Just in time for Oscar weekend, this is Part Two of my focus on Latin American films at the Academy Awards. Here are another five from the Cinema Dictadura canon that I recommend watching for their historic context and relevance, their inspirational stories, their realism, and sometimes, their comedic flair. And, also notably, their production design and music. In this case, I am also including films about Latin America with foreign producers.

If you missed part one, you can read it here.

Ainda Estou Aqui/I’m Still Here

Above: Scenes from I’m Still Here set to Brazilian soulman Juca Chaves’ “Take Me Back to Piauí.” Via Artivis on YouTube.

The hi-fi in the living room is a centerpiece of family gatherings, and can also be turned up to drown out adult conversations in the modern dream house on the Río de Janeiro strand where much of the action takes place in Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here,) which won Best International Feature at the 2025 Academy Awards.

The turntable in the movie spins songs that were the sounds of Brazil as the sixties met the seventies: samba rock, tropicalia, Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je t’aime moi non plus,” with Jane Birkin’s famously orgasmic vocals. Os Mutantes wayout “Baby.” The powerful groove of Donny Hathaway’s “The Ghetto.”

In the first half hour of I’m Still Here, the musical choices on the record player, and soundtrack, draw the film’s characters as cosmopolitan, liberal, effortlessly stylish and going firmly against the direction of a totalitarian regime. The same albums we may see as a calling card of cool could arouse suspicion or serve as proof of “anti-government activity” in a time when civil rights and freedoms of expression were curtailed in Brazil.

I’m Still Here is based on the true story of Rubens Paiva, a former congressman turned clandestine activist, his wife, Eunice Paiva, played by Fernanda Torres in an Oscar-nominated performance, and their five children. While the beginning of Walter Salles’ film presents what seems like a perfect picture of the sun-soaked Rio and beautiful and carefree Brazilians so often imagined, it soon descends into a much darker scenario.

I left the movie theater devastated. And yet. In I’m Still Here, life goes on even in the most previously unimaginable circumstances. As the movie’s title implies, it is a portrait of a woman’s perseverance and her choice to take a stand.

As the credits roll, the song É Preciso Dar Um Jeito, Meu Amigo (“We Need to Find a Way, My Friend”) by Erasmo Carlos and Roberto Carlos drives it home:

“Mas não vou ficar calado/No conforto acomodado/Como tantos por aí/É preciso dar um jeito, meu amigo/É preciso dar um jeito, meu amigo”

“But I won’t stay silent/In comfortable complacency /Like so many out there Something needs to be done, my friend/We need to find a way, my friend”

Gustavo Montenegro, who also worked on this year’s Oscar nominee The Secret Agent, was the music supervisor. I can’t wait to hear more from him.

Watch more: In 1999, director Salles’ film Central Station received two Oscar nomnations, for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actress.

Argentina 1985

Yesterday I dreamed about the hungry, the crazy ones

The ones who left the ones who went to prison…

Ayer soñé con los hambrientos, los locos
Los que fueron los que están en prisión…

Charly Garcia, “Inconsciente Colectivo”

The movie Argentina 1985 looks back at the country’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship from the vantage point of the democracy that immediately followed, starting in with the election of President Raúl Alfonsín. An estimated 30,000 people were murdered in those years of military rule in Argentina. The exact circumstances of many of their deaths and the whereabouts of their remains are still unknown.

The emotional, true-life thriller, nominatd for the Best International Picture Oscar in 2023, spotlights the landmark civilian court trial of the country’s former military leaders, where victims of the regime testified in excruciating detail. Starring Argentine leading man Ricardo Darín as prosecutor Julio Strassera, it visually recreates the Buenos Aires of that time through the worn European elegance of its interiors, and the dark streets that were the setting for a society in recovery.

Charly Garcia’s “Inconsciente Colectivo” plays at the end of the movie, one of the songs on the soundtrack intentionally placed to trigger immediate memories for Argentine viewers. It’s a track selected to start a collective singalong, accompanying applause and the wiping of tears while images of the actual trial roll by on screen before the credits.

In 1983, when democracy was declared, it already had its soundtrack. New groups and new music that expressed the optimism and euphoria of a time when young people were ready to move on.

The work of compiling witness testimony for the generals’ trial is accomplished in Argentina 1985 by a scrappy, shaggy haired young team put together by the prosecutor. Their spirit is captured in a scene that provides comic relief, set to the power pop song “Lunes por la Madrugada” by the group Abuelos de la Nada, released in 1984. It was an anthem of a new era. A song for screaming out loud.

“Beyond all the sorrow,

I feel that life is good

Today.”

“Mas allá de toda pena
Siento que la vida es buena
Hoy.”

Hear the song toward the end of this clip from the movie:

[The above text is excerpted from a feature story about the music of Argentina 1985 that I wrote for No Depression magazine.]

Before Night Falls

Before Night Falls is based on the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas’ memoir Antes que anochezca, but it is not a Cuban film. The movie was directed by American art star Julian Schnabel, and shot in Mexico, with Veracruz and other locations standing-in for the island.

Javier Bardem was nominated for a 2001 Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Arenas. His heavy not-exactly-Cuban-accented performance was his first in an English-language film, and it firmly set him on the road to becoming the best-known Spanish leading man in Hollywood after Antonio Banderas. Schnabel wrote the screenplay with Lázaro Gómez Carriles, Arenas’ companion at the end of his life in New York City. As he was dying from AIDS, Arenas ended his own life in 1990. Olivier Mártinez plays Gómez Carriles in the movie.

Like others, I am more of a fan of Schnabel’s films than his paintings, and particularly, of Before Night Falls. His painterly film about poetry and persecution in Cuba evokes the beauty of the island’s landscapes that are the stuff of nostalgic dreams, and what’s more interesting to me, the decadent surrealism of daily life.

While providing a stark window onto the history of the targeting of homosexuals in Cuba, Schnabel portrays most vividly a parallel reality to the ongoing repression, an alternative world of clandestine literature and sexual encounters.

For me, the film brings to life elements of a 70s Havana that had been described to me by contemporaries of Arenas, exile artists who left Cuba with the Mariel boat lift, who I met in Miami. In one memorable scene, Schnabel captures, at least in spirit, los bailes de perchero - secret “hanger” parties where guests would abandon their clothes and their watchful selves at the door.

