MIAMI.- Arturo Sandoval, one of the most virtuoso musicians that Cuban culture has produced, has not been able to return to the Island in decades. Even while in exile, the dictatorship censored his work and harassed his family. However, the artist stands out for transforming setbacks into victories. His professional imprint is undeniable.
With 11 Grammy Awards to support his experience, and more than double the number of nominations, Sandoval has received high-caliber honors in the United States and can boast collaborations with greats on the North American scene.
From a sofa in his apartment in Miami and the warm Cubanness that characterizes him, the musician spoke with CubaNet about hard and unforgettable moments in his life, his greatest achievements and the future of the dictatorship.
How and why did you leave Cuba?
Many people ask me, when did you come out? And my answer has always been and will be the same: when I could. It is not at all pleasant or pleasant when you feel the need to escape from the country that gave you life and where you were born. He’s not nice at all.
They were terrible moments, moments of sadness, of uncertainty, of many things, but I never doubted that it was an absolutely necessary step. God had given me the possibility of being a musician and my future, what was going to happen with my life in Cuba, I had no idea that I could have any kind of success.
My responsibility was also with my family, with the children. Later, thank God, I was able to bring almost all of them. I come back and repeat, it is not pleasant when you have to do that, but I will never regret it.
I believe that one’s country and one’s place is where one is admired, respected, and where things are going well, and where you have absolute freedom to do what you want and how you want it. That’s your place. It can be anywhere on the planet. We are earthlings, we are citizens of the world.
I would have liked all these possibilities to have been where I was born, on the beautiful island of Cuba. Unfortunately, for more than 65 years all these possibilities have been truncated by a disgraceful system, a horrible dictatorship that leaves no room for anything. I have always said that life without freedom is not life.
And at that moment of making the decision to leave, not to return to Cuba, what was that feeling of family separation like? How long did it last?
Very hard. We were able to leave because the Cuban dictatorship made the mistake of giving special permission to my wife and our son to come to Europe to spend a vacation with me during a tour I had, a fairly extensive one. I started with my own group, all Cubans, they returned to Cuba and I stayed to do another continuous tour with Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra.
When they gave us permission for my wife and my son to come and spend a few days in Europe, that’s when we saw the open skies. They arrived and the next day when they opened the American embassy, there I was with Dizzy Gillespie asking for political asylum.
I’ll go ahead a little and tell you that since arriving in the United States all kinds of things have happened to me, but very nice things too. I’ve had opportunities that I couldn’t even dream of, I couldn’t even imagine. Impossible. From the beginning, many opportunities opened up to me and I began to develop my career in a practically dizzying manner.
Of those opportunities, which ones have given you the most?
They are millions. I have participated in recordings, for example, with the biggest stars of American music, starting with Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis. The list is huge. I have made 48 albums. In Cuba I did one in my entire career.
And the career of how many years in Cuba?
In Cuba, well, I started at 11 and left at 40. An album. And here, in the 34 years we have been here, I have done 48. Of them, 24 have been nominated and 11 have won Grammys. I have also won an Emmy and I have the most important decoration that the North American Government offers to a civilian, which is the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
There are three other jazz musicians who have won that medal in the entire history of the United States: Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie. And this little guy from Artemis is in that group of four characters.
There are countless, since I arrived, all the major universities in Florida that have offered me a job. In Cuba they never allowed me to teach a class nor did they ever invite me. What’s more, once a boy I knew invited me, who was a trumpet professor at the National School of Art, where I studied for a couple of years. When I got there, he invited me to an exam, a trumpeter competition, supposedly for a competition in Europe.
The people in the offices saw me, called him and said, “What are you doing here?” “No, I invited him, because…” “No, no, no, no, this is not graduated here from anything, in fact, no, no, no. Tell him to leave.” And they took me out of there.
That was my experience in Cuba. Here, since I arrived, the main universities offered me full time, that is, the highest position within the teaching range. There is an assistant professor, a professor and there are full time teacher. They offered me all that. And I spent 20 years teaching at Florida International University, until I retired.
And what do you attribute to the fact that in Cuba they have always been, despite his demonstrated talent, suspicious of his teaching?
I am more than convinced that in Cuba any person who stands out in any branch, in any profession, or who has half a brain to think a little, is not one of the dictatorship’s predilections.
