Cruz, Celia

Celia Cruz

Cuban-born singing star Celia Cruz (1925–2003) has been hailed as the queen of salsa, the queen of rumba, the queen of Latin music, and an inadvertent symbol of the Cuban American community's exile spirit. Cruz, who fled the Caribbean island nation in 1960, became a world-famous singer with an energetic, flamboyant stage presence that brought audiences to their feet. "Cruz is undisputedly the best-known and most influential female figure in the history of Afro-Cuban music," declared Billboard 's Leila Cobo.

Sang Lullabies

Though sometimes evasive about her age, it is believed that Cruz was born on October 21, 1925, in Havana, Cuba. Cruz grew up in the Santo Suárez area of Havana in a household headed by her father, a railroad stoker. The family was of Afro-Cuban heritage, descendants of the Africans who were forcibly brought to the island nation to work in its vast sugar fields in centuries past, and eventually grew to include 14 children, some of them Cruz's cousins. As the second eldest child, she would often have to put the younger ones to bed and would sing them to sleep. The adults in the household, hearing her voice, began to gather outside the door to listen themselves.

In her teens, Cruz entered and won first prize in a radio contest, "La hora del té," by singing a tango song. She began entering other amateur contests, and though her mother was encouraging, her father strongly disapproved of her ambitions to become a singer in Cuba's strong salsa scene. This musical style merged elements from traditional Spanish music with the African rhythms that came from the island's former slave population and exemplified national character traits of both exuberance and a penchant for romantic melancholy. Cruz's father hoped instead that she would become a teacher, and so to placate him Cruz entered the local teachers' college for a time, but quit when her singing career began to take off in earnest. From 1947 to 1950 she studied music theory, voice, and piano at the National Conservatory of Music in Havana, but even a teacher there suggested that she pursue stardom full-time.

Fled Castro Regime

Cruz's break came when La Sonora Matancera, a popular Cuban band, hired her as their lead vocalist in 1950. She had a tough time at first, for female singers were a relative rarity in Cuban music—the stage was considered an unseemly place for a woman—and she replaced a singer with a popular following. Irate fans even wrote to the radio station that broadcast La Sonora Matancera performances, but as Cruz told Cobo in Billboard, she was unfazed. "I could care less. This was my job—the job of my dreams and the job that fed me." Even an American record company executive that signed the band was uneasy with the proposition of a rumba track with a female singer, so the band's leader, Rogelio Martínez, promised to pay Cruz out of his own pocket for the session if the record failed to catch on, but the song was a hit.

Both La Sonora Matancera and Cruz became stars in Cuba. Throughout the 1950s, they played regularly at Havana's famed Tropicana nightclub, appeared in films, and toured extensively throughout Latin America. These heady years ended in 1959 when Communist leader Fidel Castro seized power and Cuba became a socialist state. A year and a half later, Cruz was with La Sonora Matancera on a Mexican tour when they defected en masse on July 15, 1960. The band settled in the United States, and Cruz soon became a naturalized citizen. Castro was irate that one of his country's most popular musical acts had made such a public statement against his regime and vowed that none would ever be granted entry back into Cuba again. Cruz tried to return when her mother died in 1962 but was unable to secure government permission. That same year, she wed Pedro Knight, La Sonora Matancera's trumpet player, who would eventually become her manager and musical director for much of her career.

Teamed with Puente

For much of the decade, Cruz remained relatively unknown in the United States outside of the Cuban exile community, but that changed when she joined the Tito Puente Orchestra in the mid-1960s. The popular percussionist and bandleader from Puerto Rico had a large following across Latin America, and as frontperson Cruz again became a dynamic focus for the act. Puente, who died in 2000, once told New York Times writer Elizabeth Llorente, "She keeps the musicians on their toes.… We'll be huffing, exhausted, and she'll be on a roll, with more Tina Turner energy left in her than all of us together."

Cruz recorded several albums with Puente, including Cuba Y Puerto Rico Son in 1966. But it was her stage presence that made her such a compelling figure in Latin music. She had a strong, husky voice that could hold its own against a hard-working rhythm section and was a tireless dancer, storyteller, and audience-rouser. Fans adored her glitzy stage outfits, often sewn from yards of fabric and embellished with sequins, feathers, or lace. Reportedly she never wore the same one twice. High heels and towering wigs only added to the diminutive singer's allure. Her signature shout, "Azucar!" (Sugar!), came from a dining experience at a Miami restaurant, when her Cuban waiter asked if she took sugar in her coffee. As she recalled in the Billboard interview with Cobo, "I said, 'Chico, you're Cuban. How can you even ask that? With sugar!' And that evening during my show—I always talk during the show so the horn players can rest their mouths—I told the audience the story and they laughed. And one day, instead of telling the story, I simply walked down the stairs and shouted 'Azucar!'"