I’ve listened often to the soundtrack of Before Night Falls. After I saw it for the first time I bought the CD, and I still find its mix of familiar vintage Cuban songs like Miguel Matamoros’ El que siembra su maíz and Bola de Nieve’s Por qué me dejaste querer and tracks by the folk singer Pedro Luis Ferrar and other contemporary artists to have an inspired flow; it’s not a mere pastiche compiled to represent “Cubanidad.” Music supervisor Susan Jacobs shares soundtrack credit with Olatz Lopez Garmendia, the Basque designer and model who was Schnabel’s wife at the time.

Carter Burwell wrote a gorgous score, with, interestingly, additional music by Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed.

Actas de Marusia/Letters From Marusia

Lesser-known than other movies on this list, 1975’s Oscar-nominated Actas de Marusia was directed by the Chilean Miguel Littin. It takes place in Chile, but is a Mexican film, made when Littin, who had been appointed by President Salvador Allende as the director of a Chilean State film company, went into exile after the bloody 1973 coup that put Pinochet in power.

The film flashes back to another violent episode in Chile’s history. In 1925, miners in Northern Chile exploited by British owners struggled for their rights to decent working conditions and pay. They organized to form a union.

In support of the mine owners, the Chilean government sent in the army. Over 500 striking workers and their family members were massacred.

Zorba the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis wrote the mournful soundtrack for Littin’s film.

Balseros

In the August 1994, in what would become known as the Cuban rafter crisis, Cubans left the island on precarious structures made from anything that, they hoped, would float. The documentary Balseros chronicles the departure of those 50,000 people through the stories of seven of the emigrants, who the filmmakers would follow for the next five years.

Balseros is a documentary feat, an immensely moving film that provides a profound look at a crucial moment in Havana. As Bosch would explain, the Cuban government his and other crews had blanket permission to film the emigrants’ preparations.

“Fidel knew perfectly well that Florida was not prepared to receive that amount of undocumented people,” director Carles Bosch said in a 2022 interview on the website Cubanet. “And it benefitted the Cuban government that it would be become a [media] event.”

Perhaps Balseros most transcendent value is the stark portrait of the immigrant experience in the United States that it creates through the stories of its seven characters.

“It is after the years have gone by that you can begin to value what you have [risked your life for],” Bosch said. “It is not just about crossing thousands of miles over the ocean.”

Bosch and his crew continued to film for the Catalan public television channel for an ongoing series of reports from Cuba, and support for the film was later provided by Cinemax/HBO.

The 2002 doc was nominated for a Best Documentary Award at the Oscars in 2004. Balseros won other awards, including Best Documentary at the Havana Film Festival (Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano), an Emmy for Best Photography, and a Peabody Award.

“These interwoven stories show the emotional toll exacted on those who risked acts of desperation in hopes of attaining a better life,” observed the Peabody Award jury, praising the film as one that “cast a revealing light on Cuban culture and the country’s perceptions of America during this tumultuous time.”

The emotion in Balseros is heightened by boleros performed by the Cuban singer Lucrecia. She emigrated to Spain in 1993.

More about movies:

Brazil’s The Secret Agent did not win Best International Feature, or less surprisingly, because it is a Latin American film, Best Actor, Best Picture or Best Cinematography at the Oscars, although I would have liked to see it break those barriers. Still, I hope that its four nominations will motivate more people to see it, and to watch other movies from Latin America that have been nominated for the Oscars, and which like O Agente Secreto, unspool during periods of authoritarian rule in the countries where they take place.

Here are five films I recommend watching for their historic context and relevance, their inspirational stories, their realism, and sometimes, their comedic flair. And, also notably, their production design and music. The circumstances and perspectives are different, but they all are set in the 1970s and 1980s.

This is part one of my list. Read part two HERE.

LA HISTORIA OFICIAL/THE OFFICIAL STORY

La Historia Oficial, called The Official Story in the U.S., was the first Latin American film to win an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1986. A surprising fact to say the very least, some might say shameful, given the history of cinema from the region up to that point.

La Historia Oficial takes place in 1983. In October of that year, Raúl Alfonsín was elected president, following the country’s years of violent military dictatorship since 1976, during which time, as the movie revealed to international viewers through a story centering on an adoptive mother played by Norma Aleandro, babies were taken from women who gave birth, and were killed, in captivity. The babies were raised by military families, government personnel, and those in their favor.

The movie premiered in Buenos Aires less than two years after those democratic elections, which could seem like an exceptionally rapid conversion of national trauma to the screen. But the Oscar-winning movie, directed by Luis Puenzo, was just one of a New Argentine Cinema Wave that also included, to name just a few, 1981’s Tiempo de revancha (Time for Revenge, directed Adolfo Aristarain,) 1983’s No habrá más penas ni olvido (Funny Dirty Little War), directed by Héctor Olivera, and the searing La noche de los lápices from 1986, also directed by Olivera, based on one dark episode in the years of dictatorship, the torturing and killing of high school students in 1976 in response to student protests in La Plata.

All of these movies provided me with an education in authoritarian terror, and also humanity. I saw them after I arrived in Buenos Aires in 1986, the first week of a scorching February, as an Inter American Press Association Scholar assigned to work at the financial newspaper El Ambito Financiero. I was put up in a faded grand hotel on the Avenida de Mayo where the thick floral carpeting seemed endless and most rooms were empty. I was told to pick up my grant money - a big stack of Argentine currency - once a month, since, as a foreigner, I “wouldn’t understand the paper’s point of view,” and my help would not be needed. Through colleagues at the Associated Press, where I had gotten my first journalism job as a copy girl on the New York City desk a year-and-a-half earlier, I did find freelance work for the Buenos Aires Herald. The American-owned English-language newspaper, under its courageous British editor, Robert Cox, had starting early in the days of the dictatorship published reports of people who had been detained and never returned home, when other Buenos Aires papers fearfully (with every right to be fearful) remained silent during the dictatorship. (Cox himself was arrested and then released, and he and his family left the country under constant threats on their lives; even his 11-year-old son was threatened.)

Watch the trailer for a documentary about Robert Cox, “Messenger on a White Horse,” HERE.

One of my first assignments at the Herald was to write a series of articles about that new Argentine cinema explosion. I interviewed the directors of the above-mentioned movies and others, who after escaping censorship and harm by going into exile, or living in the purgatory of directing advertising commercials in Argentina, were more than ready to make movies that to different degrees were inspired by recent events. They included Eliseo Subiela, the director of Hombre Mirando al Sudeste, who became a friend. (I also soon met Gaspar Noé, then a wily French-educated kid, the son of the beloved painter Luis Felipe Noé, who would go on to build his own brand of cinematic terror.) It was a time when my Latin American education began in earnest, and my American teenage innocence ended. Though I still have so much to learn.