They prefer people who are easily controllable and who can dominate, and who do not have a criterion that can be heard by several people or crowds. And I possibly find myself in one of those, because when we started traveling with Iraqere the specialized press in the United States and Europe spoke very nice things and we began to stand out a little. When you start to stand out and don’t think exactly like them, from the start you become an enemy of the dictatorship.
Do you think they were not in control of your opinions?
Of course, they never had it, I honestly swear. As a boy, when I was I think 19 or 20 years old, I had my first trip abroad. And I’ll tell you something that was shocking to me and I will never forget it. We went to a festival called the World Youth Festival, in Democratic Berlin, which was Communist Berlin.
One day a man who was our translator, who sympathized with me and was a fan of music, invited me to a place that is in the center of a very famous square in that city of East Berlin, which is called Alexanderplatz, the Square. Alexander. There is a huge tower there, very tall, and it has a restaurant on top like a ball. You sit down and in 60 minutes it goes around completely and you can see everything around.
This man took me and told me: “I want to invite you there so you can see something.” He will never forget me. When we turned around we began to see the other Berlin, West Berlin. It was such a shocking thing, so violent, that it completely shook me because on one side it was all gray, dark, poverty, the streets half broken (…) And on the other side was Federal Germany.
That city of West Berlin is still one of my favorites, that was where you could see extraordinary splendor, the advances, the buildings, everything. Not to mention the cars! Mercedes Benz, Porsche, Audi, BMW, all the great European cars were on the other side. Afterwards I went many times and the day the Berlin Wall fell, I was playing there, in a very good jazz club called Quasimodo.
When I returned to Cuba, when I was able to talk to my family and friends, I told them: “Hey, as we say in good Cuban, we are embarked, but very embarked. “We have taken the path in reverse, we are swimming against the current and this system is not going to lead to anything good.” They sounded like prophetic words, but no, it was reality, it is not prophecy.
The system does not work, it is more than proven, no country with a totalitarian system, with a dictatorship, under a socialist or communist regime, whatever you want to call it, has been successful. It annihilates the spirit, the soul of the individual, it does not allow you to develop your ideas or your passion.
In Cuba I remember when I was in mandatory military service, I heard on a battery-operated “radio” a broadcast that they made daily called Jazz Hour, and for 45 minutes they played all the most concurrent recordings of what was happening at that moment. For us it was essential, because there was the music that we liked so much, but there was no other way to listen. In Cuba they called jazz music the music of Yankee imperialism, they also called rock and roll that way.
In what year was all this done? For the youngest.
Military service called me in 71, I was about 20 or 21 years old.
So, in ’71 jazz was not heard in Cuba?
Not jazz. I think since ’60 or ’61, no, not at all. Even when we formed the group Irakere, they prohibited us from using cymbals on the drums, because they said that it sounded like rock and roll, to imperialist music. We had to change the cymbals for cowbells and bells. It seems like a joke, but it is total control of everything.
And what happened in the service?
I was in military service for three years. In a corner, in that barrack. I had to spend it in an abandoned house in Old Havana, on Amargura Street. Ah! What a coincidence! Amargura Street, in Old Havana.
That was full of rats and cockroaches. This is how I had to spend three years of my life. And I was in a corner of that gloomy, dark and disgusting place, listening to that “little radio.” Then a sergeant came and told me: “Hey, I caught you!”, because he heard that they were speaking in English. “You are a traitor, you are listening to the voice of the Americans.” He took me to the office and they put me in jail for three and a half months for listening to jazz music.
Horrible things happened to me in Cuba. The saddest thing is that I arrived in the United States and everything went very well for me. But, I came home from working at the university, or on tour, or whatever, and I sat in an armchair and I had an immense sadness inside because in my head the only thing I had was my mother and my father. The rest of my family too.
My father was 72 and my mother was 70. For me that was terrible. From the first day I arrived, I began to make arrangements to be able to bring my mother and father. These efforts lasted for more than two and a half years. They scammed me, they made fun of me, they stole money from me, telling me that they were going to bring it here, there. Well, everything happened, but I never stopped trying at all costs to get the two visas so that they could come.
One fine day, after two and a half years, the State Department, through acquaintances and friends and politicians here in Miami, and all that, granted me two visas for my mother and father. That was one of the happiest days of my life. I sent the two visas to the Interests Office that was there on the boardwalk. They put the North American visas in their passports, I sent them the two tickets, everything was ready.
