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    Desi Arnaz Historical Marker Celebrates the ‘I Love Lucy’ Star in Miami Beach

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    A new historical marker in Miami Beach pays tribute to his younger years, before Hollywood, when as a Cuban émigré he performed at a nightclub.Years before he played the charming and devoted husband Ricky Ricardo on the sitcom “I Love Lucy” and became a bandleader who belted out “Babalú” before audiences, Desi Arnaz was a teenage Cuban immigrant who struggled to learn English in Florida.He attended a Catholic school in Miami Beach, picking up the guitar and the conga drum. And he was eventually hired as a bandleader at a nightclub where he popularized the conga.Nearly 90 years after that first big break, Miami Beach honored him on Tuesday with a historical marker that was placed near where the nightclub stood. The marker pays tribute to his younger years in the city and celebrates him for paving the way for generations of Latino entertainers.“He was not only a pioneer for Cubans that were coming to the United States but he was a pioneer for the arts in Miami Beach,” said Alex Fernandez, a member of the Miami Beach Commission, the city’s legislative body.Desi, ‘an American Original’Desi Arnaz during a publicity tour to Lucille Ball’s hometown in Jamestown, N.Y., in 1956.Charlotte BrooksThe new marker is at Collins Park outside the Miami City Ballet. It is near the site of the former Park Avenue Restaurant that hosted performances and came to be remembered as the Park Avenue nightclub. The memorial joins an artsy Miami Beach district that includes the Bass Museum of Art and a library.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Musical Will Open on Broadway Next Year

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      The show, which had a previous run at Atlantic Theater Company, is scheduled to begin previews in February at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.Twenty-seven years ago, “Buena Vista Social Club,” an album of prerevolutionary Cuban music that became an unexpected best seller, was released, spawning tours and documentary films and a burst of interest in the Afro-Cuban sound.Now a stage musical inspired by the making of the album is heading for Broadway.“Buena Vista Social Club” is scheduled to begin previews Feb. 21 and to open March 19 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.Set primarily in Havana, the show depicts a group of aging and often overlooked musicians gathering in a recording studio, and recalling the tumultuous era decades earlier when they were young and the Cuban Revolution was gaining steam. The narrative loosely tracks with the history of the album, but contains songs that were released separately and elements that are fictionalized.The show had an Off Broadway run, at Atlantic Theater Company, that opened in late 2023; Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, described it as “full-of-riches,” praising the song and dance elements but expressing concerns about some of the storytelling. The Broadway cast will include many of the same performers and musicians as the Off Broadway production.The songs are all attributed to the Buena Vista Social Club, and the show has a book by Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”). The director is Saheem Ali (“Fat Ham”) and the choreographers are the married couple Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck.The musical is being capitalized for $17 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The lead producers are Orin Wolf, John Styles and Barbara Broccoli, who previously worked together on “The Band’s Visit.” Among the co-producers are the comedian-actor John Leguizamo; Luis Miranda, a founder of the Hispanic Federation and the father of Lin-Manuel Miranda; and LaChanze, the Tony-winning actress. More

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      ‘Scarface’ Actor Ángel Salazar Dies at 68

