In the last few years, Celia Cruz had begun to do something very different in her concerts.
Usually, when she sang her signature song, “Bemba Colora,” she normally dragged out the groove at the end — “bemmm-ba-co-lo-raaaaaaa” into a sweaty, dirty slow-mo.
But in recent years, Cruz had replaced that crucial line — it means big red lower lip, a pejorative against people of color turned not just into defiance, but in her hands into a term of endearment, intimacy — with a come-on shot through with all sorts of promises.
In its place was: “Yo soy Celia Cruz.” I am Celia Cruz. Recently, she’d just say, “Yo soy . . . ” and the crowds would thunder back her name. She’d lower her head, bow, hold her hand to her heart or throw kisses. Then she’d scat around: “Remember me, remember me.”
But it wasn’t a command, it wasn’t even an affirmation — how, after all, could the world ever forget its greatest salsa singer?
Whenever this happened, I used to think it was almost embarrassing. Cruz prompting the crowd to love her. She didn’t need to do that.
What I realize now is that Cruz sounded vulnerable at those moments.
And for me — and everyone in the world for whom her music is the soundtrack of our lives — that was discomforting. We needed Celia Cruz to be strong.
Thursday’s El Nuevo Herald in Miami, the day after Cruz died in New Jersey at age 77, featured just a big image of Celia and the legend: “Celia Eterna.”
And, of course, that’s what we always thought: Cruz belonged to the world, as constant as the night sky. Eternal.
Front-page news
Cruz’s death made the front page everywhere: Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Spain, France, Italy, Japan. Spanish-language radio and TV stations suspended regular programming for days to feature tributes to her. Even Granma, the Communist Party newspaper in Cuba, where her music is banned, came to its knees and announced the events with a short and somewhat acidic note.
Many of the articles in the U.S. tried to explain her to non-Latinos. A Latina Ella Fitzgerald. A Latina Sara Vaughn. The Washington Post compared her with Aretha Franklin.
But, with all due respect to those marvelous divas, Celia Cruz was bigger than all that. Way bigger.
For Latinos, she was maybe on par with Bob Dylan, or Elvis, or the Beatles, or Madonna.
But all rolled into one.
I first saw Cruz in the ’60s, on a double bill with her best friend, the rumba dancer Tongolele. I was a kid, taken by my parents. But even then I knew it wasn’t like going to hear anybody else.
My parents didn’t just talk about her music but of her an example: Celia was hardworking (over the years her work ethic became legendary), Celia was generous of spirit, Celia was of an essential and clear decency (and certainly no scandal was ever attached to her name). She was the perfect Cuban, the most Cuban you could ever hope to be. She had a huge heart — she was known for fund-raising for cancer projects, was the first Latino celebrity to address AIDS and raise money for its cure. Just before her death, she established the Celia Cruz Foundation, which will address all of the social causes that meant so much to her.
And all the recent articles have indeed underscored her connection to Cuba, her ambassadorship of Cuban music.
But that’s just half the story.
More than just Cuban
Though she was first known as La Guarachera de Cuba, Cruz was never just about Cuba, or Cubans, even as she often said that salsa was just another name for Cuban music.
She sang Colombian cumbia, Dominican merengue, Argentine tango; she sang disco and pop, bachata and bolero. She sang songs of praise and gratitude to Colombia and Mexico, the Dominican Republic and, especially, Puerto Rico. She always talked in superlatives about the U.S., thankful to have been given refuge here.
If she had a patron saint, it was the great Puerto Rican timbal player and orchestra leader Tito Puente. When she first arrived on U.S. shores, Celia didn’t have her own group and wasn’t especially well-known outside of Cuban music fanatics.
Contrary to her performances with La Sonora, where she was one of several stars, Puente put her upfront — and, like him, she turned flamboyant, saucy. (In keeping with her rep for outrageous dress, for her wake in Miami this weekend, she was to go through two costume changes, including wigs.)
Even though her first solo recordings in Cuba, “Homenaje a los Santos,” were Santeria songs, it wasn’t until her stint with Puente that she started doing more pointedly black material. And older songs, like “Bemba Colora,” took on a whole different timbre.
When interviewed — and in the last 20-some years, I interviewed her more than a dozen times — Cruz always turned away from discussions about racism. She’d acknowledge it but she insisted she had never personally experienced discrimination.
But then she’d tell you how she always wanted to sing boleros — romantic ballads — but when she started her career, black girls in Cuba weren’t supposed to sing boleros, only dance music.
And, without comment, she’d stick songs like “El Pueblo Negro” on her albums, which didn’t mince words, and talked about slavery and whippings and the legacy of that era.
“I’m so proud of being black/I’m so proud of my black people,” she cried out.
Queen of Salsa
It was Puente who dubbed her the Queen of Salsa. And what a gift that was: It made her more than Cuban, it made her universal.
At a concert here once, when Puente shouted out her title, a Cuban in the audience yelled back: “Celia de Cuba!” But then somebody else chimed in: “Celia de Puerto Rico” And: “Celia de Mexico!”
Cruz seemed taken aback but Puente, never at a loss, put the capper on it: “Celia del mundo!” “Celia belongs to the world!”
For young Cubans like me, Cruz — who didn’t live in Miami, the center of the Cuban exile world, but in New Jersey, surrounded by a pan-Latino community — provided an entry to the larger Latino world in the U.S.
Transcendent personality
Before Gloria Estefan, most Cuban artists in exile seemed particular to South Florida, but, years before, Celia had transcended all sorts of borders. Her music was essentially Cuban, but she spiced it up with other influences — just like us, Cuban, but not just Cuban.
There she was with Ruben Blades, with Pete El Conde, with Marc Anthony, with one of her favorite people though their politics differed markedly, Willie Colon. (If you wanted to make her smile, all you had to do was mention Willie’s name.)
Over the years, it became clear she understood her presence as a kind of cohesive force.
No matter the hits, no matter who she was recording with, album after album began to include deliberate messages of unity. One of them, “Latinos en Estados Unidos,” asked for mutual tolerance but also for mutual appreciation.
“I don’t want to criticize, I don’t want to make anyone angry,” she told me once. “I want to make people happy, to make them feel better about themselves, about the world.”
Bold move
A few years back, in a move that stunned many, Cruz headlined a show at the Warsaw in Miami. The Warsaw was a gay club — a gay space where blacks and whites and Latinos of all colors went to let their hair down. When Celia (long a drag queen’s dream icon) came on, people cheered through tears.
Outside, there were hawkers with their CDs, bootlegs and all, and dozens of different kinds of T-shirts. One of them — in screaming neon colors — read: Celia del mundo.
Perhaps it might be a good time to note that Pedro Knight, her husband of 40 years who accompanied her pretty much everywhere (and was at her bedside when she died), never, ever, called her Celia.
It was out there, under the floodlights, where the dancers stomped their feet and flags of many nations waved that she was really Celia del mundo.
When he called her, Pedro would gently wrap his own sweet bemba colora around just one word, “Negra . . . “
In Cuba, this is a universal term of endearment. It has nothing to do with race, it has everything to do with heart.