In La Historia Oficial, the song “En el País de nomeacuerdo” (“In the Land of Idon’tremember”) by the Argentine mother of children’s music, Maria Elena Walsh, is used to haunting effect.

Here is a recording of the original song by Walsh, whose seemingly playful lyrics allude to the dangers of collective forgetting:

“In the land of I don’t remember
One step this way, I don’t remember if I took it
One step that way, oh, how scared I am

In the land of I don’t remember
I take three little steps and get lost
One step back and I don’t take any more
Because I already forgot where I put the other foot”

WATCH MORE: As the children of the disappeared came of age, and more information about their origins was revealed, movies portraying their search for their idenitities have been made. Two of them are 2003’s critically-acclaimed Cautiva, and the experimental-styled personal documentary Los Rubios, released the same year, by Albertina Carri, whose parents were disappeared in 1976.

O AGENTE SECRETO/THE SECRET AGENT

I agree with Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw that O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent) should win the award for Best Picture at the Oscars next Sunday (March 15.)

Bradshaw describes the engrossing and complex movie about a professor trying to escape the reach of the tentacles of Brazil’s corrupt regime as “an amazingly sophisticated, wayward and garrulous film from Brazil, a film about love and fatherhood, tyranny and resistance, and coming to terms with the past. It is digressive and droll and yet in its final act escalates stunningly from lugubrious mystery to cold-sweat tension and violence.”

That slowly unraveling plot, the performance by Best Actor-nominated Wagner Moura, and the rest of the ensemble cast of characters who are tough in different ways; the impeccable period art direction and wardrobe (highlighting effortless and eccentric style, and also the tightness of men’s pants in that decade.) And the soundtrack! When the movie ended after three hours, I just wanted to kept sitting there and watch it again.

“I think The Secret Agent is very much about power, and how power can be used as a whim, or just as one’s desire to crush somebody else, and that can be someone, or a group of people, or a country,” director Kleber Mendonça Filho said in an interview with Deadline. “And unfortunately, that’s just the history of humanity…I wrote the film as taking place in 1977, thinking that it would be a very good disguise, in terms of not really discussing contemporary sociopolitical situations in Brazil, for example. But after a while, I realized that I was trying to fool myself, because in fact, what we had in the military regime, they attempted to do all over again just recently. So, I was writing about the past, but it was very much about contemporary Brazil, or Brazil from seven years ago. The systems of power, they keep coming back, and I think that’s what The Secret Agent is about.”

Deceptively carefree grooves, psychedelic folk and dramatic drinking songs help to create the layers of Brazilian reality captured in the film, which is also up for Best International Feature Film and Best Casting at the 2026 Academy Awards.

Here are three songs that set the tone for the movie’s portrait of 1970s Brazil:

FRESA Y CHOCOLATE/STRAWBERRY AND CHOCOLATE

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 1994. Although it did not win the Oscar, it was at the time the first Cuban film commercially distributed in the United States in three decades, and for Americans then opened a window onto the quality of Cuba’s active cinema production, as well as a glimpse of life in Havana, prominently featuring the Coppelia ice cream parlor.

In an article in the New York Times headlined “Totalitarian Cuba, Ice Cream and Understanding,” writer Michael Z. Wise described it as chronicling the unlikely friendship between a gay intellectual (Diego, actor Jorge Perugorria’s character) and a Communist militant, (David, played by Vladimir Cruz) that develops in “a controlled society where respect for diversity, be it of ice cream flavors, sex or ideas, has often been hard to come by.”

“It’s not strictly a film about homosexuals,” Gutiérrez Alea, who died of cancer in 1996 at age 69, told Wise. The director was best known, before Fresa y Chocolate and Oscar buzz brought him to more mainstream audiences, for his 1968 classic Memorias de Subdesarollo (Memories of Underdevelopment). Juan Carlos Tabío shared the director credit with Gutiérrez Alea on Fresa y Chocolate.

“It is about the intolerance and incomprehension of those who are different,” Gutiérrez Alea said of the film. “And that applies not only to homosexuals, but to people who think with their own head, and Blacks, and everyone who is discriminated against.”

The film was tenderly scored by Cuban composer José María Vitier.

ROMA

“In Mexico, our memories are always linked to songs,” the late, great Mexican music supervisor Lynn Fainchtein told me when I talked to her in 2019 about the soundtrack for Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including best picture. The 2018 Netflix production won Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director and Best Cinematography.

Music plays an exceptional role in the movie. “All of the music is embedded in the story,” Fainchtein said. “It’s part of each scene. “There is nothing by accident. Nothing that doesn’t have meaning.”

In addition to relying on her and Cuarón’s memories, Fainchtein did extensive research on what songs received radio airplay in 1970 and 1971. Music in Roma most often comes from the ever-present radio, an all-access medium of symbolic importance in a film that highlights class inequality.

“The film is about the relationship that exists between class and ethnic background,” Cuarón said about Roma, which is a reconstruction of the early-1970s Mexico City of his youth. He grew up in the Roma neighborhood of the film’s title.

Cuarón has said that the movie is not intentionally political. But it is set in a tense time of student demonstrations and exploding violence brought on by government repression. (For background, read Alejandro de la Garza’s 2019 article in Time Magazine.)

Lynn Fainchtein died in 2024 at age 60. One of the people whose ear I have most admired, she was largely responsible for the introduction of what became known as Latin alternative music to international audiences, through movies. I could say no more than that she worked with Alejandro González Iñárritu on Amores Perros. In fact, she worked on all of his films, including Birdman and 21 Grams. And the list of movies she soundtracked went way beyond.

To read Fainchtein’s descriptions of what for her were key songs in Roma, read my complete interview with her about the film’s music in Billboard.

NO

Pablo Lorraín’s high-spirited No is “the true story of a marketing campaign that sparked a revolution.” The movie was nominated in 2013 for Best Foreign Language Film.

The story takes place in 1988, when Chileans ended the 15-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet by voting no in a “Yes or No” referrendum on whether he should stay in power.

No takes entertainment-enhancing liberties with the story but essentially recounts the real events. Lorraín used 30% archival footage from the time of the campaign in the movie.

The plot centers on the creation of the “No” campaign, which in the movie is orchestrated by a young advertising director played by actor Gael García Bernal as a Chilean who has returned from exile in Mexico, bringing with him a modern approach. With what now we’d consider an MTV-type style, he appeals to voters in the same way he would consumers. He rides around Santiago on a skateboard, and he knows that democracy must be presented as “a happy product” in order to win.

