The Cuban-American Sound Machine: Nostalgia and Identity in the Music of Celia Cruz, Gloria Estefan and Pitbull

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.10.2.0238
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Pages: 238-265
• Author: Horacio Sierra
• Subject Matter: Cuban-American identity,popular music,immigration,nostalgia,race,gender

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 10.2 WInter 2018

ACADEMIC ARTICLE

THE CUBAN-AMERICAN SOUND MACHINE:

NOSTALGIA AND IDENTITY IN THE MUSIC

OF CELIA CRUZ, GLORIA ESTEFAN AND

PITBULL

Horacio Sierra

Bowie State University, USA1

Abstract

This article examines how Celia Cruz (1925–2003), Gloria Estefan (born 1957) and

Pitbull (born 1981), each of whom represents different generations, immigration

statuses, gender performances and racial identities, have employed their

musical hits and public personae to simultaneously shorten and widen the 90-

mile distance between the US and Cuba. Their musical and political commentary

parallels the evolving attitudes and identities of the Cuban-American community

towards Cuba and its politics. Each successive artist is a little more ambiguous

about his or her political leanings in the American political sphere, but all of

them continue to oppose Cuba’s Communist regime while trading in the musical

currency of nostalgia for the Cuba of yesteryear. In the vein of Gustavo Pérez

Firmat’s watershed analysis of Cuban-Americans’ hyphenated identity, these

artists demonstrate how Cuban-American identity exists in a liminal cultural

space that lives in the present and plans for the future with one foot planted

firmly in the fantasy of an Edenic past.

Keywords: Cuban-American identity, popular music, immigration, nostalgia, race,

gender

People in both of our countries have sung along with Celia Cruz or Gloria Estefan

and now . . . Pitbull

–US President Barack Obama, 2016 (Flores 2016)

THE CUBAN-AMERICAN SOUND MACHINE 239

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

This article examines how Celia Cruz (1925–2003), Gloria Estefan (born 1957)

and Pitbull (born 1981), each of whom represents different generations, immi-

gration statuses, gender performances and racial identities, have employed their

musical hits and public personae to simultaneously shorten and widen the

90-mile distance between the US and Cuba. These artists have curated unique

musical careers cognisant of mainstream musical palatability and political pos-

turing attendant to the eras in which they achieved their peak popularity. Their

musical and political commentary parallels the evolving attitudes and identities

of the Cuban-American community towards Cuba and its politics.2 Each succes-

sive artist is a little more ambiguous about his or her political leanings in the

American political sphere, but all of them continue to oppose Cuba’s Communist

regime while trading in the musical currency of nostalgia for the Cuba of yester-

year. In the vein of Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s watershed analysis of Cuban-

Americans’ hyphenated identity, these artists demonstrate how Cuban-American

identity exists in a liminal cultural space that lives in the present and plans for

the future with one foot planted firmly in the fantasy of an Edenic past.

Celia Cruz: Raconteuse of Pre-lapsarian Cuba

Cruz was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1925 as Ursula Hilaria Celia Caridad Cruz

Alfonso. She enjoyed a successful career in her homeland as the lead singer of the

orchestra band La Sonora Matancera. She left Cuba in 1960, more than a year

after Castro seized power, never to return. Successful collaborations in the US

with artists such as Tito Puente, Johnny Pacheco and Willie Colón led to her

being dubbed the Queen of Salsa and the Queen of Latin Music. The former is a

significant accolade seeing as how salsa has historically been and still is domi-

nated by male artists. Cruz found success in the Spanish-language music market

but was mostly unknown throughout the US English-speaking population

(Steward 1999: 59). Despite her relative lack of name recognition, she was argu-

ably the most famous Cuban-American since Desi Arnaz (of I Love Lucy) fame

in the 1950s.

Unlike Arnaz, who was born and raised in Cuba but attended high school in

the US, Cruz moved to the US as a 35-year-old. For this reason, I refer to her as

a ‘first-generation’ Cuban-American immigrant. Like other post-1959 Cuban

first-generation immigrants to the US, she was an exile. As part of this first wave

of Cuban exiles, Cruz and her community hoped they would return to the Cuba

they were forced to flee when the political situation made life untenable for them.

She spoke idealistically about returning to a free Cuba and angrily about the

Castro regime’s denial of her request to attend her mother’s funeral in Cuba.

References to such travel denials surfaced regularly in articles about Cruz, which