Buena Vista Social Club: From Hollywood Glamour to Bloody Revolution, How an Island of Mystery Produced a Musical Sensation

In March 1996, 20 musicians—many of them stars of Cuba’s pre-revolution “golden age”—spent six days in Havana’s EGREM studio recording Buena Vista Social Club. As the story goes, World Circuit executive Nick Gold had the idea to record two albums in the Cuban capital: a big band tribute album featuring Havana native Juan de Marcos González on tres guitar (the start of González’s Afro-Cuban All Stars), and an album of the island’s eastern music, bringing together Cuban and Malian musicians—a fusion targeting the burgeoning “world music” market that would be produced by American guitarist Ry Cooder. When visas for the Malian musicians fell through, Gold, Cooder and González came up with a new concept for the second “Eastern Album” (as they called it at the time) and scoured the island for “old-timers” who could bring it to life.

A country that had been culturally and economically isolated from the United States since 1961 suddenly came to American pop-culture consciousness with an album of traditional Cuban music. Suburban pre-teens were dancing to son because of the syncopated tumbao rhythms of 88-year-old Compay Segundo’s lead track “Chan Chan.” Second- and third-generation Cuban-Americans were re-introduced to the romantic sounds of bolero because of 69-year-old crooner Ibrahim Ferrer’s silky rendition of “Dos Gardenias,” a tune Isolina Carrillo wrote in 1945. Software engineers in Silicon Valley, whose understanding of Cuban culture up to that point amounted to black-market cigars, were schooled in danzón by 77-year-old pianist Rubén González, the man who gave the album’s title track the nimble embellishments that made it famous. The album won a 1998 Grammy Award, made it to number 80 on the Billboard 200 and in 2003, was listed in Rolling Stone magazine among the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

And it wasn’t just America that was hooked.

The album topped charts in countries where Cuban music had rarely, if ever, broken through: Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium. It also inspired Wim Wenders’ Oscar-nominated 1999 documentary, and continues to buoy the musicians who tour the globe under the Buena Vista Social Club banner. And of course, you can’t argue with a bottom line: over 12 million copies sold.

The reach of Buena Vista Social Club now extends to Broadway in a new musical written by Marco Ramirez and directed by Saheem Ali (Juan de Marcos González lends his firsthand expertise as a music consultant). The semi-historical narrative—which zooms in on the previously mentioned Rubén González, Ferrer and Segundo, along with guitarist Eliades Ochoa and star vocalist Omara Portuondo—toggles between the 1996 recording sessions and the 1950s, a time when the “songs from the old days” were in their heyday and Castro’s revolution hadn’t yet turned Americans’ favorite island paradise into an inscrutable mystery. Like the album itself, it’s an opening of a time capsule that brings back the beautiful, ephemeral and complicated past that inspired a global phenomenon.

IT'S NOVEMBER 1950 and Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling have hinged the love story at the center of their new musical Guys and Dolls on Havana’s powers of intoxication. Save-a-Soul Sargeant Sarah Brown is a teetotaling evangelist, preaching at drunken sinners to “follow the fold.” But one trip to the island of Bacardi and her true feelings of infatuation for career gambler Sky Masterson come pouring out in an uninhibited “ding dong ding!”

Cartoonish as it is, this piece of Broadway canon epitomizes what Cuba represented to most Americans in the 1950s: a wonderland of hedonism. Hollywood starlet Ava Gardner, who honeymooned with Frank Sinatra at Havana’s Hotel Nacional (and after her split from Sinatra, took to joining Ernest Hemingway at his sprawling Cuban villa Finca Vigía), described Havana as an “American playground, complete with gambling houses, whorehouses, and brightly lit cafes, every other one boasting a live orchestra.” Marlon Brando, Winston Churchill, Jack Dempsey—every brand of celebrity was spellbound by the music, the nightlife, the women. In Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba, Rosalie Schwartz writes: “Cuba offered tourists an acceptable way to succumb to temptation without scandalizing the neighbors. The suburban striver removed his necktie; the PTA president hid her hat and gloves.”

