‘She had no real interest in the consolation zone’: celebrating the centenary of Celia Cruz, Cuba’s Queen of Salsa

On 13 November 1973, at Roberto Clemente Coliseum in Puerto Rico, Celia Cruz took to the stage in a bejewelled, psychedelic blue costume and huge afro, saluting the 12,500-capacity enviornment together with her trademark rallying cry: “Azucar!” – sugar.

The Cuban singer had been a star for greater than 20 years by this level, however this live performance marked a rebirth. Backed by the Fania All-Stars, the in-house orquesta of the label that introduced salsa to the US, Cruz carried out Bemba Colorá. Devotees have variously decoded its lyric and “massive purple lips” metaphor as a repudiation of a neighbourhood gossip, a commentary on anti-Black racism or an anthem for feminine empowerment. Stretched out to a righteous 12-minute call-and-response in Puerto Rico, she recast the music as a cry of anguish over her exile from her homeland, including strains like “Yo como el pájaro quiero / mi libertad recobrar” (“Just like the chook / I need to regain my freedom”) that channelled the ache of the dispossessed.

Whether or not exiles themselves or just financial migrants, many within the live performance viewers – identical to many in her fanbase throughout the Latin American diaspora – sensed the disappointment beneath her phrases, the vulnerability throughout the power. They topped her the Queen of Salsa. “Celia had energy in a male-dominated world, she modified the sport,” says Cuban singer Daymé Arocena. “She had no real interest in the consolation zone.”

Cruz’s affect remains to be keenly felt at this time in up to date stars corresponding to Cardi B, who saluted her within the video for I Like It and arrived finally 12 months’s Met Gala dressed like her; UK dance star Barry Can’t Swim rewired Cruz’s 1974 music Quimbara for his personal 2024 mega-banger Kimbara. And salsa, the music Cruz helped pioneer, is having fun with a renaissance, within the type of smash hits corresponding to Unhealthy Bunny’s Baile Inolvidable and Rauw Alejandro’s Tú con Él.

Cruz was maybe the best Latin American icon of her period, dominating the Latin music charts, adorning her partitions with gold information, three US Grammys and 4 Latin Grammys – alongside prizes from Billboard, the Smithsonian Establishment and extra – and receiving the keys to New York, Los Angeles, Miami and plenty of different US cities. “I’ve plenty of keys,” she later lamented, “however they don’t open any doorways.” Final 12 months, Cruz additionally grew to become the primary Afro-Latina to look on the US 25-cent coin, with Ventris Gibson, then director of the US Mint, declaring the singer “a trailblazer in music and civil rights”. Cruz’s centenary can be celebrated this 12 months with a sequence of reissues, alongside occasions and exhibitions throughout the US.

Cruz had by no means deliberate on being a performer; her childhood ambitions had been to be “a mom, a instructor, a housewife”, she as soon as stated. However, she triumphed at expertise exhibits, thrived at Havana’s Nationwide Conservatory of Music and, in 1950, joined La Sonora Matancera, a long-running band that specialised in son cubano, guaguancó and chá-chá-chá, the rhythms that later coalesced into salsa. Over the following decade, they grew to become main lights of the golden age of Cuban music.

Then Castro took energy. Keenly understanding the ability of radio, Castro eliminated the dance music La Sonora Matancera specialised in from the airwaves, changing it with propaganda messages. He admired Cruz, nonetheless – he would clear his gun to her music Burundanga within the days earlier than the revolution – however these emotions weren’t reciprocated. Castro would ship brokers to her home, requesting she carry out at his official occasions; Cruz hid in a closet, sending her brother to say she wasn’t residence.

As work for La Sonora Matancera dwindled below Cuba’s new regime, in June 1960 they left Havana for a gig in Mexico; en route, bandleader Rogelio Martinez instructed his musicians: “It is a one-way flight.” They by no means returned, resettling within the US in 1961; Pedro Knight, the band’s trumpeter and later Cruz’s husband, reasoned that if they’d remained in Cuba, “we’d have ended up like a few of our compatriots who don’t have any approach of getting out”. However exile wore closely upon Cruz, who by no means noticed her dad and mom once more. “I don’t have a mom, a father, I don’t have a rustic,” she mourned 25 years after fleeing Havana. “I solely have Pedro.” Outwardly, nonetheless, she usually selected to radiate pleasure: “My message is all the time felicidad – happiness.”

In 1965, now dwelling in New York, Cruz went solo, backed by the orchestra of Spanish Harlem’s Tito Puente. She grew to become ever extra profitable, although the ingrained racism within the US was a culture-shock for this proud Afro-Cuban. “Celia celebrated her African roots,” says Angélique Kidjo, the Benin-born singer, five-time Grammy winner and a buddy and superfan of Cruz. “She grew up singing Yoruba songs – her phrasing is embedded within the African custom. However the white Cubans didn’t need her to succeed, nor to be related together with her. And her reply to that was: ‘Azucar!’”

Cruz first coined the catchphrase when a waiter in Miami requested if she wished sugar in her black espresso. Explains Kidjo: “She was saying [to white Cubans]: ‘It’s possible you’ll not prefer it, however you’ll be able to drink espresso as a consequence of my ancestors, with the sugar you add. I’m the one who brings flavour to every part you do.’”

