challenged by the revolutionary gauntlet thrown down by the island republic. Whether in favour or against, an entire Latin American generation was influenced by Castro.
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​Like most Latin American leftwingers at that time, Castro was influenced by Marxism – whatever that might mean in the Latin American context, about which Marx himself had little to say. In practice it meant a warm feeling for the (far away) Russian revolution, and a strong dislike of (nearby) Yankee “imperialism”.
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Whether Castro was pushed into the Soviet camp by US mishandling in the early years, or whether that was where he planned to be all along, is a matter of historical debate. There is evidence on both sides, and Castro allowed different interpretations to flourish. Guevara and Raúl Castro were certainly persuaded of the need to make an alliance with the Cuban communists, the only party that had troubled to enrol the country’s black people, and they had great hopes of economic (and later military) support from the Soviet Union. Yet for the first 10 years of Castro’s regime – until 1968 when he supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Leonid Brezhnev – he fought hard to maintain Cuba’s separate identity as a developing country struggling to take its own particular road to socialism. Even when he had taken the Soviet shilling, he tried ceaselessly to build bridges elsewhere – in Latin America (to Peru, Panama and Chile); in Africa (to Algeria, Angola and Ethiopia); and in Asia (to Vietnam – Vietnam Heróico as the Cubans liked to call it – and North Korea).​
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The policies of glasnost and perestroika espoused by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s brought a dramatic unravelling of the Cuban revolution. Castro was always an opportunist communist rather than a true believer such as Erich Honecker, the East German leader, yet the two men shared a distrust of Gorbachev’s reforms. The stability and survival of their states depended on Russian support, although Cuba, the fruit of a popular revolution, had greater staying power than East Germany.
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Castro’s revolution was a remarkably peaceful process, apart from a number of Batista’s henchmen shot in the first weeks. [*But BBC New states: "Hundreds of Batista's former supporters were executed after trials that many foreign observers deemed as less than fair. Hundreds of people were sent to jail and labour camps as political prisoners. Thousands of mainly middle class Cubans fled into exile."] Some revolutionary enthusiasts of the first generation could not stomach the government’s leftward drift, and swaths of the professional middle class left for Miami, but the revolution did not “eat its children”. Much of the inner group around Castro survived into old age.
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But the Telegraph states: 'Opponents were executed and former allies imprisoned; Cuba was declared an atheist state; priests, churchgoers and homosexuals were singled out for persecution. No one complained, of course, because dissidents were incarcerated and the press censored. Castro had proclaimed himself the father of his people, and there was a heavy price to be paid for doubting his good intentions.'
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Also in the Telegraph: 'For 30 years under Castro the Cuban people were merely reduced to penury, but after the Soviet empire collapsed in 1989 they found themselves in such straits that they struggled to avoid starvation. Thousands attempted to reach the United States on precarious home-made rafts, only to be sent back when caught by the Americans. In this crisis Castro found himself compelled to allow Cubans to earn and spend more dollars, to open the country to tourism, to lift restrictions on religion. But he could not bring himself to do what was really required — admit that his anti-Americanism was now redundant, and make the concessions required to obtain the relaxation of the US trade embargo.'​​
“He was reasonable, not domineering, as one might expect,” Wayne Smith, a former US ambassador to Cuba who knew Fidel, told Al Jazeera. “He would listen to you.”
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'While many Cubans undoubtedly detested Castro, others genuinely loved him. They saw him as a David who could stand up to the Goliath of America, who successfully spat in the "Yanqui" eye. For them Castro was Cuba and Cuba was Castro.' (BBC New website)
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“Cuba is a poor country, but people did not live in the kind of misery as many other Latin American people in the surroundings of Lima or Mexico City,” said Volker Skierka, the author of Fidel Castro: A Biography. European diplomats estimate that 70 percent of Cubans would back the Castros, if free elections were held, Skierka said.