As seen in the trailer above, the movie includes the actual jingle that was composed for the campaign. Here below, in an extensive report on the campaign from 1988 in which you can watch the actual ad with the jingle. (Some of this same footage is included in the movie.)

As I’m writing this today, I can’t stop singing Chile’s “no” song.

In addition to the inspirational jingle, The No soundtrack included music by Chilean artist Isabel Parra (daighter of Violeta Parra) and the group Ini illimani.

After No came out, The New York Times published this excellent article by Larry Rohter about the movie, the actual story, and the debate the film incited in Chile: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/movies/oscar-nominated-no-stirring-debate-in-chile.html

WATCH MORE: For a very different look at life - and death - under the Pinochet regime, I recommend the documentary Mi Vida con Carlos by Germán Berger, whose father, a provincial radio announcer, was detained and murdered in 1973. The filmmaker’s mother is Carmen Hertz, a lawyer who after democracy was restored in Chile became president of the Chilean Congress’ Human Rights Comission, and was instrumental in achieving the arrest of Pinochet in Spain in 1988 and subsequently his return to Chile.

Thank you for reading and listening, and for your support to keep me going here. Please ❤️ and share if you enjoyed this piece. It really helps others to find Cuba on Record.

Five more films and soundtracks:

It was not by any means the beginning of the repression of artistic expression, but it was a turning point in the detention of contemporary artists, and for rebellion. As told by artists on the ground in Cuban filmmaker Ernesto Fundora’s new documentary, Estamos Conectados (We Are Connected), Cuba’s Decree 349, a law laid down by the Cuban government in 2018, requires artists to have approval from State authorities to present their work anyplace where people can see it, and prohibits them from selling it without government permission. The arbitrary law, which according to the government, targets “vulger,” “mediocre” and “low brow” creations, allows for the detention of visual and performing artists, musicians and writers, and extends to the outlawing of even aquiring materials to make art.

Amnesty International has called it a “dystopian prospect for Cuba’s artists.”

“Estamos Conectados” chronicles the San Isidro Movement, formed by artists in Havana in response to the decree, telling the story of Cuba’s recent and ongoing crackdown and the artists’ resistance through the words and work of 38-year-old artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántera, who has been arrested dozens of times and is currently in prison on a five-year sentence. Cuban rappers who have created a raging soundtrack for the movement are heard in the film, and pianist Omar Sosa provides a poignant piano score.

The documentary will premiere this Saturday (February 7) at the Museum of the Cuban Diaspora in Miami. Other Miami screenings are scheduled for this month. (See Ernesto Fundora’s Instagram for details.) Showings in other cities are in the works.

Fundora describes Otero as “a brave man who confronted, without weapons or bullets, a military dictatorship specializing in fabricating disqualifying sophisms against its opponents.” He also refers to the artist as “an eccentric and charismatic performer.” The film documents his street performance pieces, his videos and social media posts, and his constant sparring with police.

“He is someone with a transendent mission,” Fundora told me last week when I contacted him about the film. “It goes beyond ego. It’s a commitment to the country, the nation, the people and Cuba’s destiny. He knows that art is one of the few tools that can help to save humanity and to cure its wounds.”

This trailer does not have English subtitles, but the film does.

Otero has used Cuban religious iconography to symbolize art’s higher cause, and to connect with people on the street. His performance works, as seen in the film, have included a series of pilgrimages in which he pulled a cart through the streets containing a large wooden figure of a saint - San Lazaro or the Cuban patron saint the Caridad del Cobre Virgin, whose representation is the goddess Oshún in the syncretic Afro-Cuban religion. Otero also dragged a rock chained to his ankle, scooting on his butt through the street.

Among other acts that provoked police, he walked Havana dressed as a Tropicana dancer in full makeup and miminal body coverage, to represent the selling of Cuban identity to foreigners. He and other artists ran a race wrapped in American flags. And he wore a Cuban flag continually for a month, photographing himself in situations including sitting on the toilet.

A 2020 video piece by Pavel Urkiza with Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, showing lips in the colors of the Cuban flag whistling the Cuban National Anthem:

We Are Connected - a phrase Otero often uses when speaking to his fellow artists and the public - was mostly filmed in Havana by the San Isidro Movement members themselves. In some parts of the doc, footage allows for a contrast between the short-lived “thaw” between the U.S. and Cuba, highlighted by President Obama’s 2016 visit to Havana, and the subsequent increase in censorship, repression and arrests, and also a mass exodus by artists who have been able to leave Cuba. The film follows the movement until July 2021, when street demonstrations erupted throughout the island to protest shortages of food and medicine and the government repression that has kept the island’s population locked down. It was then that Otero was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison.

“This is a questioning of Cuban contemporary reality rather than personal struggle with the authorities,” says Otero in the film. “What makes me a political artist is the situation I live in. I’m from a generation that wants a better world…that the Cubans can be comfortable in Cuba. My generation wants to have some change in their pocket, be free, not have problems with the government. I want internet in my house.”

Otero speaks candidly throughout “Estamos conectados” via video. The use of iPhone recorded testimonials has become a common and often crucial documentary device, and it may not seem particularly remarkable here. But the use of social media by independent artists and and journalists in Cuba has presented new challenges to the government in their goal of containing freedom of expression.

“Senior officials in the Cuban government have acknowledged publicly that due to the growing presence of the internet and the availability of pirated media from abroad, the state has lost control of the information on the island,” the writer and artist Coco Fusco wrote in a 2019 article about the Cuban authorities’ campaign against Otero published on the site Hyperallergic. “Artists are members of an island elite with the greatest access to travel, digital technology, and foreign influence. Together with a growing cadre of independent journalists and bloggers, they have introduced methods of communication and civil disobedience into public culture that state officials are not used to having to deal with.”

Berna Jam, whose music is featured in the doc:

At one point in Fundora’s documentary, Otero acknowledges that Cuba has evolved.

“In the 1970s they would have shot us for what we are doing,” he says. And several times in the film, he explains that his own art has been influenced directly by defiant Cuban artists who came before.

Ernesto Fundora himself is one example. Best known outside of Cuba for his risk-taking video for Celia Cruz’s song “La negra tiene tumbao,” Fundora was also part of an underground scene in Havana in the early 1990s. Here is his video of Santiago Feliu’s song “bs. as. Muerte del ’92” (“bs. as. Death of ’92”.)

Fundora created more mainstream music videos in Cuba as well, but ones like Feliu’s, with decadent settings and dissident messages, could not be shown, although copies secretly circulated. He lived that double life as a filmmaker until he left Cuba for Mexico City.

“I think that my generation and the generation of the San isidro movement have common DNA in terms of philosophy, ethics, social consciousness and esthetic vision,” he says, “the desire to create a common good and elevate citizens’ social awareness. But Luis Manuel and San Isidro go beyond us in their courage, daring, boldness and in working as a team. They rose above because they knew how to work together.”

Thank you for reading and listening, and for your support to keep me going here. Please ❤️ and share if you enjoyed this piece. It really helps others to find Cuba on Record.

Further reading, watching and listening:

-To see more of Ernesto Fundora’s films and videos: https://efundora.com/mx/

-For more about the history of performance art in Cuba and government censorship, read Coco Fusco’s book Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba.

Related stories from Cuba on Record:

Today’s installment of the Celia Cruz: 100 years/100 songs centennial series looks back at some of Celia’s many film, TV and soundtrack appearances.

Listen to the playlist and watch the clips below.

NY Times film critic Vincent Canby opened his otherwise unenthusiastic review of the film The Mambo Kings with an appreciation of Celia Cruz:

“About halfway through The Mambo Kings, the adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Oscar Hijuelos, there is a brief moment in which all of the elements work as they were meant to,” he wrote in his February 1992 critique. He went on to describe the appearance of “Miss Cruz,” who played Evalina Montoya, the owner of the movie’s Club Babalú as

“a figure of light and shadow, a one-woman definition of chiaroscuro. Her broad smile, the lightness of her walk, the easy way she carries herself become an expression of the exuberant Latin music that is the other side of the mismatched, melancholy lives of the film's Latin exiles.”

Canby had no such praise for the stars of the film, Antonio Banderas and Armand Assante, and less for the movie’s director, Arne Glimcher. He did like the music (how could he resist it), which included several numbers sung by Cruz and a nightclub scene with Tito Puente performing as himself. But, Canby wrote, “It's as if there were a terrible telephone connection between the film's vivid sound track and its tepid romantic melodrama, to which the music is supposed to give style and substance.”

Canby (who passed away in October 2000) may not have known that her appearance in The Mambo Kings was just one of the many times that Cruz exhibited her own magnetic style, substance and always, professionalism on the screen since the early days of her career.

Talk about style: here is Cruz in the 1961 Mexican film Amorcito corazón, together with La Sonora Matancera:

And here, a decade earlier in the Cuban movie Rincón Criollo, at age 25, she’s the lead in a nightclub scene, performing “El mambo es así.” In the clip below, as documented by Cruz biographer Rosa Marquetti, she’s accompanied by the Havana radio network Suaritos’ Orquesta Atómica and Obdulio Morales, author of the song, and the Mulatas de Fuego, the all-women dance and singing group with which Cruz performed as her star first rose. Although she had already been cast in a film two years earlier (Salon México,) this was the ingenue’s first cast credit (as Celia Cruz and her Mambo Chorus.)

In 1957, Cruz performed in the Afro-Cuban Carnaval street scenes of Affair in Havana, starred John Cassavetes as a jazz piano player and Raymond Burr as a sugar plantation owner confined to a wheelchair after an accident, who is betrayed by his wife (Sara Shane.) Although the response to the movie was unimpressive, it exposed Cruz’s charismatic presence and voice to American audiences.

After Cruz settled in the United States in the early 1960s, frequent promotional tours kept her in touch with her growing fans in Latin America and Spain. She was a frequent guest on Spanish TV. By the late sixties, televised variety shows in Spain were reflecting the country’s awkward evolution into modern times under the Franco dictatorship, featuring liberating new sounds and groovy fashions but not quite popping the cork on the new culture.

But no matter what the situation, Cruz always came out swinging to the music. She heats up the solitary dance floor where she’s singing her signature “Bemba Colorá” in this clip from 1970:

Here, in 1984, when Spain’s “movida” was in full swing, she shows how times had changed, letting loose in an intimate performance in the studio of Barcelona’s TV3 with Tito Puente (and a band including her husband Pedro Knight singing back up.)

In the United States, Cruz visited Sesame Street on four occasions. Teaching the little viewers Spanish words and exposing them to Cuban music, she made an indelible mark on new generations of American Latinos and non-Latinos.

Here’s an appearance from 1986, when, dancing with Big Bird, she sang the song “Sun Sun Babae,” made famous by Conjunto Casino, (shortening the title to “Zun Zun.”)

In 1994, she made “Quimbara” into a call-and-response game with the Sesame kids and Muppets.

And I’m including Celia’s Carnaval counting song with a chorus of Muppets just because I love it. (When I was listening to it today, my 17-year-old son came running from the next room. We used to watch it on a DVD all the time when he was a toddler.)

It’s notable that on Celia’s Sesame guest spots she spoke, and sang, in English, as well as Spanish. As late as 1998, after almost four decades in the U.S., she told journalist Mirta Ojito in a NY Times article titled “Singer's Popularity Rides Waves of Immigration” that she “had never attempted to cultivate a non-Hispanic audience.”

And when she was awarded a Latin Grammy in 2002 (not the first), she said, with a joke too often repeated by the maestros of her generation, “Ladies and gentlemen excuse my English because it’s not very good looking.”

But while she shied away from recording in English, she went bilingual for Sesame Street, and spoke and sang in English in The Mambo Kings. After demonstrating her appeal for mixed audiences (and important film critics) in that movie, she was cast in an English-speaking cameo role in 1995’s The Perez Family. This time, not as a glamorous nightlife figure, but as a santera, a fortune teller in the makeshift refugee camp for Cubans in Miami set up in the aftermath of the 1980 Mariel boatlift that is the setting at the start of the film.

As Roger Ebert put it, “There [was] controversy over the casting of so many non-Hispanic actors ” in the movie, which starred Marisa Tomei, Alfredo Molina and Anjelica Huston.

“The actors are so frenetically “ethnic” that they never convince as real people,” L.A. Times critic Peter Rainer wrote in his scathing review. “Tomei, normally one of the most likable of actresses, traipses about in a heavy Coppertone tan and flouncy garb and a Charo accent.”

Celia Cruz was the only one of the well-known performers in the film who was Cuban. In a brief scene, she was clothed to look like the gypsy of a wardrobe person’s imagination. But, as usual, Cruz did the work and played her role with dignity.

The Perez Family was a box office dissapointment. It did have a fine if unsurprising soundtrack that did not include a song sung by Cruz. (Listen to her version of the movie theme “Mata Siguaraya” below.)

Was The Perez Family an embarrasment for Cruz when she saw the finished movie? I do not know.

There’s no lack of pride in Celia Cruz and the Fania All Stars Live in Africa, the concert of the documentary of the New York salsa collective’s participation in Zaire 74, the music festival preceding The Rumble in the Jungle, the Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman championship fight in Kinshasa. The footage released on DVD captures a powerful and gorgeous Celia at the top of her game.

LISTEN TO THE PLAYLIST:

On Qobuz:

On Spotify:

Further reading:

Fabien Pisani’s enthralling documentary En la Caliente: Tales of a Reggaeton Warrior is a portrait of the deep underground in Santiago de Cuba, where a jerry-rigged gym and a hidden room with a microphone and a computer are the lifeblood of the protagonists of the film. The 2024 doc, whose release has thus far been limited to festivals, was awarded Colombia’s Gabo Foundation Imagen prize (named for Gabriel García Márquez) last weekend. Watch the trailer below.

Pisani’s covertly filmed scenes of the star of a musical revolution in Cuba and revealing footage of life on Santiago’s streets uniquely document the rise of reggaeton in the island, which was led by the subject of En la Caliente: Candyman (he has also spelled it Kandyman).

Candyman, whose given name is Rubén Cuesta Palomo, was weaned on the dancehall music he heard on Jamaican stations he and his friends could dial in on the radio using antennas made with brooms and pipes. Immersed in the culture, he also smoked a lot of weed. When reggaeton from Puerto Rico started to explode in the early 2000s, Santiago, where an intense hip hop scene had long been percolating, was ripe for a reggaeton takeover whose controversial success was in its inception staged almost singlehandedly by Candyman.

As told in the documentary, some people thought Candyman was from Panamá (cradle of reggaeton) when they first heard his songs. He started out performing at martial arts demonstrations, and soon his music was being passed around and was heard all over the island. I happened to be in Havana in 2003 and can attest to the Candyman “fever” as captured in the movie. Everyone was listening to and talking about Candyman. The music was loud and intrusive and raunchy, and the kids loved it. And not just the kids. As detailed in the film, Candyman opened a Pandora’s Box. Music in Cuba would never be the same.

“What my music gave this country was joy,” Candyman says in the documentary. “I can’t say that the 12 million people in this country liked my music, but at least 5 million liked it.”

The authorities did not, which led to the circumstances that are at the center of the visceral drama of En la Caliente. Cancelled by authorities, Rubén Cuesta becomes a man walled in by isolation and broken down by the inability to express himself.

“You go to bed being a success and in the morning there’s silence,” he says. He cries. And ultimately persists.

Later in the film, Pisani catches up with Candyman, living in a trailer in Miami.

“Although the story focuses on a Cuban reality, the documentary transcends its context to address universal issues,” representatives of the Gabo Foundation, which awards the documentary prize, wrote, “Themes such as repression, cultural identity, and resistance resonate in diverse realities, making this work a valuable and relevant testimony for audiences around the world.” The members of the awards jury lauded the film for exploring the repercussions of the social transformation that Cuba experienced in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In his acceptance speech at the awards ceremony, Pisani dedicated the prize to Candyman himself, calling him “a central figure in a cultural movement that shook the island with the force that the new Cuban cinema and the Nueva Trova [folk music movement] did in the 1960s.”

As reported by several Spanish-langage media outlets, Pisani, who lives between Mexico City and New York, also commented on the current situation in his native Cuba and the importance of art to shine a light: “It is no secret that Cuba is going through the worst moment in its history, the darkest, the most hopeless, and I want to believe that telling these stories, which can be difficult and uncomfortable, is essential for imagining a different future.”

I was able to view En la Caliente last year when it had a short run on Spain’s Caixaforum+ channel. I hope this prize will lead to it being available for viewing on a streaming platform and perhaps in theatrical release soon. Meanwhile, here is the trailer:

Here is Candyman’s Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@Candymanoficial

Further reading:

Argentines hug their heroes hard, and Lalo Schifrin, who died June 26 at 93, is one of the greatest in the country’s proud cultural pantheon. I first learned his name not growing up in the U.S., where as a girl I heard his music out at the movies with my parents, but from the rock musicians I hung out with as a young journalist in Buenos Aires. They revered his fast and furious virtuosity, and shared his tango soul and lifelong pursuit of something new.

The son of a violinist in the orchestra at the prestigious Teatro Colón, Schifrin was studying piano seriously at age 16, when he also discovered jazz, and was granted a scholarship by the Paris conservatory when he was 20. Shortly thereafter, in the mid-fifties, he was already writing music for film and TV when a meeting with Dizzy Gillespie in Buenos Aires prompted his move to the United States. In 1970, after Schifrin had composed the Mission Impossible theme song and the scores for Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman and Steve McQueen’s Bullit, the press had already crowned the “dark-haired pipe smoker” Hollywood’s hottest composer.

As one reporter noted around that time, Schifrin’s work derived from “a seemingly endless supply of music, from rock to symphony.”

That well-spring included of course jazz, the music he had fallen in love with as a teen and pursued despite his father’s misgivings. And also the tango, Brazilian bossa nova, Cuban dance music, and flamenco and medieval instrumental music from Spain.

Schifrin first recorded with the new tango pioneer Astor Piazzolla in 1955, when they were both living in Paris.

“Astor and I talked a lot about jazz,” Schifrin later recalled in an interview with the Argentine newspaper La Nación. “Jazz and his loves, who were Ellington, Gillespie, Gershwin.”

According to Schifrin, Piazzolla told him, “I need a pianist who has swing because my tangos have swing.” Schifrin had swing.

The Argentine pianist was absorbing the Latin tinge that had seeped into jazz at the time. Schifrin plays on a version of the Duke Ellington standard “Caravan,” composed by the Puerto Rican trombonist Juan Tizol, on an album by Eddie Warner titled 100% Mambo. The estimated recording year is also 1955, according to a detailed Lalo Schifrin discography compiled by Doug Payne.

The young Schifrin then moved back to Buenos Aires and formed his own jazz big band. He recorded his first solo album in 1957. Spectrum was a set of jazz standards. He soon had a taste of what would be his lifelong success in film: he composed the soundtrack for the 1958 movie El Jefe, which won the Best Spanish-Language Film Award at the Mar de Plata Festival. The theme song features saxophonist Gato Barbieri.