Latin Music's Own Tina Turner

By the 1970s, the salsa sound had caught on with a new generation of Latin Americans, riding a resurgence of ethnic pride and interest in the music of their parents' era. Cruz even appeared at Carnegie Hall for a 1973 staging of Hommy–A Latin Opera, the Spanish-language adaptation of the hit rock opera from the Who's Tommy. For a number of years, she was signed to the Fania label, a salsa-source powerhouse co-owned by trombonist Willie Colón, with whom she recorded an acclaimed 1974 work, Celia and Johnny. She performed regularly with the Fania All-Stars, including a 1976 concert at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx that was recorded and released as a double album. The singer also appeared annually at a New York City salsa-fest held at Madison Square Garden. "Onstage, she leaps, dances, flaunts, flirts and teases to the gyrating beat of salsa," wrote Llorente in a 1987 New York Times article. "She improvises playfully, trading riffs with the chorus and instruments. And just when she seems deeply lost in a song about a doomed love affair—microphone clutched, eyes closed, tears imminent—she looks out at the audience and tosses them an aside ('The man was a jerk, anyway')."

Cruz lived in the New York City area but was also a star in Miami and performed there often. For Cuban Americans, she seemed to symbolize the trajectory of its large exile community centered in southern Florida—many of whom, like her, had fled the Castro regime and then achieved personal and professional success in their adopted homeland. Most were avowed foes of Castro and asserted, as Cruz had also done, that they would never to return to Cuba unless it became a democracy. One song in her repertoire, "Canto a la Habana" (Song to Havana), featured the line, "Cuba que lindos son tus paisajes" (Cuba, what beautiful vistas you have), which would incite an emotional eruption from her audiences. Cruz even gained a following among the second generation of Cuban Americans, noted New York Times writer Mirta Ojito. To those "who left Cuba as children or were born in the United States," Ojito wrote, "Cruz embodied the Cuba of the 1950's, an era that, through the prism of exile and the passing of decades, has become mythic for them."

Won Several Grammys

Over the years, Cruz worked with a roster of performers that proved her crossover appeal, though she never sang in anything but her native Spanish language. She recorded or collaborated with Brazilian star Caetano Veloso, Patti La-Belle, Wyclef Jean of the Fugees, producer Emilio Estefan, the tenor Luciano Pavarotti, and even former Talking Heads singer David Byrne. With him she sang a duet, "Loco de Amor," that appeared on the soundtrack to the 1986 film Something Wild. In the 1992 film The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, she was cast as a nightclub owner, and she also appeared in 1995's The Perez Family. Her awards included a Grammy for best tropical Latin album of 1989 for Ritmo en el corazón, a collaboration with conga player Ray Barretto, and she took three consecutive Latin Grammy awards when the honors were established in 2000, including best salsa album of 2002 for La Negra Tiene Tumbao, which spawned a hit single of the same name.

Cruz was not slowed by age and still toured heavily and recorded well into her seventies. "My life is singing," she told Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service reporter Mario Tarradell in 2002. "I don't plan on retiring. I plan to die on a stage. I can have a headache. But when it's time to sing and I step on that stage, there's no more headache. As long as I'm doing what I want to do, I feel good." Her final album was Regalo de Alma ("Gift from the Soul"), recorded in early 2003 when she was already suffering from cancer. She died on July 16, 2003, at her home in Fort Lee, New Jersey. She had requested that her funeral include two public viewings—one in New York City and a second in Miami. Thousands turned out for each, including a woman dressed as a patron saint in Roman Catholic iconography who stood outside the Madison Avenue funeral home the entire day holding a Cuban flag and a Colombian man who was a regular performer on New York city subway platforms, dancing to Cruz's repertoire with a foam doll.

In Miami, Cruz's casket stood inside a building known as the Freedom Tower, once an immigration-processing center that was the first stop in the United States for some half a million Cuban exiles in the 1960s and 1970s. "For the almost two million Cubans who live outside the island," noted Ojito in the New York Times, "Cruz was an icon.… She embodied what Cubans view as some of their best qualities, strong family ties, an impeccable work ethic and a joy in living, even in the face of calamity." Many of the fans who stood in line for hours in both cities, however, carried the flags of Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Ecuador, and even Jamaica, a testament to Cruz's immense appeal throughout the Latin and Caribbean world.

Books

Contemporary Hispanic Biography, Volume 1, Gale, 2002.

Periodicals

Billboard, October 28, 2000; July 26, 2003.

Economist, July 26, 2003.

Entertainment Weekly, August 1, 2003.

Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, September 13, 2002; July 16, 2003; July 19, 2003; July 22, 2003.

New York Times, August 30, 1987; July 17, 2003; July 20, 2003; July 22, 2003.

People, August 4, 2003.

Time, July 11, 1998.