Memories of Cuba in the 1940s & 1950s vary widely; they represent a point of tension between
those sympathetic to the socialist revolution
and others ambivalent or opposed to it.
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Robin D. Moore (2006)
Music and Revolution
'Supporters of socialist Cuba have tended to characterize the “pseudo-republic” [the pre-1959 period] as one of the darkest periods of the country’s history. To them, midcentury life was fundamentally marred by the effects of government corruption and political violence as well as by widespread social ills—racism, class division, organized crime, gambling, prostitution, unemployment—and deficiencies in public education and other social services.
Cubans in exile, by contrast, often ignore or downplay the period’s problems. They instead emphasize its many positive features, including its large professional class, cosmopolitan intelligentsia, nightlife, media stars, and world-renowned performers. Cuba was undeniably one of the most affluent Latin American countries in the 1950s, and North Americans were not alone in considering it an unlikely site of socialist revolution (Llenera 1978:11).
Robin D. Moore, Music and Revolution, Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba
(University of California Press, 2006)
Cuban Politics in the 1940/50s
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Fulgencio Batista, the figure dominating Cuban politics in the decades prior to 1959, is perhaps best characterized as a pragmatist, someone more interested in personal gain than in leadership for its own sake. He had virtually no political ideology and shifted affiliation as necessary in order to maintain power.
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A mulatto career soldier of humble origins, Batista first came to national attention as a tool of the U.S. State Department. Its representatives helped him execute a successful military coup against Ramón Grau San Martín in 1934, considered too nationalistic and independent. The earliest years of Batista’s rule witnessed the imposition of martial law and the repression of opposition leaders. He later legitimized himself to many by relaxing political restrictions and supporting progressive legislation related to health insurance, education, and women’s suffrage. At the end of the decade [1930s], he won a fair election against Grau and served as president from 1940 to 1944.
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The period from 1944 to 1952, often described as a moment of lost opportunity in Cuban politics, witnessed campaigns against government corruption and frustrated attempts to instigate the social reforms mandated by the new Constitution. Ironically, the individual who most completely betrayed the public trust at the time was Grau San Martín. Hugh Thomas Cuba:The Pursuit of Freedom (1971) describes his administration (1944–48) as “an orgy of theft, ill-disguised by emotional nationalistic speeches.” The administration of President Carlos Prío Socarrás (1948–52) was similarly known for misuse of public funds, though it managed to pass some progressive legislation related to public works and (ironically) fiscal accountability. Despite the problems associated with Prío’s presidency, historians have characterized it as relatively capable and well managed (Alvarez Díaz 1963:787). To many, the country seemed to be making a slow transition away from fraud and military coups and toward responsible leadership.​​
In this context, Batista once again declared his candidacy for the presidential elections of 1952. With his opponents favored to win, Batista staged a second military coup before elections could be held. He deposed Prío in a matter of hours, virtually without bloodshed. The public cared little about the fate of Prío, yet they were outraged over the affront to democracy represented by the act itself (Pérez-Stable 1993:36). Any sense of movement toward rule by constitutional law had been “unceremoniously shunted aside” (Luis Pérez 1999:446) by Batista’s actions. Beginning a year or so later, groups vying for power abandoned political discussion in favor of violence. The process begun in the 1940s in which disputes increasingly came to be resolved by warring gangs of gunmen, policemen, ex-ministers, officers, and students (Thomas 1971:886) became even more pronounced.
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This spirit of anarchy and growing radicalism is what fuelled the famous attack organized by Castro on the Moncada garrison in Santiago on July 26, 1953. His 26th of July movement failed resoundingly in this initial effort, yet its very audacity brought Castro to national attention. The remainder of the decade witnessed an intensification of acts of violence against the government. It also saw the return of Castro, who had been exiled, and a group of supporters who eventually initiated guerrilla raids against military targets in Oriente.
