CBS Sunday Morning glowingly promoted a Broadway play about a controversial Cuban band, without once mentioning the word communism, and barely mentioning the Cuban Revolution. Its report promoting “Buena Vista Social Club” should be viewed as no less than softcore communist propaganda.
Watch this eye-popping segment towards the end of the report:
MARTHA TEICHNER: Brought to life on a Broadway stage: the old songs, as they were played in the 1940s and ’50s at the actual Buena Vista Social Club, a members-only Havana nightclub for working-class black Cubans. It was shut down after Castro came to power in 1959. The events of the Cuban Revolution lurk at the edges of the show.
ACTOR: It’s not your fault the world made us take sides. Until one day, there were only two types of Cubans. Those who stayed and those who left.
TEICHNER: Playing yesterday’s Cuban music on Broadway, some of today’s finest Cuban musicians. Most of whom now live outside Cuba. Because making a living there is tough.
Correspondent Martha Teichner never explains WHY making a living in Cuba might be tough. Such explanations, perhaps, might soil the premise of the report, which is to glamorize the regime-comfortable band as the semi-biographical play hits Broadway proper. Or perhaps such an omission is intended in order to grant viewers permission not to dwell on such unpleasantries as the murderous regime that has held Cuba in its iron grip for 66 years and whose cancer has metastasized throughout this hemisphere. Either way, it is disgusting.
Although it is sanitized out of CBS’s report, the Castro regime does indeed loom over Buena Vista Social Club. From Samuel Leiter’s review on theaterlife dot com:
One central conflict is between Young Omara (Kenya Browne) and her sister Haydee (Danaya Esperanza), with whom, in 1956, she shares an increasingly successful act performing for tourists at the Tropicana Hotel. When Cuba’s troubles heat up, Haydee decides to flee for the USA, but Omara, who wants only to “sing for our people,” can’t bring herself to do so.
Partly that’s because of her relationship to a talented Black performer, Ibrahim (1956: Olly Sholotan; 1996: Mel Semé), with whom she chooses to perform at a déclassé, non-discriminatory joint called the Buena Vista Social Club. Racial issues in the music business, however, prevent them from continuing their budding partnership.
Talented individuals who stay “for the people” rather than flee communist revolution for personal freedom (see Cruz, Celia) are often lionized and elevated by the regimes.
Consider that the 2001 Latin Grammys were moved from Miami to Los Angeles due to the Cuban exile community protesting the nominations and potential attendance of Buena Vista Social Club singers. This change in venue was trumpeted by the Castro regime as a victory, on the heels of Elián González getting sent back to Cuba.
In 2015, Buena Vista Social Club were invited to perform at the Obama White House for Hispanic Heritage Month, despite their appearing to have recorded a version of what could be most charitably described as an elegy to murderous homophobe Ernesto “Che” Guevara. When you click on the Babalu Blog item, note the picture of the heroine of the play, getting her hand kissed by Raul Castro as she performs for him and Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez. For what it’s worth, none of this made it to Jim Acosta’s writeup on the BVSC-White House booking.
CBS’s whitewashing of history and syrupy treatment of communist-adjacent elites might play well for liberal theater kids, but reeks of communist propaganda to the rest of us, especially those of us who understand that our hemisphere will not be truly free until the Castroite cancer is cut from Cuba.
Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned report, as aired on CBS Sunday Morning on March 9th, 2025:
MO ROCCA: Martha Teichner this morning is taking us on a colorful journey to Old Havana for a preview of the new Broadway musical Buena Vista Social Club.
MARTHA TEICHNER: Remember Buena Vista Social Club the album? Even if you don’t, now there’s Buena Vista Social Club, the musical. An exuberant blast from the past. Old Cuban music for a new audience. The Broadway version is a stand-in for the city’s corroded grandeur and for the studio where in 1996, a group of old, mostly forgotten Cuban musicians recorded the album.
ACTOR: What follows is the story of a band, not ours, though we will do our best. Some of what follows is true. Some of it only feels true.
TEICHNER: The true part: the real person this actor is playing: Juan de Marcos González. Look. There he is during rehearsals. Juan de Marcos had already located and brought together the old musicians before music producers Ry Cooder and Nick Gold showed up in Havana. When their plan to make an album pairing Cuban and west African performers fell through, they went with plan B and recorded with the group Juan de Marcos had assembled.