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      He first made his mark doing stand-up in New York, but he was best known for his role as Chi Chi opposite Al Pacino in the hit 1983 movie.Ángel Salazar, a dynamic stand-up comedian who became well known for his wild routines and an actor best known for his role in the hit 1983 film “Scarface,” died on Sunday at a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn. He was 68.His death was confirmed by a representative, Roger Paul, who said Mr. Salazar had an enlarged heart and was found unresponsive.Mr. Salazar built his career in New York City comedy clubs after fleeing Cuba when he was young.As an actor, he was seen onstage, on television and in films including “Carlito’s Way” in 1993. But none of these roles would surpass the renown he achieved in “Scarface” as Chi Chi, a henchman of the drug lord Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino. In that film, directed by Brian De Palma and loosely based on the 1932 movie of the same name, Chi Chi backs Montana, a fellow Cuban refugee, on his violent campaign to reach the top of Miami’s cocaine trade.More than 30 years later, in 2017, after the film had secured generations of fans, Mr. Salazar told The Record of Bergen County, N.J., that he still answered to “Chi Chi” and didn’t mind when people brought copies of the “Scarface” DVD to his comedy shows to be signed.Ángel Salazar was born on March 2, 1956, in Cuba. He acted in plays there before fleeing the country in the early 1970s, swimming across Guantánamo Bay to reach the U.S. naval base there, he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996. From there, he was flown to Miami and then moved to New York, where he was placed in a foster home in the Bronx.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Salazar, left, with Al Pacino in the 1983 film “Scarface.” He played Chi Chi, a henchman of the drug lord Tony Montana, played by Mr. Pacino. Photo 12/Alamy Stock PhotoIn New York, he had trouble finding acting jobs, but he could make people laugh and at age 18 decided to test how far that could get him by performing at a comedy club’s open mic night.“I had 10 minutes,” Mr. Salazar told The Inquirer. “And I think I had one joke. The rest of the time I said, ‘Check it out,’ over and over again.”He eventually became a comedy club regular, and “Check it out” was a staple of his high-energy routines, which included costumes, props and impersonations of celebrities like Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and Tina Turner.Mr. Salazar lived between New York and Florida. Earlier this month he performed at the Laugh Factory in Reno, Nev., and Mr. Paul, his representative, said that they had talked last week about a possible show in Chicago.In Vanity Fair’s 2016 oral history of the famed New York City club the Comedy Cellar, the comedian Jim Norton said: “Auditions were typically done during the Friday late show, which meant you could get stuck following Ángel Salazar or some other guy who killed so hard the walls would shake.”Mr. Salazar at an event celebrating the release of “Scarface” on Blu-ray in Los Angeles in 2011.Frazer Harrison/Getty Images More

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      Juan Carlos Formell, Buoyant Heir of Cuban Musical Legacy, Dies at 59