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By 1957, random bombings and other sabotage were commonplace across the island, and the regime became more ruthless in its attempts to retain political control. Several of Batista’s military leaders gained notoriety for their bloody tactics: Carlos Tabernilla Doltz and Alberto Ríos Chaviano in Santiago and chiefs of the Secret Police Ugalde Carrillo and Captain Esteban Ventura in Havana, among others. By 1958, perceiving that Batista was absolutely discredited among Cubans of every political affiliation and class, the United States finally imposed an arms embargo against him. In May 1958, his army failed in a final offensive against the guerrillas and began losing territory. On New Year’s Eve 1958, Batista fled the country with a few of his closest supporters, leaving revolutionary forces free to take control of the capital.
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Robin D. Moore, Music and Revolution (2006)
Mid-century Society​
Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres, written by an admirer of 1950s Cuba, provides a window on what it was like to live in Havana at that time.The novel depicts a city with a large, well-educated, cosmopolitan professional class, enamored of its cabarets and clubs, given to sensual pursuits and the full enjoyment of life. This group, primarily of white/Hispanic origin, lived well and chose for the most part to ignore problems in the countryside and in marginal urban neighborhoods. Ruiz (1968:153) describes the society as one “in which rich and poor lived in separate worlds.”
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Racial discrimination adversely affected much of the population. Biases against blacks and mulattos manifested themselves in many areas, including education, housing, and limited access to public and private recreational areas. During the Grau administration, only 5 of 50 senators and 12 of 127 representatives were nonwhite in a country whose population was at least one-third colored (Thomas 1971:1121).
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By the mid-1950s, American visitors spent about 30 million dollars a year in Cuba, with over seventy flights a week scheduled from Miami to Havana alone (Schwartz 1997:125, 168). Cruise ships made Havana a constant port of call. New luxury hotels appeared one after another as a complement to older establishments: the Vedado and Bruzón in 1952; the Colina and Lido in 1954 and 1955; the St. Johns, Capri, and Riviera in 1957; and the Havana Hilton and Deauville in 1958 (Schroeder 1982:459) represent only a few examples. Interest in music and dance—ballroom rumba, conga, son, mambo, chachachá—inspired many excursions (Luis Pérez 1999:210).
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For many midcentury visitors, Cuba’s allure derived from its associations with sensuality, excess, and abandon. A holiday in Havana represented a physical getaway but also a space for moral laxity far from the confines of home. Marijuana (and cocaine for the wealthy) could be purchased easily in many areas. The sex industry in Havana had expanded by the 1950s to include over two hundred fifty brothels and at least ten thousand prostitutes, pornographic stage shows in the Shanghai Theater (Machover 1995:220), pornographic movies at the Lira and Molino Rojo, and the so-called dance academies (academias de baile), many of which functioned simultaneously as centers of music making and prostitution.
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​In Havana, several distinct zones of prostitution existed, including the barrios of Colón in Centro Habana behind the America Theater, the dockside streets of Habana Vieja (especially San Isidro near the train station), and the beachfront area of Marianao. These catered to sailors and foreigners, but others—Atarés, sections of the Vía Blanca, the La Victoria neighborhood to the southeast of Carlos III Avenue—were frequented almost exclusively by locals
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Robin D. Moore, Music and Revolution (2006)
Mid-century Musical Life​
The city’s Pro-Arte Musical Society (established in 1918) and Sociedad Liceum and Lawn Tennis Club regularly sponsored a variety of classical events. Cuba boasted an excellent symphony orchestra as of the early 1920s and later featured world-class guest artists and conductors such as Kleiber, Stravinsky, and Villa-Lobos.
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Statistics on full-time musicians obscure the fact that a much larger body of mostly untrained individuals worked alongside them. It is this “shadow group” that actually typifies the midcentury artist. Most came from working-class backgrounds and grew up playing folk music of various sorts, styles largely under-appreciated and in some cases persecuted prior to 1959. Approximately 75 percent were black or mulatto (Valdés Cantero 1988:22, 44).
