It’s been more than ten years since Juan Formell and the band he founded, Los Van Van, Cuba’s most popular salsa band for decades, played a concert in Miami. In 1999, thousands of Cuba exile protestors threw rocks, bottles and eggs at the intrepid concert goers. Last night, Juan Formell and his band returned to Miami, heartened by the overwhelmingly positive reaction in Miami to the Juanes concert in Havana last year. And while three or four hundred protestors showed up, ten times as many were able to attend the concert, in relative peace. Times sure have changed.
Or have they? Writing in yesterday’s Miami Herald, Alina Fernandez Revuelta shows us just how much some few things stay the same.
Fernandez ( is Fidel Castro's daughter from an affair he had with her mother, Natalia Revuelta) is no fan of Los Van Van, who she says carry a political message with them from Cuba “precisely because they come from Cuba.”
[Formell] arrives during this ``cultural exchange'' that's unequal and offensive, where the ones from the other Cuba can come here to provoke, ignoring the tragedy of so many thousands of families.But those from this Cuba, those here, the exiles, have been vetoed any permission to step foot on their homeland, much less go sing their own songs . . .
Let those who are more Pavlovian dog than Cuban go to Formell's event. I'm staying home.
For decades, we've been trained to believe that Miami's Cuban American community wants nothing to do with the Juan Formells of the world. Any artist who doesn't either denounce the Cuban regime or else leave the island is an artist that must himself be denounced and shunned. There is this Cuba, and there is that Cuba, and you can only live in, and be loyal, to one of them. Whichever one you choose is your personal political statement.
Unless it isn't. Increasingly, and overwhelmingly, the Cuban American community is abandoning the name-calling, zero-sum game (If Juan Formell loses, we win) approach to Cuba and Cubans, and simply focusing on how to reach out to the Cuban people. Embracing their Cuban roots, family, music and immediate future, a majority of Cuban Americans supported Juanes' concert for peace in Havana which nearly a million Cubans attended (and not a few Cuban Americans as well), and nearly 70% support all Americans traveling to Cuba. Thousands of Cuban Americans, especially those who left Cuba within the last 20 years, are choosing both countries, quite literally, and traveling home as much as they can afford.
Many among this new Cuban American majority oppose the Cuban government in the strongest terms, but have simply concluded that isolating Cubans from Americans, and vice versa, isn't helping anyone. More and more, what Cubans share across the straits, rather than what they don't, is beginning to redefine the fractured Cuban family. Or, as Vanessa Formell, Juan Formell's daughter (who lives in Miami) put it to last night's crowd:
If you're Cuban, show me some feeling! I don't care if you're from here or from there!