And 24 hours before the trip, they were summoned to a MININT (Ministry of the Interior) office. There was a general and two colonels, and there they asked for their passports with American visas.
My parents were born, raised and lived until that moment in Artemisa, a small town of extremely humble people. They learned to read and write as adults, they didn’t even go to school. In other words, it was impossible to be more humble.
“Do you have the passports with the North American visas? And the tickets that his son sent him.” When the man had them in his hand, he tore up the two tickets, the two passports, and threw them in the trash. He gave my mom something, of course.
“I have a message for you from the Commander in Chief. You will never be able to leave here, forget about the holy journey, you will never be able to leave Cuba and you will never be able to see your traitor son again. “You can go now.” That is my last memory of Cuba.
A few months later my mother and father got on a raft with 8 or 10 other people and they arrived at a small cay south of Key West. My father arrived in this black color, full of bruises. My mother fractured three vertebrae because it was in January and imagine bad weather. There she was picked up by the Coast Guard and taken to the Key West hospital.
I was in Tokyo, when my wife called me she said: “Hey, the old people arrived, they are in the hospital in Key West.” That was the news. Well, my mom was paralyzed in a wheelchair for more than 6 months, she couldn’t even comb her hair, poor thing.
People ask me if I don’t feel nostalgic, and I tell them “nostalgia?” Hate is very ugly, resentment, suffering… All of that is very ugly, but I will never be able to forget all those things that he did to me. the Cuban dictatorship is impossible. That is there, in memory. I wouldn’t like to remember, but it was too much, a lot of abuse, a lot of contempt for what one could offer. They voted my sister and her husband out of work. She was a high school teacher.
After all that, when we stayed, they threw stones at my parents, they threw those stinky eggs at them in the little house where they lived in Artemisa. They held repudiation rallies, as they say, on several occasions. In other words, the memories that I have in Cuba are of a beautiful island where I was born and where I began my career, but they are things so hard to digest and accept, that honestly the only thing that I wish that one day that dictatorship would end.
And what hope do you have for that?
Hope is the last thing you lose in life, you cannot lose hope, although it has been difficult because 65 years have passed.
And which ones did you not see anymore?
Well, to those who stayed in Cuba. It’s been 34 and a half years since I left and never came back. I haven’t been able to go back again. I did go once, more than 20 years ago, to the Guantanamo naval base. There it was the turn of the rafters, of which there were thousands. I spent two days there in Cuban territory.
Speaking of concerts, do today’s young people, especially from Cuba, listen to Arturo Sandoval?
How are they going to listen to it? Since I left, it is forbidden to play my music. You can’t touch it, you can’t put a video on it, you can’t mention my name in any post. That is one of the saddest things, because that is one thing. of its own kind from Cuba. In every country in the world, it doesn’t matter what regime it is, if you are a person who has had acceptance, who has had some success in what you do, your country is going to be proud of that. It doesn’t matter where it is, but not Cuba. In Cuba people died and never knew who Celia Cruz was. So many people who have died and Cuba did not allow her to be known, for her work to be disseminated, great artists in exile.
A bit to get into controversy, and those current artists of the urban genre who return to the Island and see everything, not to say rosy, do they see everything well?
And you said “artists”? “Artists”? That is a sacred word. We must not offend artists. First of all, if you consider yourself an artist you have to be a professional and you must have a certain knowledge of what you develop or try to do. A person who jumps three times and screams, says a string of expletives and unpleasant things, no, it is unfair to call that an artist.
The artist has to love art, he has to respect the public, he has to get on stage to do things that illustrate and enrich the intellect of the people who are in that place. If they deteriorate it, if they denigrate women, for example, and say a bunch of bad words, that cannot be considered art.
All this that he has told about what has happened in Cuba, about the experiences, the memories, the bad memories he has. Do you miss Cuba as a country?
Yes of course. That’s what hurts me the most because I can’t get that out of my head. I can’t delete it. I’m going to die being Cuban. I am not Chinese, nor Austrian, nor American. I speak as a Cuban and I eat rice, beans and cassava every day. So it’s not something that I can erase and start a life completely from another point of view, no, not at all. I’m going to die being Cuban.
Cuba hurts me a lot and sometimes it even depresses me when I see on social media the misery, the abuses, how they do this, the people complaining, crying because they don’t have food to give to the children. It is inevitable that it hurts a lot, and it breaks my soul, because my God, for how long.
