The Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon of the late 1990s—which rescued from obscurity a group of aged Cuban musicians and brought them to Carnegie Hall and beyond in the company of a globetrotting North American guitarist and a German filmmaker with a romantic fondness for Old Havana—provoked two competing reactions among lovers of Cuban music. On the one hand, it generated a keen hope that Buena Vista’s rising tide would lift the boats of other Cuban musicians; on the other hand, it provoked a rankling suspicion that it corrupted the very music it purported to save. Often the same observers held both views at once—they wanted simultaneously to share what was theirs by extolling its riches and to protect it by defining it.
These two books grow out of this dual reaction, attempting both to latch onto the recent fad for Cuban music and to emphasize that fad’s long historical...