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Havana was the unquestioned center of nightlife, offering diverse entertainment options for locals and visitors alike. Bars and restaurants could be found everywhere, among the most famous being the Floridita, said to have been frequented by Hemingway, and Sloppy Joe’s on Zulueta Street. Clubs and cabarets existed in all sizes, from smaller, intimate, and bohemian (the Alí Bar, the Las Vegas, the Palermo, the Alloy) to lavish and expansive (the Montmartre, Salón Rojo, the Sans Souci). Some were located in the heart of the city, for instance in the hotels of Vedado and Habana Vieja, while others (the Bambú, Johnny’s Dream Club, Club 66, at least a half-dozen on the beaches of Marianao) operated at a discreet distance. Interestingly, Cubans themselves represented the majority of the patrons rather than foreigners (Díaz Ayala 1981:212).
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Musically, midcentury Cuba can only be described as extremely vibrant, creative, and influential. This small island nurtured countless artists who took the world by storm. Influences from African- and Spanish-derived folklore, light classical repertoire, and North American jazz fused in the midcentury into music at once familiar and engagingly “exotic” to Western listeners. Taking advantage of new opportunities available to them, members of the working classes secured employment in all areas of the expanding tourist-oriented economy. With more visitors than ever before, more money circulating on the island, and a population enamored of music, dance, and the pursuit of happiness, Havana became a mecca for nightlife.
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Of course, fewer opportunities for artistic employment existed in the interior areas of the island relative to the cities. The mistreatment of rural workers had its corollary in a lack of interest in the music and dance they performed, at least in their traditional forms. Likewise, the overtly “Africansounding” music of the black working class met in many cases with the same discrimination as did the performers themselves. Many of the less appealing aspects of music making in 1950s Cuba—its flagrantly commercial nature, its orientation toward spectacle, its links to gambling—would be criticized by the new government in the years following Batista’s departure. Their attempts to redress such problems as well as the nationalization of the entertainment sector would fundamentally alter musical life.
The phenomenal vitality of Cuban music in the 1950s owes much to the increasing prominence of African-derived aesthetic elements and their fusion with Western musical forms in new, creative ways. Most performers in the midcentury were black or mulatto and grew up surrounded by folkloric repertoire that had a strong influence on their commercial compositions. Because of their involvement, genres such as the danzón eventually developed a final, open-ended vamp consisting of syncopated, interlocking rhythms and melodies.
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​As the decade progressed, patrons and even performers themselves began to note the effects of the unstable political environment on the arts. Carnival street celebrations were suspended in Havana for six years for reasons of security (Orejuela Martínez 2004:34). The numbers of tourists declined markedly in 1957 as sabotage and armed conflict escalated. Sentiment continued to shift more decisively against Batista, and government officials as a result censored public discourse more severely, including that of performers.
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Robin D. Moore, Music and Revolution (2006)
Fidel Castro and Maya Plisetskaya after a performance of 'Swan Lake' at the Bolshoi Theatre,
29 April 1963:
Aurelio de la Vega (1925-2022) Cuban-American composer​
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The first decades of the 20th Century.
[This] is the epoch in which Ernesto Lecuona composes his best-known piano pieces and operettas (zarzuelas), before succumbing, in the 40s and 50s, to the commercial attraction (from Broadway and Hollywood) that cheapened his music. We would have to wait for the appearance of the highly important figure of Amadeo Roldán to come face to face with the first relevant Cuban composer of classical music which is versed with contemporaneity. He is immediately followed by Alejandro García Caturla and José Ardévol--the Catalan who arrives in Cuba and founds the Musical Renovation Group, the first organized attempt to establish a real school of Cuban composers of classical music, filling two decades of production with the creations of Harold Gramatges, Edgardo Martín, Serafín Pro, Gisela Hernández, Argelieers León, Virginia Fleites, Hilario González and Julián Orbón soon abandons the Renovation Group and begins his prolific career as an important composer nurtured by Cuba and Spain, uniting son and Gregorian Chant, and the tonadilla with African rhythms.