We are talking about what you see on social networks, but that is your choice, if you want you don’t see it.
Yes, but it is inevitable, because when I see the word Cuba it catches my attention and I have to read what they are saying, it is an uncontrollable thing. I can’t say, I’m going to ignore this or I’m going to turn a blind eye. Sometimes I say: “Hey, I’m martyring myself because there is only one life,” but that’s inside of you.
Would you like to return to Cuba to rebuild, if applicable, Cuban culture?
I don’t have the capacity for that by any means, but I would like to do everything I can to rebuild that Island. People complain a lot about the material issue, the deterioration of the buildings, the streets, the thousands of tons of garbage in the streets, hunger, all that. I believe that this can be solved under a regime that respects absolute freedoms in a very short time. What is going to be very difficult to fix is the mental damage, the psychological damage that this system has done. People do not know how to live in the modern world, they have no idea how everything works, for their own benefit, they do not know what to do.
So, a psychological or deep damage that will cost a lot, I would say generations so that people can understand how to solve even their own problems and develop their ideas.
Another thing that is also terrible and makes me very sad. In all my years in Cuba, I never saw a lady, a girl or a woman, say the worst, most rude bad words. Nowadays it is very common. You see her in the videos and they say some curse words that I say: “But she is a woman in public and in front of a camera.” It seems silly, but that is part of the psychological, moral, principled, and ethical degeneration. Everything that was brilliant in Cuba until 1959 has gone, I don’t even know where.
Right now we were talking about the protests in Cuba and he told me that it was not right. In other words, there are protests, but there is no way out.
If not they are massive. I’m not talking about four, five people on a corner, in a neighborhood. I’m talking about the people who take to the streets completely, peacefully.
Furthermore, they have no other way, because in Cuba everyone knows that no civilian is allowed to have any type of weapons. How are they going to defend themselves from the repressive bodies with stones and sticks? It is impossible. We are talking about completely peaceful, but forceful demonstrations.
And massive. If they are not really massive, they may be uncontrollable by the repressive bodies. Nothing is going to happen there. People have to become aware of that, and I am not inciting anyone to break anything, or to plant bombs, or to carry out assaults like the rebels did before ’59, who killed people unjustly and did all kinds of sabotage.
It’s just going out into the street and asking for freedom. That is the only thing that will solve the problem in Cuba. The events of July 11, which was in 2021, were like a respite. I would say that was like a little light at the end of the tunnel. After that there has been a impasse There, nothing has happened, and people have become badly accustomed to enduring so much abuse and so much misery and so much hopelessness. Because hope is the last thing that is lost in life, and when you hit that rock bottom, nothing makes sense in life anymore, nothing.
It is a widespread disillusionment already within the people of Cuba, and also the total ignorance of what the rest of the world is like due to the communist propaganda that has been put into their heads since the 60s. At the beginning, for example, black people were told that they should not go to the United States because they will throw the dogs at them there. That is the mentality, and that here the big owners exploit the people, and all that type of propaganda that has penetrated the minds of the most vulnerable, simple people, without an education, without knowledge of how social regimes work in the world. world.
Capitalism is not perfect. There is no doubt about that. We are aware of that. There has not existed to this day a political system that can be considered perfect, but my question is, if you say that capitalism is imperfect, please show me the alternative. The other system that is proven, that works efficiently and that provides better conditions of all kinds for humans, mention that system to me, if you mention it to me and that is proven, perfect.
I will be the first to support that system called rich race. I don’t know how, but to this day, the only system that has been proven to work is the capitalist system. It is what encourages human beings to create, to be more productive, to be more responsible. And there is no doubt about that, because you see the achievements of all the systems of all the countries that have embraced the capitalist system.
Do you trust that at some point in your life you will be able to return to a free Cuba?
This year I turn 75 years old. I don’t know how much longer God lets me be on planet Earth, but every day I find it more difficult. I confess, we are going to assume that there is a violent transition, a big transition in Cuba. I wouldn’t want to go back immediately like that to see all those garbage cans in the street, people collecting traces inside the garbage to eat, and see poverty and see the destroyed streets, the buildings. I don’t know, I wouldn’t want to return to that Cuba. I think I would wait a while for things to normalize a bit so that it’s not such an unpleasant impression. I repeat, hope is the last thing that is lostI would not want to die without being able to return to Cuba, after a change in the system.
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2024-03-31 03:10:01
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