Like Lola Flores, did Celia Cruz a genre all her own, and one day she screamed “sugar” and, aboard that tropical scream, she rode through decades of great success. Lola Flores was our Mick Jagger, according to the unrivaled currency of Sabineand next to … There’s Celia Cruz, like a Rolling Stone with Merecumbé ruffles, like a rocker with a Tropicana shoe store.
Today we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Celia Cruz is a little forgotten, to tell the truth, when she was a summit, a vertigo and a cabaret, all alone. Celia goes from Havana to the worldthen people in Havana, without asking permission, and with a smile that is a joyfully cannibalistic laugh. Celia Cruz goes from La Sonora Matancerathis legendary orchestra, with universal salsa, from the neighborhood to the stadiums, from the studio to the ritual. I didn’t sing to be loved, I sang to arrive. The voice, hoarse and extremely powerful, was a rhythmic disobedience, a joyful hoarseness that said all the time, here I am and behind comes the Caribbean complete.
The inevitable exile makes it a symbol, without taking away its enthusiasm. He lost the island, but he did not lose the rhythm, the “swing”, the Cubanness, this cold sun which is his. One day he returned to the island for a one-off concert at Guantanamo, and on the way back he carried a handful of soil from that beloved place in his bag. His father was a railroad driver and his mother was a housewife. In the United States, it became continental, and the holiday then became a language. sung with Johnny Pachecowith Willie Colon, with Héctor Lavoé. But even surrounded by decisive, almost mythological men, it was she who put the emphasis and the cramp, just as Lola put the focus. With figure and also with genius. And among all her men, appears Pedro Knight, her peaceful husband, her luminous shadow. Knight was a trumpeter before becoming a warden, and later a choir butler. He was the man who held the crown while the queen danced. It was not a troop of knights, nor a secondary character, but rather this practical love which makes possible the daily miracle, the long-lasting fantasy. Pedro ordered the world to ensure that Celia could disrupt the scene. Like Lola, and the allusion or comparison is once again inevitable, Célia had a worked, almost militant joy. I knew that dance is also resistance and that music can be a form of government. He did not have the melancholy wound of Billie Vacation nor the serious memory of Nina Simone. He chose the fire before. This is why Guillermo Cabrera Infante He said she was on par with Bessie Smith and beyond Ella Fitzgerald. That’s a lot to say, but Cabrera said it. And we don’t talk so much about the technique, about Cruz, who had it, but about destiny.
The inevitable exile makes it a symbol, without taking away its enthusiasm. He lost the island, but he did not lose the rhythm, the “swing”, the Cubanness, this cold of the sun, therefore his
He dressed as he sang, according to a formula without premeditation, which is an excess of meaning. I had a vice for him burst of glitterfor bulky shoes, for crazy oxygen wigs. It was like he was opening another room in his own museum, when he came out again to sing, or whatever that great rhythmic tension was doing. Célia transformed the wardrobe into a manifesto. She was baroque, crazy, jubilant, dressed as if the Caribbean could fit her, in a tattered trousseau, in the closet of a diva who doesn’t work. Every suit was a skintight disaster, a buttoned-up disaster, a summer disaster. And everything was finally wrapped up in the historic cry, sugar, which is a cry of joy that also includes the humility of rebellion. His funeral, in Miami, in a white carriage, filled the city with emotion.
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