All Omara’s parties  

Larry Schwartz  
OMARA PORTUONDO was touring the US in 1962 when news of the Cuban missile crisis broke. She was in Miami, singing with a quartet called Las D’Aida, and quickly made plans to slip back to Havana. JFK and Krushchev were engaged in a dangerous stand-off over Soviet plans to establish missile bases on its Caribbean ally, and, as Portuondo recalls, “we feared the relationship between the US and Cuba would break down”.

As history attests, she was right. The relationship did crumble, and with it, her burgeoning career stateside. Though she is now established as a touring artist on the world stage, it wasn’t until the late 1990s, when Ry Cooder recorded her singing and the playing of her contemporaries on the Buena Vista Social Club album (followed by Wim Wenders’ film), that
Portuondo had arrived on the international stage.

Five years after she fled Miami, Portuondo was singing solo, representing Cuba at the Sopot Festival in Poland, an event that has been described as “a kind of socialist version of the Eurovision Song Contest”.

That was pretty much the high point. Though she continued to perform and record in the intervening 30 years, the woman who has been tagged “Cuba’s Edith Piaf” and “the fiance of feeling” was stuck in relative obscurity pre-Cooder, as global politics and musical fashion pushed her aside.

Now, though, she pursues a dizzying schedule that has taken her from Zurich’s Volkshaus to the Hollywood Bowl in recent months. This week she’s in Melbourne – for the second time in a year.

“I thought the people were very kind, very simple, very unsophisticated,” she says of her first impressions of the city (she was here with the Buena Vista Social Club in February).

She means it as a compliment. “We got a really wonderful treatment. I remember looking at the streets and everything looked so normal, relaxed, that I felt as if I was in my own country. I would say I felt at home.”

Now 70, Portuondo was the lone female among the veteran Cuban musicians brought to the attention of the world – and Cuba – by Cooder.

It is perhaps a touch ironic that it took an American to remind young Cubans of their own rich musical heritage. “Young (Cuban) people didn’t know this music before,” Portuondo says. “In a way, it is the traditional music of Cuba. For them, having come into contact with it is like a treasure that they’ve found. The other part of the Cuban community, people my age, feel very happy because they can pass on this music to the younger generation.”

Now that the wider world has caught on to this treasure as well, Portuondo is determined to make the most of the belated attention. “One has to live in the present,” she says with the help of a Spanish-speaking interpreter. “At my age, the present
moment is important. It’s true that one says that if you want things ahead you haven’t got a long time ahead. Not as when I was 17, for example.

“But for me the music is what matters. First it matters to me. Then it matters to my culture. And, if it matters to the world, I want to continue. I see music as (being of) value to the world. The same as doctors or scientists. I see that in singers. We do good to mankind.”

In the fallow years, Portuondo eked out a living playing the Tropicana, Havana’s most famous venue. These days her schedule leaves little time for that, though the venue in which she once backed Nat King Cole remains a special place.

She made her debut there in 1945, as a reluctant recruit to the chorus line after a dancer dropped out of the ballet troupe days before a show. She had been waiting in the wings, watching her older sister Haydee, but feared joining her onstage.

Soon she and Haydee, who has since retired, started to sing American jazz standards with musician friends. They became known as Loquibambla Swing. By the early ’50s the sisters were in a female vocal quartet led by the pianist Aida Diestro. Portuondo stayed with the seminal Cuarteto Las D’Aida for 15 years – and was in fact performing with them in Miami that fateful day in 1962.

Now that she’s a darling of the world music scene, you wonder if life has become just a little more lavish. “The gains haven’t been that much,” says Portuondo, though she concedes that some of the Buena Vista stars have managed to buy cars and other coveted luxury goods. “For us the biggest satisfaction has been that we have made our music known.”

Wim Wenders claims his favorite scene in the Buena Vista Social Club movie is the moment in which singer Ibrahim Ferrer removes his handkerchief from his pocket and gently wipes away a tear from Portuondo’s eye after they have dueted on Silencio, a song about flowers that might wither and die if they knew her sadness. “That moment was very spontaneous,” Portuondo says. “We were not aware that the camera was so close.”

She is fond of the scene, too, but cites as her own favorite the performance by the troupe in New York City. “For me to be singing at the Carnegie Hall was a very special moment because when I was a child I used to listen on the radio to Marian Anderson, of whom I was a great admirer.

“I knew she had been singing in that hall and for me being there at the same place was a very, very, very special moment. I could say that I was almost a bit frightened to have such an honor and be able to sing there.”

It’s been an extraordinary journey for Portuondo, one that began in 1996 when Cuban record producer Juan de Marcos Gonzalez invited her to sing for Cooder. She had already met the slide guitar player, whose music has graced soundtracks for films including Wenders’ Paris Texas, when he visited Cuba the previous year to record with the Chieftains.

When they met again at Havana’s Egrem Studios, she suggested she sing a song called Viente Anos (Twenty Years) with Compay Segundo, the cigar-smoking guitar master then in his 90s. She was a child when she first heard the song. “It was my mum and my dad who taught me to sing, especially that old song,” she says.

Portuondo was born in Havana in October 1930. Her mother had defied her wealthy Spanish family to marry her father, who was black and a baseball player from the Cuban national team (racially mixed marriages were considered improper in Cuba at the time). “We were a normal family,” she says.
“Sometimes there wasn’t enough money. Sometimes there was not enough work. But as a family, there was a lot of love. We were happy to share everything.”

How unlikely it must have seemed to her then that one day she would be adored by people who do not even understand a word of the Spanish she sings.

Or maybe not. “When I was a child, I used to love music sung in English and later on also French,” she says.

“The music connects us. Even though it is true that it is important to know the words of a song, there are other things, like the expression, the melody and the feeling. Music is a universal language.”

The Sunday Age, 16-Sep-2001