[The music was] neoclassical at first and later nationalistic, tonal in style, whose tutelary gods were Stravinsky, Falla, Bartók and Garcia Caturla...
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The Cuban authorities claim that the number of symphony orchestras, after the triumph of the Castro Revolution, rose rapidly throughout the Island, and that professional musical education attained goals far superior to the instruction that was given during the Republican era. What can you tell me about this?
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As with all propaganda that continuously emanates, as a way of a justifying barrage, from all totalitarian states, these are only half-truths, very tinged with proselytism. It is true that the number of symphonic orchestras rose considerably. What is not said is that their technical-interpretative level was, and is, extremely inferior to that reached in the 40s and 50s by the old Havana Philharmonic Orchestra, which came to be one of the three best in Latin America and attained a musical profile similar to that of the second-tier North American orchestral groups, comparable to (and even surpassing) orchestras such as those of New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Dallas and Houston (these last two before they became first-rate groups), Tulsa, Cincinnati, Atlanta or Miami, to name a few. (...) What must always be remembered is that the Western free-market musical world (see the case of Spain) has advanced in all areas, from the economic to the artistic, with the passing of the years. It cannot be speculated with total assuredness what a continued Cuban Republic might have achieved in the field of classical music, for example, half a century later. What certainly is very important is to review what already existed on the Island more than six decades ago.
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If it is true that the musical activities in Havana were a thousand times superior to those which took place on the rest of the Island, that is no reason to deny that the capital came to be, in the last two decades of the Republic, one of the most dazzling cities of the Americas regarding music, whether popular or classical. As this last is what concerns us in this curious dialogue, let us face the real historical data.
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​(...)​
Let us talk first about Pro-Arte Musical. This incredible society was founded by María Teresa Giberga and directed by her and by dedicated Cuban women who helped her and then carried on her initial work--women who also later established the Concert Society, the Chamber Music Society of Cuba, the Havana Chorale, the Lyceum, and Santiago de Cuba's parallel Pro-Arte Musical. It became in the decades of the 30s, 40s, and 40s and exemplary entity that, in spite of all kinds of socio-economic-political ups and downs, brought to Havana the most noteworthy of the international musical world--from Rubinstein to Horowitz, from Heifetz to Isaac Stern, from Gigli to Mario del Monaco, from Rosa Ponselle to Helen Traubel, from Milstein to Piatigorsky, passing through opera seasons, the presentation of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy and the Ballets Russes of Monte Carlo with Leonid Massine and Michel Fokine dancing and designing choreography.
Pro-Arte had members who attended an average of three concerts per month (day and night sessions) by payment of a ridiculously low subscription fee, and the most amazing thing of all is that it constructed its own elegant building on the corner of Calzada and D, in El Vedado. This highly noteworthy venue had the best concert hall in Cuba, the famous Auditorium, which would be remembered so well by singers, instrumentalists and orchestra directors, all famous, as one of the most welcoming and significant musical temples of the Americas...
Besides the Auditorium, the Pro-Arte Musical building contained a beautiful library that held one of the most complete collections of opera scores on the entire American continent
The Auditorium and the whole interior of the Pro-Arte Musical building were consumed by a mysterious fire in the early times of the Castro régime. The beautiful library disappeared forever along with the theater. The Cuban Marxist government, which had re-baptized the Auditorium with the name of Amadeo Roldán Theater, took many years to reconstruct it, and sold the idea that it was built by the Revolution to the "socialists of the East" and to the North Americans, usually young people with starry eyes who succeeded in flouting the existing laws by visiting the Island. The stage was smaller, and the exterior is now an example of the best Soviet architecture: square, devoid of beauty, sterile and supremely unimaginative.