Americans could also indulge their fantasies from home. Desi Arnaz gave them a shined-up version of himself as I Love Lucy’s Ricky Ricardo—exasperated husband by day, dreamy Cuban bandleader by night. New Yorkers, meanwhile, fed the mambo dance craze at the Palladium Ballroom’s weekly competitions. Steve Allen even hosted an episode of his primetime Sunday night show from the Hotel Havana Riviera, featuring a performance from bombshell Mamie Van Doren. The act included a throng of besotted men diving gymnastically into the hotel’s luxury swimming pool as Van Doren, in a glittering mermaid dress, seductively sang:

Sand in my shoes
Sand from Havana
Calling me to that ever-so-heavenly shore.

Cuba was as prosperous as it appeared stateside, with a flourishing entertainment industry and more TV sets per capita than any other Latin American country. But that was only half of a fractured story. As Robin D. Moore writes in Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socalist Cuba, “Cuba in the 1950s remains difficult to comprehend in light of its many opposing representations and realities.” Affluent urban professionals lived parallel to rural farmers and urban immigrants struggling to get by. The island hosted performances from Nat King Cole and Josephine Baker, but Afro-Cubans were deprived of education, social services, employment and housing in a country built on racial discrimination. (If you think Cole and Baker were allowed to stay at the Hotel Nacional with Gardner and Sinatra, you’re sorely mistaken.)

And behind it all was Fulgencio Batista’s authoritarian dictatorship, barreling toward its bloody end in 1959 when Fidel Castro and his socialist revolutionaries finally toppled his regime. “Especially after 1957,” writes Moore, “coverage of bombings, assassinations and violence shared newspaper space with descriptions of carnival festivities, yacht races, golf championships and openings of new cabarets.” As Schwartz describes, Cuba was “a holiday paradise in the midst of a political hell.”

Most Americans couldn’t (or perhaps chose not to) see past the country’s decadent veneer, but Cubans couldn’t escape their daily realities. They could, however, find respite from the unrest. “It appears that political instability, rather than suppressing performance, functioned to encourage it in certain respects,” Moore says about life in Cuba after Batista’s 1952 coup. If you wanted a dose of live music and camaraderie, “sociedades de recreo” (recreation societies) were the places to go. There were over 130 of them in Havana alone, their clientele divided by ethnicity, neighborhood, common interests and, of course, race. The Buenavista Social Club was a sociedad specifically for working-class Afro-Cubans—among them Ibrahim Ferrer, who, decades before lending his voice to the watering hole’s eponymous album, would go there to drink, play dominos and smoke cigars.

The U.S. imposed its full trade embargo in September, 1961, officially shuttering the rum-soaked party that Americans thought would never end. The Cuban government had already expropriated a number of foreign properties, including Hemingway’s Finca Vigía. And in 1962, all of the sociedades de recreo, including the Buenavista Social Club, were abolished—their perpetuation of racial segregation antithetical to Castro’s revolutionary ideals.

When the Buena Vista Social Club album emerged in 1996, it felt to many like a cryogenically preserved specimen, cold and motionless for nearly 40 years, was being thawed back to life. While that sense of time travel was central to the album’s appeal, what eluded foreign listeners was that the heart of Cuba had never stopped beating—even without Marlon Brando (the silver screen's Sky Masterson) sipping Dulce de Leche cocktails by its “ever-so-heavenly shore.”

“THE POSSIBILITY FOR THE ALBUM to even come to be is very much rooted in Cuban history,” says Christina Abreu, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies at Northern Illinois University. “There are reasons why these Afro-Cuban musicians ended up staying in Cuba. Some of the outcomes around race and racism likely impacted why, in 1996, you have all of these super significant Afro-Cuban musicians still on the island and able to then sit and record this music.”

The original Buena Vista Social Club musicians were never exceedingly vocal about politics, but the few public comments that do exist track with that inference. In a 2003 tribute to the late Compay Segundo in The Guardian, Ry Cooder wrote: “I once asked him about politics, which isn't something you do lightly with Cubans. He looked at me and said: ‘Politics? This new guy is good. The 1930s were rough. That's when we had the really bad times.’ That's how old he was. He had seen dictators and revolutions come and go in his life and to him Castro was ‘the new guy.’”