JUAN DE MARCOS GONZALEZ: I was so happy. Because they were my idols. You know, I grew up listening to their music. And then, suddenly, I was the band leader.
TEICHNER: Did any of the people involved, including you, have any idea that what became “Buena Vista Social Club” would be something big?
GONZALEZ: No. They became pop stars. It was like unbelievable fame.
TEICHNER: The unexpected and irresistible phenomenon that resulted is the subject of the Oscar-nominated Wim Wenders 1999 documentary.
JUDY CANTOR-NAVAS: Well, it was just ubiquitous. I mean, you would hear this music everywhere.
TEICHNER: Music journalist Judy Cantor-Navas is a Substack contributor, and the author of Cuba on Record.
CANTOR-NAVAS: To say that, yes, we’re listening to this old Cuban music that is suddenly selling millions of albums seemed like something that was unlikely.
TEICHNER: Why do you think people love the music so much?
CANTOR-NAVAS: I think not only this, but Cuban music has really appealed to so many different kinds of people. They say it has the perfect combination of the Afro-Cuban rhythms and the Spanish melodies that came together in Cuba. And it’s just this very infectious music that, like, gets in your soul.
TEICHNER: It wasn’t just the music they loved. It was who the musicians were. The improbable last act of their careers. The album won a Grammy, and has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide.
GONZALEZ: And they were so happy, you know, because they came back to the stage. Because if you are a musician and you are an artist, you are always an artist. And even when you are retired, you have this small candle in your heart.
TEICHNER: Omara Portuondo was 67. Ibrahim Ferrer was 70. Other band members were as old as 90. They began touring the world, even singing to me for a Sunday Morning story 25 years ago. “I still have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not asleep and dreaming,” Ferrer says. I never thought I’d have so much success.
The play tells the imagined origin story of the musicians, of their careers, their personal struggles.
ACTOR: But I know how the story goes.
TEICHNER: With hints of romance. Decades before their fame late in life.
ACTRESS: What’s this place called?
Actor: The Buena Vista Social Club.
MARCO RAMIREZ: I’m Cuban American. I was born and raised in Miami. But my parents and my family is Cuban. And so for me, what brought me to this was the music. It was music I was raised around my entire life.
TEICHNER: Marco Ramirez wrote the Broadway show. He was 14 when the album came out.
MARCO RAMIREZ: There was a moment of intense pride- of us realizing that the world cared about our music and that these songs that I was used to hearing on my grandfather’s little yellow Sony boombox over the washing machine, these were songs that suddenly the world cared about. That meant everything to me.
ACTOR: I guess I just dreamed one day that with the right record, we might remind the world that Mozart has got nothing on us.
SAHIM ALI: And I just was obsessed with this album. I kept listening to it on repeat. Something about the lyrics spoke to me. I learned the lyrics without knowing what I was talking about. Because Swahili is my first language.
TEICHNER: This was in Kenya where Sahim Ali, the director of the show, grew up. His father, an airline pilot, brought the album home.
AKI: I knew nothing about their stories. The first time I knew about the stories was reading Marcos’ script. That’s what excited me about this musical. People are going to know about them now in a way that young people like me never had a chance to.
TEICHNER: Brought to life on a Broadway stage: the old songs, as they were played in the 1940s and ’50s at the actual Buena Vista Social Club, a members-only Havana nightclub for working-class black Cubans. It was shut down after Castro came to power in 1959. The events of the Cuban Revolution lurk at the edges of the show.
ACTOR: It’s not your fault the world made us take sides. Until one day, there were only two types of Cubans. Those who stayed and those who left.
TEICHNER: Playing yesterday’s Cuban music on Broadway, some of today’s finest Cuban musicians. Most of whom now live outside Cuba. Because making a living there is tough.
GONZALEZ: The people are going to see the real Cuba. They are going to get a piece of our country when they attend the musical. We have nothing in our country. We don’t have oil, we don’t have gold but we have the music, beautiful ladies, good coffee, the best cigars and best rum. And the best music. Which is the most important thing like food for us.
TEICHNER: Served up on Broadway, a feast.