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      The son of Juan Formell, a giant of Cuban music, he found his own voice as a singer-songwriter. He died during a performance in New York.Juan Carlos Formell, an acclaimed singer-songwriter who settled in New York after defecting from Cuba and eventually took over as bassist for his famous father, Juan Formell, in Los Van Van, one of the most influential bands of post-Revolutionary Cuba, died on Saturday during a performance in New York City. He was 59.His death, from a heart attack he suffered onstage at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts in the Bronx, was confirmed by his romantic and musical partner, Danae Blanco. Mr. Formell, she said, had hypertension and arteriosclerosis.Since fleeing Cuba for New York City in 1993, Mr. Formell had charted his own musical course, releasing five solo albums and earning a Grammy nomination in 2000 for best traditional tropical Latin performance for his debut album, “Songs from a Little Blue House.”When his father died in 2014, Mr. Formell agreed to carry on his legacy as the bassist for Los Van Van, the Afro-Cuban dance band co-founded by his father. The band’s current lineup also includes his brother Samuel on drums and his sister Vanessa Formell Medina on vocals.The band was just a few numbers into an energetic set at the Lehman Center when Mr. Formell wandered away from his upright bass, doubled over as if to catch his breath, then lumbered toward the rear of the stage. As the band played on, Abdel Rasalps Sotolongo, the Van Van singer known as Lele, and Javier León Peña, a sound engineer, were helping him offstage when he collapsed near the curtain.After a brief announcement that Mr. Formell was having a health problem, the band took a break of more than a half hour, then returned to finish the set, playing for nearly an hour in an apparent tribute to Mr. Formell, a friend, the musician Ned Sublette, who was present, said in a phone interview.Mr. Formell’s debut album, “Songs from a Little Blue House,” was nominated for a Grammy in 2000 for best traditional tropical Latin performance.Mr. Formell was a fourth-generation member of one of Cuba’s most famous musical families. His great-grandfather, Juan Francisco, was a popular bandleader. His grandfather, Francisco Formell, was a conductor of the Havana Philharmonic and the arranger for the Lecuona Cuban Boys, a popular big band starting in the 1930s.His father, Juan Formell, along with fellow giants of Cuban music, César Pedroso, known as Pupy, and José Luis Quintana, known as Changuito, founded Los Van Van in 1969, fusing traditional Afro-Cuban genres like son cubano with elements of rock, soul and disco.With the blessing of the Cuban government, the band toured the world for decades, developing a global following. It won a Grammy Award in 2000 for best salsa performance for their album “Llego…Van Van/Van Van is Here.”)Despite his family name, Mr. Formell’s path to musical success was not easy.Juan Carlos Formell was born in Havana on Feb. 18, 1964, the eldest of three children of Juan Formell and the cabaret singer Natalia Alfonso.When he was three weeks old, his parents sent him to live on the outskirts of Havana with his paternal grandparents. His grandfather, the conductor, had been ostracized by the Castro government for being part of the old guard. Mr. Formell told The Los Angeles Times in 2000 that he had been teased by other children for having holes in his shoes.Even so, he set his course toward music, studying at the Alejandro García Caturla and Amadeo Roldán conservatories in Havana, and later at Cuba’s National Art School.Influenced by Afrocubanismo, the Cuban artistic movement focused on Black identity, as well as the negrista movement in poetry, particularly the work of Nicolás Guillén, Mr. Formell was already composing by his teens and studying bass with Andres Escalona of the Havana Symphony Orchestra. He went on to play bass with the jazz pianist Emiliano Salvador.He was also a talented guitarist and hoped to carve out a career as a singer-songwriter, but felt unable to express himself freely under the restrictions of the government-controlled Cuban music industry, his former wife, Dita Sullivan, said in a phone interview.“While still in my 20s, at a time when most musicians are full of hope,” he once said, “I was resigned to a future of marginalization.”In 1993, while on tour with the dance band Rumbavana in Mexico, he defected, crossing the Rio Grande near Laredo, Texas, and eventually settling in New York City. The transition was not easy.Los Van Van performing in New York in 2010. Mr. Formell joined the band in 2014, after his father, the band’s bassist and co-founder, died.Brian Harkin for The New York Times“When you leave Cuba, you don’t exist,” Mr. Formell said in a 2005 interview with The Chicago Sun-Times. “You come here, you’re invisible. You come here and no one cares. If you want to defect, you’d better have a support system.”Even so, he built a career performing solo and with various ensembles at New York jazz clubs like the Blue Note and Birdland before releasing his Grammy-nominated debut. Mr. Formell followed with “Las Calles del Paraíso” (“The Streets of Paradise”) in 2002 and “Cemeteries of Desire,” a 2005 rumination on the Latin musical flavorings of New Orleans, along with “Son Radical” (2006) and “Johnny’s Dream Club” (2008), which a Village Voice review said wove “an unforgettable spell.”His music, rooted in filin, a romantic, jazz-inflected genre of Cuban popular music, as well as son cubano, a traditional style mixing Spanish and African influences, celebrated the natural beauty of his homeland as well as its complicated history, including of slavery and revolution.“Although my songs don’t specifically talk about politics,” he said in a 1996 interview, “they reflect the reality of Cuba from my perspective and not from the perspective of the system.”In addition to Samuel and Vanessa, his survivors include his other sisters, Elisa Formell Alfonso and Paloma Formell Delgado, and another brother, Lorenzo Formell González. He and Ms. Sullivan separated in 2012 and divorced in 2021.In a Facebook post announcing his death, Los Van Van said it would continue its tour of the United States, “paying tribute to Juan Carlos in every performance, every musical note, in every Vanvanero choice as Juanca would have wanted.” More

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      Pablo Milanés, Troubadour of the Cuban Revolution, Dies at 79