Aside from Pro-Arte Musical, the Concert Society, founded in Havana by Rosa Rivacoba de Marcos, which carried out its activities in the Lyceum of El Vedado, offered numerous concerts, presenting mainly national instrumentalists and singers, and in its heyday premiered various works by Cuban composers of classical music...
(...)
Let us speak now of orchestras. In Havana, during the decade of the 30s, there were two active orchestras: one being the Symphony, founded and directed by Gonzalo Roig, which played much of his music and that of Lecuona, and which on some occasions accompanied the staging of operas from the Italian repertoire, and the other the Philharmonic, founded and directed by Amadeo Roldán and by the Spanish orchestra director Pedro Sanjuán, which soon became a highly professional ensemble and through which Havana heard, for the first time, a good deal of international contemporary music, from Stravinsky to Bartók, from Hindemith to Roldán himself, from Prokofieff to García Caturla. I
n the decade of the 40s, the Philharmonic Orchestra providentially fell into the hands of the famous German orchestra director Erich Kleiber, driven away from the European musical theater because of the horrific Second World War. Kleiber radically transformed the Orchestra, and in six years converted it into an outstanding symphonic assembly, capable of interpreting very well even the difficult atonal labyrinth of Alban Berg's Wozzeck.
Throughout this epoch, the Orchestra was financed almost entirely by the Cuban patron Agustín Batista, a prominent wealthy businessman who allowed Cuba to have its first and highly active great symphonic ensemble. The Philharmonic later was directed by the flower and cream of the most prominent orchestra directors of the world: Bruno Walter, Arthur Rodzinski, Manuel Rosenthal, Herbert von Karajan, Efrem Kurtz, Erich Leinsdorff, William Steinberg, Serge Koussevitzky, Sir Thomas Beechman, Juan José Castro, Charles Münch, Pierre Monteux, and Sergiu Celibidache, among others. Incidentally, the Philharmonic, in the 50s, played music of Ardévol and the Cubans Edgardo Martín, Pablo Ruiz Castellanos and Gilberto Valdéz. It must be noted that the Orchestra offered popular midnight concerts in the National Theater (previously the Theater of the Galician Center) at an entrance price of 50 cents and of one dollar, including orchestra and box seats.
(...)
Finally, we should note the fact that radio station CMQ had founded a symphony orchestra of its own, under the direction of Enrique González Mantici, a member of the Popular Socialist Party (née Communist Party) and a good director, whose politcal affiliation was never questioned. Mantici, in addition to playing various Cuban symphonic works, premiered in 1951, with this Orchestra, my Overture to a Serious Farce, composed a year earlier.
(...)
There existed, beginning with the decade of the 30s, the National Opera, which presented many operas in Havana... The free concerts of the Cathedral Plaza, paid for by the State (which culminate in the mid-50s with a magnificent production of Honegger's oratorio Joan of Arc at the Stake, a work premiered in Zürich in this format, in 1942); the summer concerts, also free, in the Stadium of El Cerro, and above all, the radio transmissions of several Cuban stations which, at the end of the 40s and in the 50s, increased their support for classical music. CMQ transmitted, in prime-time hours by television (Cuba was the first country in Latin America that, at the height of the Republic, had color television), classical ballets and light operas, such as Lecuona's Lola Cruz, and it made history when it staged, in a scenic world premiére, Amadeo Roldán's ballet La Rebambaramba. Classical music was broadcast starting in the 40s by the CMZ radio chain, founded by Fulgencio Batista during his first constitutional presidential period, and also by the Communist-affiliated Radio Mil Diez. Nevertheless, the most popular radio programs were those of the Sunday daytime concerts of the Philharmonic Orchestra in the Auditorium, sponsored by General Electric on CMBF and by General Motors on RHC.
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Excerpts from Herencia Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2003. Cuban National Heritage; Coral Gables, Florida.