Celia Cruz left Cuba in 1960 at the age of 34 without knowing if she would ever be able to return.
The Queen of Salsa, who promised not to return to the country while under Fidel Castro’s regime, spent more than four decades in exile until she died on July 16, 2003.
But there was only one time when the legendary singer came close to her land, and even took a little piece of Cuban soil.
His visit to the Guantanamo Naval Base, located in the southeast of the island, was short but went down in history.
In the BBC’s Witness History podcast, journalist Stefania Gozzer reconstructed what happened on that emotional trip, with the voices of its protagonists.
the star
In January 1990the Queen of Salsa boarded a plane heading to the Guantanamo Naval Base, in the eastern region of Cuba.
The base, which occupies 117.6 km² (49.4 of land and the rest of water), has been under US jurisdiction since 1898, when the North American country occupied the island after defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War.
The United States operates it under a perpetual lease regime established in a treaty signed in 1903 with Cuba, whose current government considers it null and void and claims sovereignty over the territory.
Celia Cruz was invited to the base to give a concert as part of the Cuban-American Friendship Day celebrations, which takes place each year at the end of January.
By then the Havana artist was already a star and the greatest reference of the moment in one of the most popular Latin musical genres: salsa.
Settling in New York and not in Miami like most Cuban exiles, Celia had achieved success in an industry dominated by men and helped give visibility to the black communities of the Caribbean.
The one in Guantánamo was her only trip to the island where she was born during 43 years of exile.
The change in Cuba
Celia Cruz left Cuba a year after the triumph of the Revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959.
In 1960, when the new regime was under construction, she was the singer of a successful band called The Sonora Matancera.
“When the Revolution triumphed, the band was on tour in Mexico. Back in Havana, they began to realize that everything was changing,” recalls Omer Pardillo Cid, manager and close friend of the Queen of Salsa.
For the world of entertainment, the authoritarian drift of the Castro regime translated into the closure of theaters, cabarets and nightclubsconsidered contrary to the new socialist morality imposed in the country.
“They closed all the places where the band could work. “La Sonora Matancera and Celia Cruz were very successful throughout Latin America, so they decided to go to Mexico,” says Pardillo Cid.
Pedro Knight, Celia’s husband and the band’s trumpeter, explained in a 1988 interview with the BBC that at that time They thought that leaving the country was temporary.
“On the plane, Rogelio Martínez told us: ‘This is a one-way trip.’ He was a smart man, wherever he went the rest of us would follow. None of us contradicted him,” he recalls.
Neither Rogelio Martínez, who was the director, nor the rest of the band knew that just one year later, in 1961, Cuba would impose strict travel limitations.
Over the next five decades Cubans would need permission from the government to leave the country and, if they remained abroad longer than allowed, they would not be admitted back to the island.
His visit to Guantánamo
Guantánamo Bay was the closest territory to her hometown, Havana, that Celia Cruz ever set foot on.
Her manager remembers that, those days in January 1990, the 30 or 40 employees who crossed the border from Cuba every day to work at the US base “were very excited to see her” since they remembered her from her television performances in the 1950s. , and Celia was also “very excited to see all those people, most of them older men who worked at the base.”
“He flew there on a military plane from Miami and, upon landing, after going down the stairs, The first thing he did was kiss the groundand uttered a phrase that has remained in the memory of Cubans. He said: ‘I have kissed this land in the name of all Cubans who are in exile,’” he reviews.
Although the trip only lasted a day and a half, it left a deep mark on Celia.
Pardillo Cid says that the artist could barely sleep the first night, immersed in her thoughts while she nostalgically perceived the smell of the Cuban countryside.
It was an hour and a half concert in which he sang “Guantanamera”, “Kimbara” and the rest of his greatest hits so far.
She also performed “Canto a La Habana,” a song dedicated to her hometown that mentions all the Cuban provinces, but she forgot part of the lyrics “because she was very nervous,” says the manager.
At the end of the concert, she asked permission to approach the fence that divides the Guantánamo base from Cuban territory, where she spent a few minutes with her husband and some journalists.
The cameras captured the moment he crouched down, put his hand between the fence and on the other side grabbed a handful of Cuban soil which he then took with him on his trip back to New York.
“The land was arid, with small stones. He gave a stone to each of his close friends. I keep mine with pride and honor, first because it was a gift from her; and second, because it is part of the land to which none of us have been able to return,” asserts Pardillo Cid.
Celia kept the earth in a glass box and, when she died of cancer in 2003, her manager and her husband fulfilled her last wish and They placed this little piece inside his coffin of the soil of Cuba.
The journey without return
Fidel Castro’s regime left a deep mark on Celia’s life, and she expressed her vision in an interview with the BBC in 1988.
“There was a change, so people thought the messiah had arrived. When we left in 1960 people were still happybut then, in 1961, some measures were announced that caused discontent,” he explained.
And he added: “We Cubans are very happy people. We continue to be, against all odds. Nobody can change our personality. But we like to have fun; We like to go out, travel and do what we want. “So when the country shut down, discontent began.”
Like Celia, the vast majority of Cubans who left in the first years after the Revolution never returned.
“The majority of Cuban exiles never return. That is a pain that we carry in our hearts. It’s very sad when You can’t return to the land where you were born because they don’t allow it.”says Pardillo Cid.
To which he adds: “that was the case of Celia: she was and in some way still is banned in Cuba. Cuban fans listen to her at home, but the official Cuban radio and television stations do not broadcast her music.”
Celia Cruz attempted to return to Cuba in 1962 to bury her mother, but was denied access.
It was when he decided never to return until the country was “free from the dictatorship.”
But that never happened.
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