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      His music blended traditional idioms with pop inflections and social themes, earning him comparisons with Bob Dylan.Pablo Milanés, a Cuban musician whose blend of folk idioms, pop influences and themes of love both personal and patriotic earned him a reputation as the Bob Dylan of Latin America, died on Tuesday in Madrid. He was 79.His son Fabien Pisani confirmed the death, in a hospital, and said the cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder.Mr. Milanés, known to fans as Pablito, was a founding member of nueva trova, a musical movement that emerged in the late 1960s and infused traditional Cuban arrangements with social and political themes.He wrote songs to accompany the dramatic changes sweeping across Cuba in the wake of the 1959 revolution, making him and the two other founders of nueva trova, Silvio Rodríguez and Noel Nicola, its unofficial troubadours.“The success of Silvio and Pablo is the success of the revolution,” Fidel Castro said during a reception for Mr. Rodríguez and Mr. Milanés in 1984.Mr. Milanés, left, with his fellow nueva trova musician Silvio Rodríguez in 1983. “The success of Silvio and Pablo,” Fidel Castro once said, “is the success of the revolution.”Prensa Latina, via AP ImagesMr. Milanés’s influence spread beyond Cuba. As the revolutionary tides that swept over Latin America in the 1960s receded in the face of right-wing authoritarians in the 1970s, songs of his like “Yo No Te Pido” and “Cuba Va” became anthems of the continental left, sung in dissident meetings and among exile communities.“To millions of Latin Americans, Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanés and their guitars are as much a symbol of Cuba and its revolution as Fidel Castro and his beard,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times in 1987.With his gentle guitar work and a voice poised on the edge between tenor and baritone, Mr. Milanés performed songs that were not, on their surface at least, about class struggle and revolution, but instead about love, longing and the beauty of the Cuban countryside.In 1970 he wrote one of his most famous songs, “Yolanda,” dedicated to his wife at the time, Yolanda Benet, after the birth of their daughter Lynn.“This can’t be more than a song/I would like it to be a declaration of love,” he sang. “If you miss me I will not die/If I have to die I want it to be with you.”Nevertheless, his close identification with the Cuban government made him a controversial figure among Cuban Americans. He recorded almost 60 albums, but until recently they were hard to find in American record stores; those that made it north were often smuggled. He was largely unwelcome in Cuban exile communities, especially in Miami, and radio stations that played his music reported receiving threats afterward.Mr. Milanés performing in 1974 for an informal gathering including the Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa, right, and the Cuban singer-songwriter Carlos Puebla, third from right.Jose A. Figueroa/Prensa Latina. via Associated PressHe toured the United States several times, coming and going with the fluctuations in U.S.-Cuban relations. At a 1987 appearance at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, a particularly passionate fan mounted the stage midsong, knelt before Mr. Milanés and placed a single red rose at his feet.“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker,” he told The New York Times after that show. “I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”By the 1980s he had established himself as an ambassador of Cuban music. He put the music of Cuban poet-patriots like José Martí and Nicolás Guillén to song. He oversaw the Varadero International Music Festival, which brought leading artists from around Latin America to Cuba. And he released a series of albums that revitalized neglected Cuban musicians and styles, especially those who, like him, were rooted in the country’s Afro-Caribbean culture.His love for the revolution was not always requited. In 1965 the Cuban