The Subversive Side to the Queen of Salsa

''Subject is inadmissible to the United States because of her affiliation with the Cuban Communist youth organization and the Communist Party of Cuba." - FBI memo, 1959

A year after her death in 2003, the Miami Herald, of all newspapers to do so, printed the results of an investigation by one of its reporters, Carol Rosenberg, into some little-known parts of the life of Cuban salsa singer Celia Cruz. The reports filled two separate news stories in 2004, the first in July, the second in September.

As surprising as the story itself, that the Herald put its resources toward it seems unbelievable given that it centered in the Vatican of anticommunist, anti-Cuban Revolution: the city-state of Miami-Dade. It would have been the last newspaper to do so on my list.

The report, which involved Freedom of Information documents, revealed that Cruz, who was born in Cuba in 1925, had been a member of its communist party, the Popular Socialist Party [PSP] and its youth wing since her teens, and how this decision affected her life at least until the mid-1960's.

The Popular Socialist Party

The PSP was founded the year of Cruz's birth by trade-union organizers and intellectuals like Blas Roca Calderio, Anibal Escalante, Fabio Grobart, Alfonso Bernal del Riesgo, and Julio Antonio Mello as the Communist Party of Cuba [CPC]. It was founded in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which gave workers around the world its first possibility of a socialist, workers state. Reportedly due to a brief spell of "Browderism," the Party changed its name in the 1940's from the CPC to the PSP when Cruz would have joined and the Party's membership grew the strongest. 

The exact date of her membership is not revealed in unclassified FOI documents. .

Roca rose quickly in the Party, being relocated to Havana from his hometown where he led a shoemakers union in Manzanillo.

In Havana is where he met Cruz. His star also rose in the labor movement; hers as a young Black woman who had trained to be a school teacher but was encouraged to pursue singing. He became the Party's general secretary in 1933 at the young age of 26, and remained in that post until the PSP was merged into the post-1959 Revolution Cuban Communist Party.

Cruz's trajectory continued upward and took its biggest leap when, in 1950, Latin America's most popular band, La Sonora Matancera, hired her as its lead singer.

In the meantime, besides being a Marxist theoretician and union leader, Roca would be one of Cruz's main handlers from within the Party. In fact, Roca reportedly recruited many prominent Cubans into the Party, like writer Alejo Carpentier, poet Nicolas Guillen, and singer Omara Portuondo.

For the first report, the Herald's reporter contacted Cruz's widower, her manager and one-time trumpet player for La Sonora Matancera, [Geronimo] Pedro Knight, about the revelations. Despite Cruz saying for years that one of the secrets to her happy marriage was open communication, Knight claims not to have known of his wife's party membership. Further, surprisingly, he said they did not talk politics.

For the subsequent, second report, Rosenberg reached out to Cruz's last manager, