Over 20 years ago, Peter Schmuck of the Baltimore Sun stepped off a plane in Havana to a frosty reception. While he was there to report on a goodwill baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban national team on March 28, 1999, the Cubans were having none of it. As he recalled in an interview with the HPR, “The Cubans did not want to have any media for that home-and-home series.” They eventually allowed him to enter — only after barring him from attending the game.
Although he was not there to witness it, that baseball game, the first time a Major League Baseball team had played in Cuba in over forty years, made history in Cuban-American relations. It also represents the complex cultural interaction between the United States and Cuba: Even though American teams had not played on the island for decades, baseball originally came to Cuba through an American-educated Cuban student.
Baseball is perhaps the most significant American contribution to Cuban culture. As Schmuck observed, “Cubans love baseball more than Americans do, and it’s our national pastime!” Indeed, MLB teams have held spring training camps and played well-attended games in Cuba since the turn of the 20th century. Cuban-American cultural interaction has also extended far beyond baseball, reaching rap, jazz, and even the American pop charts.
But the political relationship between the two countries has always hung over this interchange, especially after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution changed the countries’ relationship for the worse. The long history of Cuban-American cultural interaction suggests that the two cultures have embarked on a productive cultural exchange despite the political obstacles. Under a receptive U.S. administration, both nations can use this pre-existing cultural interchange to improve diplomatic relations.
Singing “Guantanamera”
Cubans and Americans in New York City lost no time in combining their musical styles. Afro-Cuban jazz emerged in 1947, when Afro-Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo joined Dizzy Gillespie’s jazz orchestra, mixing elements from traditional American jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms. Meanwhile, Cuban music styles such as calypso, mambo, and cha cha continued entering the American music scene into the ‘50s.
Then Castro came to power, and the United States cut off diplomatic relations a year later. “Cuba had become anathema. It lost its status as a friendly, happy, tropical country,” Deborah Pacini, professor emeritus of anthropology at Tufts University, told the HPR. But musicians on both sides continued creating new musical styles, with the ‘60s marking the high point of salsa, an American-based evolution of the Cuban son.
The song “Guantanamera” exemplifies a shift in Cuban-American cultural interchange. Instead of building something new with Cuban and American influences, a pop group named the Sandpipers Americanized a “very traditional Cuban song that need[ed] to be translated somewhat,” as Chris Molanphy, a Slate pop critic and chart analyst, told the HPR. The song also represented a counterpoint to the frosty political relationship at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as internationalist Pete Seeger promoted it across the globe as a call for peace between the two countries. In these ways, it seems that the phenomenon of distinctly American reinterpretations of older Cuban music stemmed from the nations’ political relationship. Since the embargo limited the previous interchange of information, music, and media, communities in both nations turned to improvisation.
Rap, Rock, and Synthesis
Despite that embargo, musical interchange continued as young Cubans began getting their hands on American rock music. Cultural interchange “was not happening in state- or industry-sponsored networks,” Pacini said. “It was the product of personal connections: If you knew somebody who happened to have a rock record, you could hear it.” As the Beatles gained worldwide popularity in the late 1960s, their records found a way to circulate across the island, and Cubans began founding rock bands, such as Los Van Van, that explicitly drew inspiration from American rock.
According to Pacini, as Cuban rock evolved, some artists aimed “to incorporate more Cuban elements into it, whether Spanish-language lyrics or lyrics about local issues.” Sintesis, a band founded in 1978, perfectly exemplified this theme by combining American rock chords, traditional Afro-Cuban beats, and Spanish lyrics. Its name, meaning “synthesis” in Spanish, perfectly encapsulated its mission and music.
Acceptance of rock paved the way for rap’s 1980s emergence in the Cuban cultural scene. Rappers, too, found ways to circumvent the embargo. As Sujatha Fernandes, a professor at the University of Sydney, pointed out in an interview with the HPR, young Cubans got interested in hip-hop by putting up “antennas outside of their windows with wire coat hangers to try and get hold of the music.”
These rappers would “take background beats from American songs, get a tape recorder, and loop those beats until they had a full background beat, and then they would just rap over that,” Fernandes explained. Lacking modern rap equipment (largely due to the embargo), Cuban rappers would “use Afro-Cuban music with traditional instrumentation for their beats,” along with beatboxing, to add a distinctive Cuban spin. Cuban rap and hip-hop also increasingly became a vehicle for Afro-Cuban social criticism, similar to how African-Americans used rap and hip-hop.
Across the Straits of Florida, Gloria Estefan continued the trend of Americanization in Cuban-American crossover hits like the 1985 hit song “Conga”, which added English lyrics and hip-hop beats onto its base of Cuban conga music. Meanwhile, the Buena Vista Social Club, “a supergroup of the greatest Cuban musicians of the late ‘90s,” as Molanphy described it, played off Americans’ nostalgia for pre-communist Cuban music and culture. The group’s debut album was not necessarily a response to the Americanization of Cuban music, but rather a reminder of the Cuban balladry that had largely escaped the notice of the American market for 40 years.
Abriendo Puertas, Opening Doors
Buena Vista Social Club would not have been possible without a unique set of circumstances. While Cuba started to open up to the global economy to recover from the sudden loss of Soviet support, the United States relaxed the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1988, enabling new cultural flows between the two countries. As Fernandes argues, these new interactions between Cuba and the rest of the world allowed Cuban art to “make commentary on a broader global system.”
The March 28, 1999 game took place within this broader thaw between the United States and Cuba — if only for the political wrangling of Peter Angelos, the Orioles’ owner. As Schmuck explained, Angelos “was a huge donor to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. He wanted to do this, and he contacted the Clinton administration and the State Department. That was probably the biggest thing that made it happen.”