military sent him to a forced labor camp; he was one of tens of thousands of artists, intellectuals, priests and gay people deemed potentially subversive by the government.In the 1990s he founded a nonprofit, the Pablo Milanés Foundation, to promote Cuban culture. It supported artists, published books and produced a magazine, but the Cuban Ministry of Culture dissolved it after less than two years, without official explanation.He became more critical of the government in recent years, as occasional flare-ups in dissident activity were met with official repression. His stance drove a wedge between him and Mr. Rodríguez, his old ideological compatriot, who remained closely aligned with the government and even signed a letter in 2003 supporting the arrest of dozens of protesters.Mr. Milanés suffered several health setbacks over the last 20 years and moved to Spain in 2017 to receive medical treatment. He continued to tour Latin America but rarely returned to Cuba, though he did make one last appearance in Havana in June.Mr. Milanés had lived in Spain for some time and rarely returned to Cuba, but he did perform in Havana in June.Alexandre Meneghini/ReutersPablo Milanés Arias was born under auspicious signs for a future revolutionary: His birthday, Feb. 24, 1943, was the 48th anniversary of the Grito de Baire, the declaration of Cuban independence against the Spanish in 1895, while his birthplace, Bayamo, in southeastern Cuba, was a cauldron of Cuban revolutionary sentiment.His father, Angel Milanés Aguilera, was a saddler and leather craftsman for the Cuban army, and his mother, Caridad Arias Guerra, was a seamstress and dressmaker who traded one of her creations for Pablo’s first guitar.His mother supported him in other ways: When he was still young, she moved the family to Havana, where she entered him in musical contests and sent him to the city’s Municipal Conservatory of Music to study piano.When he was 12, he encountered a group of street musicians playing traditional Cuban music, and he persuaded his mother to let him leave school to start his career early.Mr. Milanés was married five times. He is survived by his wife, Nancy Pérez, and their children, Rosa Parks Milanés Perez and Pablo; his daughter Lynn Milanés Benet and son Liam, both with his second wife, Yolanda Benet; his children, Mauricio Blanco Álvarez, Fabien Pisani Álvarez and Haydée Milanés Álvarez, with his third wife, Zoe Álvarez; and his son Antonio, with his fourth wife, Sandra Perez. Another daughter with Ms. Benet, Suylén Milanés, died in January.In 1965 Mr. Milanés released “Mi 22 Años” (“My 22 Years”), the dewy-eyed lament of a young man who has already seen so much: “Long ago, I longed to find eternal bliss,” he sang. Threaded with Cuban folk and American jazz, it is considered the first nueva trova song.His international fame grew through the 1970s, alongside the promise and struggle of revolutionaries across the developing world who often looked to Cuba as their ideological lodestar. He sang to Cuban soldiers serving in Angola, and he toured the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.He won two Latin Grammys, both in 2006 — one for best singer-songwriter album, the other for best traditional tropical album.His turn away from the Cuban government coincided with Fidel Castro’s decision to step down that year, to be succeeded by his brother, Raúl, who promised significant reforms. When those promises went unfulfilled, Mr. Milanés spoke out.“When one thinks of the reforms, you think they’re going to come united with a series of freedoms, such as freedom of expression,” he said in an interview with El Nuevo Herald, a Miami newspaper, in 2011.But he remained a devotee of the revolutionary fervor of his youth, and he never lost his legions of fans on the left.When a reporter asked Michelle Bachelet, the left-leaning former president of Chile, in July about a proposed change to the Chilean Constitution, she said it reminded her of a line from one of Mr. Milanés’s songs.“It’s not perfect,” she said, “but it’s close to what I always dreamed of.” More