By the Nineteen Seventies, Latin music was thriving within the US within the type of salsa, championed by the fledgling Fania Information. “Salsa was this melting pot of Afro-Cuban music, combined with Puerto Rican and different roots rhythms,” says Bruce McIntosh, vice-president at Craft Latino, the label placing out the centenary reissues. “It was principally created in New York by Fania and its musicians.” The label cultivated a loyal following of listeners who, McIntosh says, “longed for the homeland, and this music, like Latin meals and tradition, fed that longing”.

Fania’s preliminary viewers was overwhelmingly male, nonetheless. “Salsa was the road music of its time – it was hip-hop earlier than hip-hop, stuffed with city folklore and really male-oriented,” McIntosh says.

However Johnny Pacheco, the composer and bandleader who based the label, was in love with Cruz’s voice and her spirit, and signed her. “Celia had been a star because the 50s, and she or he introduced a little bit of professionalism to Fania,” says McIntosh. “She additionally introduced an entire new demographic, broadening the scope. When she arrived, there have been principally no different girls singing salsa. After Celia, girls had been extra drawn to it.”

And Cruz was greater than in a position to maintain her personal towards Fania’s younger bucks. On Quimbara from 1974’s Celia & Johnny, her first smash-hit collaboration with Pacheco, Kidjo says “her voice was like a percussive instrument, providing you with the beat so you’ll be able to dance salsa”. In 1974, Cruz accompanied the Fania All-Stars after they carried out a pageant in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to coincide with Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s Rumble within the Jungle bout.

“Salsa was enormous in Africa, particularly west Africa,” says Kidjo, who noticed Cruz carry out in Benin in her teenagers. “If I hadn’t seen it with my very own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed a girl could lead on a salsa band. The musicians had been performing for this girl – she performed them with out even elevating a finger. It was a defining second for me.”

Additional collaborations with Pacheco adopted, plus albums with Fania legends Ray Barretto and Willie Colón. It solidified Queen Celia’s reign, which continued till her dying in 2003. “She had hits within the 90s and the 00s,” marvels McIntosh. “She was an envoy for the music and the tradition worldwide.”

Again in Cuba, nonetheless, her music was banned, with Cruz heading an unofficial (however efficient) blacklist of artists who had spoken out towards Castro’s regime or left the island after he took energy. The ban was not overturned till 2012, 4 years earlier than Castro’s dying, and this was executed quietly and by no means formally acknowledged. “I’d by no means heard of Celia till I arrived within the US and NPR stated I gave the impression of her,” says Daymé Arocena. “We weren’t allowed to hearken to her music.” When she researched Cruz, nonetheless, Arocena realised she had grown up mere blocks from her childhood residence, and drew inspiration from her music. “Bemba Colorá has develop into an empowering music for me. They inform Black girls to not put on purple lipstick, that it makes our lips look greater, and it’s a approach of oppressing us. So each time I put on purple lipstick on stage, I consider that music.”

Aymée Nuviola, one other Cuban singer, additionally knew nothing of Cruz when she heard the comparability whereas touring overseas. “Folks would inform me I used to be a nasty Cuban for not realizing Celia!” she laughs. When she lastly heard Cruz’s information, she recognised the melodies from pregóns – songs sung by road distributors in Cuba – that she had heard as a baby. Castro’s ban couldn’t erase Cruz from Cuba’s folk-memory. Nuviola lastly noticed Cruz carry out in Mexico, late in her profession. “She solely needed to say, ‘Azucar!’ and everybody screamed and I started to cry. She was magical.”

In 2015, Nuviola was forged as Cruz within the Colombian TV drama Celia, which she describes as “an incredible honour. I absorbed how she moved her fingers, how she walked, how she sang.” She struggled with Cruz’s trademark lengthy fingernails – “I’m a pianist!” – however Nuviola understood the central tragedy of Cruz’s life, having additionally left Cuba early in her profession. “Celia needed to battle so arduous for her life – she needed to go away Cuba, and she or he cherished Cuba so, a lot.” Later this 12 months, Nuviola will launch a duet, including her vocals to Cruz’s authentic monitor Ríe y Llora (Snort and Cry). “It’s from Celia’s closing album,” says Nuviola, “a really emotional album known as Regalo del Alma. The title means ‘a present from my soul’. She gave a lot.”

Kidjo, in the meantime, befriended Cruz in her later years, and remembers “sitting collectively on the Grammys, cracking up with laughter – she known as me ‘hermana Africana’, her sister from Africa.” Kidjo later recorded Afrobeat interpretations of Cruz’s music for her 2019 album Celia, celebrating the star whose instance had been so foundational.

“After I noticed her carry out after I was a young person, she grew to become every part I wished to be,” she says. “This ball of smiling and pleasure and happiness on stage, like, ‘Nothing’s gonna cease me, that is the place I need to be. That is what I’ve to provide to the world.’ Celia didn’t select to be born in Cuba, she didn’t ask to be a descendant of slaves. However African music and spirit has survived by way of her willpower to develop into whoever she wished to be.”