Schmuck argued that the game began a “loosening” of relations between the Cuban baseball federation and MLB which eventually led to a stream of Cuban players entering the league. That stream has accelerated recently: “There are a lot more star-caliber players in the big leagues now than there were when Cuban players started defecting,” Joe Kehoskie, a former agent for Cuban players, told the HPR, naming several high-profile players such as Aroldis Chapman, Yasiel Puig, and Jose Abreu. These players have added immensely to the sport; Chapman, for instance, threw the fastest baseball pitch ever.
Although the second Bush administration introduced a new crackdown on relations, the Obama administration toned down its predecessor’s belligerence. Indeed, the administration realized the potential to use the countries’ shared cultures as a reconciling force: Obama attended a baseball game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team as part of the first trip to Cuba by a sitting U.S. president; The Guardian argued that Obama’s presence at this game did more for detente than speeches and statements ever did. And before that game, a comedy skit between Obama and Pánfilo — a character in the popular Cuban TV show Vivir del cuento — allowed him to “harness humor and popular culture to connect with the Cuban people on a quotidian level,” as Yale’s Albert Laguna argued.
Meanwhile, more formal cultural exchange also took place. The American Ballet Theater visited Cuba in 2010, where it performed and conducted workshops for Cuban dancers; both sides came away impressed with the other’s technique and started discussing plans for further interaction. In May 2016, the Minnesota Orchestra, harkening back to its 1960s concerts in Cuba, played two concerts. As Yale undergraduate Rhea Kumar argued, its astute choice of pieces, including Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, projected a “strong and direct” message of cultural unification.
Crooning about Cuba
While the Obama administration tried opening the door, the Trump administration slammed it shut, scaling back many of Obama’s changes. However, interaction in the musical sphere has continued apace, with Camila Cabello, a Cuban-American artist, and Cimafunk, a purely Cuban one, exemplifying the trend. The Cuban influences in Cabello’s 2017 breakout hit “Havana” appear obvious: The song is named after Cuba’s capital and Cabello’s birthplace, and Cabello croons that “half of [her] heart is in Havana,” representing the Cuban-American exile experience. Additionally, the clave that makes the song so catchy originates from a traditional Afro-Cuban jazz clave. As Molanphy put it, “It was the first time she was putting her Cuban roots front and center, and a metaphor for her expressing her independence in general.”
Cabello’s next number one hit “Señorita” features a key note reminiscent of that of “Havana,” while the lyric “land in Miami” clearly references the center of Cuban-American émigré life. However, the song makes few other pretensions of authenticity; the fact that the song is a “American-feeling pop record” made it popular for American audiences, Molanphy argued. Nonetheless, the success of both songs indicates the Cuban-American diaspora’s presence in American culture and the increasing diversification of American pop.
In contrast to Cabello, who mainly swoons for American pop audiences, the Cuban artist Cimafunk, called the “Cuban James Brown,” has achieved popularity in the United States and Cuba with an innovative blend between hip-hop, funk, and traditional Afro-Cuban standards, fundamentally representing America’s influence on Cuban pop music. The overwhelmingly positive reception to his 2019 tour showed that artists no longer need to pander to American audiences in order to achieve popular success. In addition to showing the wild success of the amalgam of Cuban and American music, his tour also addressed the two countries’ political relationship: He offered free concerts at low-income high schools and discussed common interests between the two countries.
Turning the Beat Around
That approach, which seemingly paid dividends, could be used as an example of cultural diplomacy, which political scientist Milton Cummings defines as “the exchange of ideas, information, art and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples to foster mutual understanding.” Indeed, effective cultural diplomacy is not a one-way street, but rather an exchange that requires equal participation of all countries involved. American policymakers largely seem to have missed the point, though, and many Cubans believe the United States intends to totally change Cuban economics and politics.
If American diplomats confine their goals to normalization, though, cultural diplomacy can certainly help bring the two states and peoples closer together by turning the formerly political question of American policy towards Cuba into a more personal question. For Schmuck, his 1999 trip changed his perspective on the Cuban-American relationship. “I’m a right-of-center guy, and when I was a child, I swallowed the whole pro-American, anti-Castro stuff. When you get there, you realize how stupid [the embargo] is.”
That cultural diplomacy would likely fall under two areas: mutual artistic exchange and baseball diplomacy. From the U.S. side, the exchanges would help to establish goodwill, dispel negative stereotypes about American popular culture, and send a message without relying on tropes of imperial domination. The exchanges would do the same for the Cuban side, especially helping to change the opinion of hardline Cuban-Americans. Indeed, as Laguna argued, “Postrevolutionary popular culture … has helped build bridges between generations of the diaspora and back to the island.” As the Cimafunk concerts and Schmuck’s experiences in Cuba show, these mutual exchanges can also help to establish meaningful dialogue about issues of common concern to Cubans and Americans, supporting political diplomacy.
Likewise, baseball diplomacy, if practiced successfully, can help bring the two countries together by emphasizing common ground and increasing person-to-person contact if fans travel to the other country. And as The Economist writes, Cuban baseball players have given Americans a more human perspective of the island. For one, Kehoskie is cautiously optimistic. “The more Cubans and Americans interact, the more the baseball programs interact long-term, it can only be a good thing,” he said.
Ultimately, rapprochement may lie in national rather than international politics, since successful cultural diplomacy requires both the American and Cuban governments to open themselves up to the other side’s culture. Yet they seem capable of doing so given how their cultural relationship has historically continued even without political rapprochement. Now, both governments can take a page from the book of the Cuban rappers and American singers who have made all that cultural interchange possible. Like good negotiators, artists who bridge the divide are ready to speak, but also willing to listen.
A Spotify playlist to accompany this article can be listened to here.