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      in Music

      The Soaring Legacy of Pablo Milanés

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      While helping pioneer nueva trova — which combined Cuban son and guaracha with soul, jazz and folk rock — he alternated embrace and rejection of the government that once disciplined him.Pablo Milanés, who died in Madrid this week at 79, left behind a body of work that was deeply personal even as he navigated one of the 20th century’s most tumultuous political experiments, the Cuban Revolution. His career was an open dialogue with the revolutionary government that had once disciplined him, then propped him up as one of its most powerful ideological icons. More recently Milanés, who moved to Spain several years ago to seek cancer treatment, resumed his critical stance toward the Cuban government. But he never renounced his artistic labor, that of the singer with a story to tell about loves lost and won, a towering voice with a guitar and a sense of poetry and swing.While some may define Milanés’s career as a product of a Cuban reality, long estranged from the United States, his art and its appeal had broad international repercussions. Having begun his career in his hometown, Bayamo, singing boleros and Mexican rancheras, he eventually collaborated with Latin American legends like the recently departed Gal Costa, as well as Milton Nascimento, Lucecita Benítez and Fito Páez. As one of the originators of the post-revolutionary genre nueva trova, he combined elements of Cuban son and guaracha with soul, jazz and folk rock.His “Son de Cuba a Puerto Rico” from 1978 immediately changed the way I thought about the Caribbean’s sea-disrupted continuity, and the still-unfolding story of two former Spanish colonies. With its opening lyric — based on a poem by the early 20th-century Puerto Rican poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió — proclaiming that the two islands were “two wings of the same bird,” the song was an emotional reverie about divergent destinies and a desire for a shared future. “I invite you on my flight,” he crooned, “and we’ll search together for the same sky.”Milanés’s first successful recording, “Mis 22 Años” (“My 22 Years”), released in 1965, was emblematic of the role he played in the evolution of trova in Cuba. The original trovadores were migrant troubadours who also dabbled in bolero and bufo, a kind of satirical musical theater, gradually incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythms. By the late 1940s, an update of trova called filin (a Spanish spelling of “feeling”) emerged, influenced by American jazz singers like Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. “Mis 22 Años” is grounded in filin, yet some consider it the first nueva trova song.The nueva trova movement was supposed to represent a break from older traditions of socially conscious music in Cuba and help to define the “New Man” promoted by its leaders. It was a genre cobbled together from the voices of children of the revolution, some singing its praises, others challenging what they saw as restrictions. Milanés was deemed to be rebellious and, according to a 2015 interview he gave to El País, he spent time in UMAP, a forced labor camp where dissidents and homosexuals were sent.Milanés onstage in Spain in 2021. His striking tenor was all the more powerful when it wavered in emotion.Miguel Paquet/EPA, via ShutterstockIn the 1970s nueva trova became a major force in Cuban music, with Milanés and Silvio Rodríguez, who openly borrowed from American folk-rock artists like Bob Dylan, its leading figures. While Milanés and Rodríguez often worked together and supported each other, in some ways they symbolized Cuba’s racial complexity. Milanés set poems by the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén to music and collaborated with the Afro-Cuban filin singers Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo, while the lighter-skinned Rodríguez was famously connected with the folk singer Pete Seeger.Milanés was most effective when he reached into those deeper recesses where Black singers find soul, like Al Green at his most yearning. His striking tenor was all the more powerful when it wavered in emotion — a slight trill paints the chorus of songs like “Yolanda,” dedicated to his former wife. In “La Vida no Vale Nada,” which insists that life has no value as long as there are victims of violence and the rest of us remain silent, Milanés is perhaps at his heart-aching best, sharply poignant, wounded yet determined.Milanés’s syncopated swing and filin-flavored nueva trova translates a little more easily to the Puerto Rican wing of his mythical Caribbean bird. In 1994, a new salsa version of “Son de Cuba a Puerto Rico” was recorded by the Afro-Cuban singer Issac Delgado on “Con Ganas,” which was distributed by the U.S. label Qbadisc; it introduced him to American listeners and remains popular in Puerto Rico. In the improvisational section, Delgado name-checks the Puerto Rican favorites Rafael Hernández, Tite Curet, Cheo Feliciano and Ismael Rivera, and the rhetorical feel of the original becomes more of a dance party.In the mid-1980s, Milanés wrote a song called “Yo Me Quedo” (“I’m Staying”), which resonated deeply with Puerto Ricans because it expressed a desire not to leave the Caribbean island that birthed him, seemingly intended to discourage out-migration. He even performed it in Puerto Rico, riding on its wave of loyalty and patriotism as he marched through reasons — the fragrant humidity, the “small, silent things” — that made it impossible to leave. A few years later, the Puerto Rican salsero Tony Vega covered it, indulging in all the materialist trappings of 1980s “salsa sensual,” yet still resonating with locals, losing nothing in the cross-Caribbean translation.With Milanés’s passing, the contradictions of his life, and the juxtaposition of Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s fates come into sharper focus. While the islands feature vastly different political systems, both struggle with electrical blackouts, economic austerity and often harsh living conditions that increasingly generate street protest.Yet even as Milanés continued to speak out against the Cuban government, he was still allowed to return as recently as 2019 to perform massively popular concerts in Havana, performing classics like “Amo Esta Isla” (“I Love This Island”), a song he wrote around the same time he recorded “Yo Me Quedo.” It was a moment when ideology took a back seat to Milanés’s unparalleled talent as a troubadour of love, compelling everyone to reach for the sky. More