Famously, the course of Schifrin’s future had been largely determined when in 1956 he met Gillespie, who came to Buenos Aires as part of a State Department good will tour and was impressed by the arrangements played by the Argentine pianist’s jazz band. With “Gillespiana,” a composition he wrote for Dizzy, in hand, he headed to New York in 1958. His sights were set on joining the authentic American jazz scene, but for a time he’d be encapsulated as a Latin player.

“Schifrin was a jazz wunderkind with a deep love of bebop and no interest in the tango or in any other Latin American musical genre,” Matthew Karush, author of the book Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music, writes in a blog post on the Duke University Press website. Nevertheless, by the mid-1950s, the idea of ‘Latin jazz,’ conceived as a mixture of jazz improvisation with Cuban rhythms, was well established. This category, and the larger one of Latin music, created opportunities for someone like Schifrin, who combined impressive musical skills with Latin American ancestry. Shortly after moving to New York, Schifrin took a job as pianist and arranger for the Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat.”

While I would argue with Karush’s statement about Schifrin’s total rejection of Latin music, it is clear that playing with rhumba king Cugat was not what the young pianist had in mind. In an interview years later in the Argentine paper La Nación, Schifrin was blasé about his work with Cugat, then past his prime as an exuberant international personality and bandleader who led the house orchestra at the Waldorf Astoria hotel.

As Karush notes, this video of a TV performance by the band “demonstrates Schifrin’s showmanship, but it also reveals the way he was able to play the role of an authentic practitioner of what the television announcer calls ‘the modern Latin form.’”

Schifrin recalled the job with Cugat only as a way to make some money while waiting for Gillespie to return from touring; he almost went back to Buenos Aires when the wait extended to two years. But then the offer came from Gillespie, both to record “Gillespiana” and to join his band as the piano player.

While he waited for Gillespie, Schifrin also recorded his second solo album. It was released by Tico Records, the New York Latin label known as home to Tito Puente and a precursor to the salsa label Fania in the sowing of the U.S. Latin music market.

This may seem surprising given Schifrin’s early ambitions to be a jazz musician, not an Argentine pianist playing tropical music, but it makes sense as a further indication that he was considered above all a “Latin” musician during those first years in New York. Schifrin’s Piano Español follows a typical format for Latin music albums during that golden age of Cuban music, a track list surely suggested to Schifrin by the label for maximum sales potential.

It includes standards like Puerto Rican composer Rafael Hernandez’s “El Cumbanchero” -(my pick on this album)- and Mexican songwriter Alberto Domínguez’s crossover hit “Frenesí.” As with so many other records of the time, a cha-cha-chá is included - in this case a “cha-cha-chá flamenco”, and an Afro number -Ismael Morales’ “Jungle Fever”-that Schifrin plays with hard jazzy flourishes surrounded by the beating of drums and random whistles. Also typical, the album includes a selection from the American songbook: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “All the Things You Are.” Schifrin approaches the numbers with a verve that in retrospect gives some indication of his future larger-than-life sound.

That sound would come through more clearly on his 1964 album New Fantasy. Schifrin’s wow take on “The Peanut Vendor” converts the benign 1930 Cuban hit into a spine-tingling thriller.

Schifrin made a later Cuban connection when he scored the 1969 film Che! The Che Guevara biopic, starring Omar Sharif with a messy beehive hairdo, continues to get miserable reviews to this day (Example: “A soggy saga so noncommittal that the Cuban Revolution ultimately seems no more monumental a historical event than the Iowa State Fair.” Matt Brunsun, Film Frenzy).

But the soundtrack is a discovery, featuring Cuban percussion masters Mongo Santamaría and Francisco Aguabella, among other notable musicians.

Doug Payne calls it a “a brilliant, varied collection of Latin themes.” Read his notes on the album that in Schifrin’s words featured the “hot Latin sounds from the rhythms and colors of Cuba, Argentina and the Bolivian Andes” here.

Schifrin’s fruitful working relationships with Cuban musicians in the United States also featured his fantastic 1962 collaboration with another of the greatest Cuban percussionists of all time: Candido Camero, who also played with Gillespie, and was another musician who clearly felt his place was in the jazz world. Candido’s Conga Soul, on Roulette Records, was a groundbreaking jazz record, led by Candido, who came up with idea of using three congas to play melodies, a technique that became his trademark. On Conga Soul, he shares writing credits with Schifrin,

Schifrin’s 1960s explorations also included recordings of then-new sound coming from Brazil - the Bossa nova.

While his Hollywood career continued to flourish, Schifrin would come together with Astor Piazzolla in the studio again in 1987, to record the album Concierto para Bandoneón y Orquesta in New York. He later told La Nación journalist Claudio Parisi that during that trip he took Piazzolla to Manhattan’s Victor’s Café to eat Cuban food, expressing amazement that Piazzolla had never been there.

“He liked to eat well. First class. That’s why I took him to Victor’s.” Piazzolla died in 1992.

In 1998, Schifrin would bring his music home once again, composing and arranging the soundtrack for the film Tango, from the Spanish director Carlos Saura, which was nominated for an Oscar.

In 2006, Schifrin recorded Letters From Argentina, an album of his own beautiful tangos and Argentine folkloric music.

“Like the clear sky, like the rain, like the clouds, music has always been part of the Argentinean atmosphere. The strumming of the Gauchos’ guitars, the rhythms of the Indian drums, the expressive melodies of the bandoneon were the aural medium in which I grew up,” the composer wrote in the notes to the album. “In Argentina, the music was ever present in the literature, in the visual arts, and in the history of the country.

Tangos coming from radios, folk music sang and danced in festivities, Milongas and Candombes celebrating Mardi Gras surrounded my childhood in Buenos Aires.

“Letters from Argentina” are the musical memories enhanced by my imagination and converted into impressions of my homeland. Working on this project helped me to recreate an unreal past in which a memory persists and invites us to a journey full of promises and dreams.”

RIP Lalo Schifrin.

Thank you for reading and listening. Please ❤️ and share if you enjoyed this piece. It really helps others to find Cuba on Record.

Gracias!

Further reading:

More music movies from director Carlos Saura:

The documentary “San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood” gets a Black History Month screening at a Hamptons Doc Fest event at the Southampton Arts Center on Saturday Feb. 22; a follow-up to the film’s debut last fall at Lincoln Center. The documentary will also be shown at the Bronx Music Hall/Bronx Music Heritage Center in NYC on Thursday, April 24 at 7pm. There will be a panel discussion after the film on gentrification and the similarities between what happened in the South Bronx and San Juan Hill. Admission is free.