Ibrahim Ferrer—the lead vocalist for bandleader Pacho Alonso in the 1950s who, when González found him in 1996, was semi-retired and occasionally shining shoes for money—effusively praised Castro in a 2003 interview in The Telegraph, just two-and-a-half years before his death: “Fidel is one of the greatest men who ever lived,” he said. “In music also he brought great opportunities for Cubans. He set up many music schools. After the revolution, children could learn for free, and instruments were provided for them.”

“It was interesting as a kid,” says Abreu, herself a child of two Cuban immigrants. “This was the '90s, so you were always listening to Celia Cruz, Gloria Estefan—a lot of these Cuban-American performers who represented this rejection of the Cuban Revolution. We felt connected to these musicians because they had made similar choices to the choices that my family had made to come to the United States—but were still fiercely proud of being Cuban.” Then Buena Vista Social Club took up permanent residence in her family’s 10-disc CD changer. “I remember it sounded different,” Abreu says. “It sounded similar, but it was slower. It was a little bit easier for me as a kid to dance to. It seemed that there was sort of this richness to it.”

The artists’ personal histories and the vintage melodies they resurrected contributed to that sense of "richness." But, “There was also something about the sonics of Buena Vista Social Club,” wrote New York Times music critic Jon Pareles, reflecting on the album’s 25th anniversary in 2021. “It was recorded in Havana’s venerable EGREM studio in real time, on analog tape on a rickety recorder (which needed repairs on the first day of sessions), and without fancy post-processing, all of which also gave the music an extra patina. In 1996, you’d never get that piano sound in a studio in Los Angeles.” To international ears, Pareles added, “The illusion that Cuba was somehow frozen in time, like the 1950s cars in old Havana, was definitely part of the aura of Buena Vista Social Club. It’s one of the many agendas that I doubt the album’s makers fully anticipated.”

“We were isolated [from] the world after 1961 when relationships between Cuba and America had a breakdown,” Juan de Marcos González commented in a 2021 interview. “But the music in Cuba kept developing.” While Americans throughout the 1970s associated Cuban music with the “salsa” movement that repackaged sounds made popular in the 1950s, groups like Irakere and Los Van Van were paving the way for timba, an innovative fusion of son and American Funk. “The music was up-tempo with a lot of breaks and power,” Juan de Marcos said, describing a kinetic Cuba, far from frozen. “Everything in Cuba was moving really fast, so the musicians were playing up-tempo because you reflect what’s happening in the society in your music.”

“There have been critiques about censorship on the island and some limits to free expression in music and dance and all that sort of stuff,” Abreu says. “However, for the purposes of understanding the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon, I think the takeaway is that Cubans continued to play music. They continued to listen to music. They continued to innovate different musical styles.”

Early in his own career, Juan de Marcos was a fan of American rock—Jethro Tull, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. When Nick Gold approached him with his nostalgic idea, he saw it primarily as an opportunity to honor his late father. “I had in my mind for a long time the idea to make an album to tribute my daddy and the people of the generation of my daddy,” he said. His father was musician Marcos González Mauriz, who played with one of the original Buenavista Social Club’s most crowd-drawing bandleaders, Arsenio Rodríguez (Buena Vista Social Club’s breakout pianist Rubén González also played in Rodríguez’s conjunto).

The sessions in EGREM studio eventually produced three albums: A Toda Cuba le Gusta from Juan de Marcos' Afro-Cuban All Stars; Introducing… Rubén González; and the dominating hit, Buena Vista Social Club.

“We brought 14,000 people to Hyde Park. More people than Elton John,” said Juan de Marcos, remembering a show the original Afro-Cuban All Stars and Buena Vista Social Club played at the famous London concert venue in 2000. “We were so proud that the music, the original traditional music of our country was so popular and so accepted by the people.”

Beyond pride, it was redemption.

“Up to 1961, Cuban music was the most important third-world music in the world,” he added. “With the Buena Vista Social Club project, we recovered the place that we had.”

"IT TOOK ALMOST FOUR YEARS to cast this show,” says Dean Sharenow, musical supervisor on Buena Vista Social Club. “I've never had a show that took so long.”