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      in Movies

      A Feminist, Neorealist, Communist Film, and a Plain Great Movie

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      “One Way or Another,” from 1974, is a class-conscious love story involving a macho worker and a well-to-do schoolteacher in Cuba.Dialectical from opening title to final image, “One Way or Another” — the first and only feature by the Afro-Cuban director Sara Gómez — introduces itself as “a film about real people, and some fictitious ones.” That’s one way to describe this deft mixture of cinéma vérité, ethnographic documentary, feminist social realism and class-conscious revolutionary romance.“One Way or Another” opens Friday for a weeklong run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Restored from its original 16-millimeter, the film looks terrific, and, despite its nostalgia for the ideals of the Cuban revolution, it feels as relevant today as it did in 1974.While “One Way or Another” never had a formal release in the United States, it has surfaced periodically in film series, including one at BAM five years ago that was devoted to Black women’s cinema. (Reviewing this series, to which “One Way or Another” lent its name, the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called it “a still-exciting mixture of documentary and narrative fiction.”)“One Way or Another” could be described as a love story involving two photogenic young people — a macho worker, Mario (Mario Balmaseda, who was a professional actor), and a schoolteacher, Yolande (Yolanda Cuéllar, who was not). But it has more on its mind.Mario, a mulatto laborer, grew up on the mean streets of Havana’s Miraflores district; Yolanda, who is white, educated and middle class, has been assigned to teach in a Miraflores primary school. Both have workplace issues. Mario is implicated in a buddy’s misconduct; Yolanda is repeatedly advised to be more diplomatic in dealing with her pupils’ impoverished parents.Given their backgrounds, the lovers often misunderstand each other. Context is all. Their most intimate conversation is in the “neutral” territory of a tiny posada, or hotel; their story is interspersed with interludes concerning the history and legacy of slavery — including the African religion Santería and the all-male secret society Abakuá.Shots of slums and slum clearance provide a metaphor for the creation of a new society and a new consciousness. That the principles come together and drift apart amid a constant interplay of destruction and construction suggests that their relationship — like the Cuban Revolution — is a perpetual work in progress. Didactic as it is, “One Way or Another” can be taken for socialist realism, but if so, it is a highly original and even critical variant. (The “positive hero,” an axiom of the mode, is an Afro-Cuban musician and former boxer, Guillermo Diaz, who supplies a song demystifying traditional gender roles.)Trained as a musician, Gómez made a score of short documentaries. (She also served as an assistant director on Agnès Varda’s 1963 documentary “Salut les Cubains” and can be seen dancing the cha-cha at the movie’s conclusion.) “One Way or Another” is so brimming with life and ideas that it is shattering to learn that Gómez died, at just 31, while editing it — she succumbed to a severe asthma attack amid complications giving birth to her third child.The postproduction was completed by her colleagues, and the movie was not shown until 1977. Since then, it has been recognized as a landmark of feminist, neorealist, Communist, Cuban, Latinx, Third World and simply world cinema.One Way or AnotherJuly 8-14 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn; bam.org. More

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      José Luis Cortés, Trailblazing Cuban Bandleader, Dies at 70