The doc directed by Stanley Nelson complements Lincoln Center’s “Legacies of San Juan Hill” website, a multimedia history documenting government’s deliberate erasure of an urban culture whose tragedy resonates today.

The 1959 groundbreaking ceremony for the Lincoln Center project was presided over by President Eisenhower and attended by John D. Rockefeller 3rd and New York City rebuilding mastermind Robert Moses. The New York Philharmonic played Handel’s “Messiah.” In the documentary “San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood,” that scene of pomp and circumstance is juxtaposed with footage of apartment buildings and bodegas folding into the ground in clouds of concrete dust, and the sound of dynamite explosions and the crunching of rubble.

We saw the whole block disappear. It was, I guess, progress is what they were saying.

“San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood” reconstructs the story of the area, unknown to the average audience member at Lincoln Center today, through interviews with people who grew up there, archival footage and music with roots in the working class community in the area of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, also known as Lincoln Square, that was once of the city’s cultural centers. Residents included bandleader and composer James Reese Europe, who based his Clef Club orchestra and union for black musicians in the neighborhood.

“Like New Orleans, it was a cosmopolitan milieu that fostered close contact and intercultural mixing of diasporic Black populations from the Americas and the Caribbean,” Chris Washburne writes in an essay about Latin jazz and San Juan Hill on Lincoln Center’s Legacies of San Juan Hill web site. “With its growing population came a vibrant music scene, which was referred to as ‘Black Bohemia,’ with performance spaces, clubs, bars, and dance halls, such as the Jungles Casino and Marshall Hotel, that catered to a Black clientele and featured “Spanish-tinged” pre-jazz and early jazz styles.”

Aurora Flores-Hostos, in the article “New York’s Dance of Displacement,” writes of the historic neighborhood scene: “Crowds packed Jungle's Casino to hear stride piano pioneer James P. Johnson's hit ‘Charleston.’ By the 1940s, the neighborhood became a popular arena for Latin music dances—from the St. Nicholas Arena on West 66th to the Palladium Ballroom on Broadway and 53rd Street; the Chateau Madrid on West 58th Street, and, of course, the famous Copacabana on 60th and Central Park West. A music explosion brewed.”

The New York office of the Havana label Panart Records was located in the neighborhod, across the street from where Lincoln Center stands now. Read about it in Chapter One of my book about Panart:

Among other San Juan Hill residents, the film features appearances by T.S. Monk, son of Thelonius Monk, who neighbors knew as the kid who played piano, and who as an adult they often spotted standing on the corner, just listening to the sound ofthe traffic.

In one clip, Robert Caro, author of the epic Robert Moses biography The Power Broker, testifies to the racist and classist urban design practiced by Moses, who called the neighborhood a “Puerto Rican slum” and, despite protests and lawsuits by residents and activists, succeeded in having it slated for urban renewal.

One of the many emotional moments in the documentary is set to the song “Somewhere” (“There’s a Place for Us”) from West Side Story, which takes place in the neighborhood. Scenes for the original movie, released in 1961, was shot on an empty lot where tenements had been cleared to make room for Lincoln Center and the Julliard School. [See photo above.]

“San Juan Hill has been lost to the dust of time,” drummer and composer Bobby Sanabria says in the documentary. In 2017, the 60th anniversary of the original West Side Story musical, Sanabria and his Multiverse Big Band performed a series of concerts at Jazz at Lincoln Center called West Side Story Reimagined, released as an album the next year. Sanabria’s take on Leonard Bernstein’s songs is a celebration of Latino pride, woven with a ream of Latin American rhythms and their jazz evolutions.

“Everything is all right when you are white in America,” Sanabria pronounces in the intro to his version of the song “America.”

“There’s a subtle social commentary in addition to the social commentary that’s already in the original West Side Story,” Sanabria told me in an interview for Billboard at the time of the concerts. “Without Latinos, New York City would be nothing…The contributions of Puerto Ricans to New York are monumental. West Side Story was a story about Puerto Ricans encroaching on a working class white neighborhood. about Puerto Ricans encroaching on a working class white neighborhood so now its white people encroaching on Puerto Ricans who live in those same neighborhoods. So there’s that subtext as well, and that’s happening in the music.” [Read down to listen to the album.]

Sanabria’s album came out several years before Steven Spielberg’s new West Side Story, released in 2021, would acknowledge the real-life story behind the film by staging the opening scene amidst the ghostly shells of the neighborhood’s torn-down buildings and demolition trucks, with the camera pausing on a sign that reads “This Property Purchased by the NY Housing Authority for Slum Clearance” and a photo of the architectural model for Lincoln Center. The first minutes of the movie show Doc’s drugstore, the Jets’ hangout, as one of the few buildings left standing near the Lincoln Center site, and 68th and Broadway as still a haven for Puerto Rican and African-American businesses.

“When history plays a starring role, it is bound to be a layered one,” writes Prof. Virginia Sánchez Korrol in another article on the Legacies of San Juan Hill site.

“As the 2021 film went on to receive well-deserved accolades in the industry, an unanticipated contribution has been the illumination of the lost neighborhoods of Lincoln Square and San Juan Hill,” writes Sánchez, who was the historical consultant for Spielberg’s West Side Story. “The recovery and commitment to preserve the stories of a community of politically powerless residents whose contributions and creativity had been forgotten has taken on new meaning as institutions like Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies create initiatives that address the legacy of San Juan Hill.”

Thus the Stanley Nelson’s documentary, and the Legacies of San Juan Hill site, both part of Lincoln Center’s vigorous acknowledgement of the past, 70 years after the neighborhood’s destruction. Lincoln Center has also launched an effort to “make our physical environment more welcoming to all” by offering community-friendly spaces on the monumental block, and particularly by opening up the back side of the cultural complex, where for decades a wall has blocked off acccess to the Amsterdam and Phipps Houses, pre-Lincoln Center housing projects that are the last vestiges of the neighborhood that once was.

Listen to this “Music of San Juan Hill” playlist by Aurora Flores-Hostos, Composer, Writer, Producer, and Educator and author of the article “New York’s Dance of Displacement.”

Listen to West Side Story Reimagined by Bobby Sanabria

Listen on Quobuz:

Listen on Spotify:

Watch the panel discussion “Legacies of San Juan Hill: Latin Jazz in New York City (1920–1960).”