Producer Orin Wolf kicked off the project seven years ago, first bringing on book writer Marco Ramirez—a Cuban-American playwright born and raised in Miami, whose family, like many, left Cuba at various points throughout the 1960s (“I’ve heard stories about the island my whole life, but specifically, I’ve heard Cuban music since I was in the womb,” Ramirez says.) Wolf had just put The Band’s Visit on Broadway—a story centered around classical Arab and klezmer music—and Sharenow was the man who invisibly blended its onstage band and cast with actor-musicians. He was the obvious next call for Buena Vista Social Club.

“This is a little bit of a rant of mine,” Sharenow says, explaining why musical theater so often rankles him. “A jazz Broadway show is like Broadway jazz—it's not real jazz. It was very important to me that the music had to feel like Cuban music. Not a Broadway or theatrical version of Cuban music.” His solution: “Hire players who do this.”

Besides the show’s orchestrator and musical director Marco Paguia, who also plays piano in the band, percussionist Javier Diaz, who worked with Paguia on arrangements, and trombonist Eddie Venegas, who previously played violin on the Temptations musical Ain’t Too Proud, no one in the band has ever played musical theater before. “Everybody else is just a gigging, recording, teaching musician,” says Sharenow. And again, with just a few exceptions, nearly all of them are Cuban.

“David learned to play guitar from [Compay] Segundo,” Sharenow says of the show’s resident guitarist David Oquendo, a childhood friend of Juan de Marcos. “He lived around the corner from him.”

González also brought on Renesito Avich, the musical’s Eliades Ochoa who slays solos on the tres: “He was like, ‘This guy's the best tres player I have ever heard. You have to hire him.” Sharenow calls him Buena Vista Social Club’s “main showman.”

Leonardo Reyna, who makes his Broadway debut as Young Rubén González, was Sharenow’s 3AM discovery during “a desperate internet search.” Reyna was a classical pianist living in Germany when Sharenow reached out asking if he played Afro-Cuban style. “Many people from that culture, they are steered away from playing more traditional folkloric music,” Sharenow explains. “But if you're born into this culture, this music is around you all the time. So Leo came and played for us and was just unbelievable.” Blessedly, Reyna also turned out to be a natural actor. “After a little bit of coaching from [director] Saheem [Ali], suddenly he's this three-dimensional singer-actor-performer in our show.”

The whole production is a tightrope kept taut by a collective of artists with niche backgrounds and skillsets, making routine things like finding substitute musicians a bigger task than most Broadway shows. “I don't know how that's going to go, frankly,” Sharenow says. But authenticity remains a non-negotiable. “You couldn't do this without people who come from the culture. It's not someone imitating the culture. It is the culture.”

Buena Vista Social Club is the story of Cuba. But it will also always be—for better or worse—the story of how Cuba was, and still is, perceived by the rest of the world. “It can reinforce these sorts of stereotypes about what Cuba was like,” Abreu says, parsing the complicated legacy of the album. “As a cultural critic, you might say, ‘Oh, that's bad.’ But it did introduce Cuban music to a whole new audience—to a whole new generation of people.”

Before directing a Broadway version of Buena Vista Social Club was even a thought in his mind, Ali was a teen in Kenya who “learned the lyrics by rote without understanding their meaning.” Puerto Rico native Luis Miranda (one of the show’s lead producers and father of Lin-Manuel Miranda), remembers how the success of the album felt like a win for his Hispanic Federation, an advocacy group he spent much of the ‘90s building in New York City: “Anything ‘Latino’ breaking into the general market was important to me professionally,” he says. Even Ramirez, whose grandfathers filled his childhood home with Cuban music, listened to the album’s familiar songs and thought, “I’d never heard them sound like that before.”

Where one person hears the past, another hears the future. The only universal experience of Buena Vista Social Club seems to be its hold on the present. “It makes you want to move,” says Abreu, briefly casting aside academia. “Even if you don't know exactly how to move or what the right steps are, I think it's hard to listen to and just sit still.”

That’s all that really brought the original Buena Vista musicians together in the first place. During a research trip to Cuba, Ramirez spoke to the group’s surviving members, and they kept circling back to those six days in EGREM studio: “Before the cameras came in, and before the rest of the world took notice, they were just old friends who enjoyed being with each other.”