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      He was trained in the classics and jazz, but he helped popularize a new, danceable genre known as timba.José Luis Cortés, a Cuban musician who with his popular band, NG La Banda, helped establish the lively genre of music known as timba and spread the sound with well-regarded albums and rollicking shows that had concertgoers dancing in the arenas and afterward in the streets, died on April 18 in Havana. He was 70.The Instituto Cubano de la Música posted news of his death on its Facebook page and said the cause was “a hemorrhagic encephalic accident.” The post called him “one of the most important figures in contemporary Cuban music.”Mr. Cortés, a flutist who graduated from the National School of Art, was an admired figure in Cuban music for decades, although he had recently been the subject of abuse allegations by a former vocalist with his band. He brought a combination of serious musicianship and showmanship to the street music of Cuba when he founded NG La Banda in 1988. He had earlier played in Los Van Van, the famed dance band of Juan Formell, and Irakere, the pianist Chucho Valdés’s genre-straddling group of virtuoso players.He drew on those influences as the leader of NG La Banda, a large ensemble partial to danceable songs.“The best way to understand his style is that he brought to dance music the complexity of big-band jazz,” Raul A. Fernandez, emeritus professor of Chicano and Latin studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of books including “From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz” (2006), said by email.The “NG” stood for Nueva Generación, and the band aimed for a young audience, with driving percussion, streetwise lyrics and a brass section known as “los metales del terror.”“There’s raw power in those terrifying horns, and in the forceful, nasal singing, but sophistication in the arrangements and rhythmic adventurousness,” The Miami Herald wrote in 1992, assessing “En La Calle” (“On the Street”), an album that solidified the group’s reputation. “Dense, driving, dance party music.”NG La Banda’s 1992 album “En La Calle” (“On the Street”) solidified the group’s reputation.That album included “La Expresiva,” a song that, as Professor Fernandez put it, “paid homage to the barrios of Havana,” which is where the band’s music particularly resonated. That sound was first called salsa cubana but soon had its own name, timba. Professor Fernandez and Anita Casavantes Bradford described the music in an academic paper, “Cuba’s Second Golden Age of Popular Music, 1989-2005.”“Fast, loud, and characterized by its multiple overlapping rhythms and deep booming bass lines,” they wrote, “timba was also recognizable for its insistent percussion and dense, rushing-note horn patterns.”It is, they added, “a highly technical style of music, and holding one’s own in a timba orquesta, especially in the horns, or ‘metales,’ section, remains an accomplishment boasted by only the most rigorously trained and disciplined musicians.”The sound Mr. Cortés and his players perfected, the Spanish-language Florida newspaper El Nuevo Herald wrote in 1994, “has breathed new life into dance music, stimulating the listener’s senses while challenging those who venture onto the dance floor.”José Luis Cortés was born on Oct. 5, 1951, in Villa Clara, Cuba. His musical education, he said, emphasized classical and jazz.“You couldn’t play popular Cuban music in school,” he said in a 1998 interview with The Miami Herald.He spent the 1970s in Los Van Van, which was breaking new ground by incorporating elements of funk and rock into mainstream Cuban dance music. For much of the 1980s he was in Irakere, an influential group whose aim was, as Mr. Valdés once put it, “bringing together jazz and the ancestral forms.”Mr. Cortés’s nickname was El Tosco, “the Rough One.” Certainly the lyrics in NG La Banda’s songs could be rough, with vulgarity and what some listeners construed as misogyny. He defended those choices.“Popular music comes from the people,” he told The Observer of Britain in 1993. “I test my songs in the streets; if they like it, it’s a hit.”He also defended timba as a genre.“The intellectuals say that timba is crap,” he told The Miami Herald in 1998. “But this is a racist concept. Cuban popular music has always been the music of the people, of the poor barrios, where there are very few whites.”Some scholars linked the emergence of timba to the difficult economic times Cuba experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union, a time often referred to as the “special period.” The genre’s energy and blunt lyrics, they suggested, spoke to a generation that came of age during the hardships of the 1990s.The group was popular enough that when it made its New York debut, in 1997, it played Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.“When the band did what it does best,” Peter Watrous wrote in a review in The New York Times, “playing long, structurally complicated tunes that mixed funk, stop-time parts, drum sections and Afro-Cuban dance music, all with wild choreography, the audience was up on its feet and screaming.”Mr. Cortés’s career, though, ended under a cloud. In 2019 Dianelys Alfonso, who had been a singer in the band and had had a romantic relationship with him for a time, said he had repeatedly assaulted her. That year The Associated Press reported that Mr. Cortés had not responded to the accusations, but that Ms. Alfonso had received both widespread support for coming forward and abusive messages from Mr. Cortés’s admirers.Information on Mr. Cortés’s survivors was not immediately available. More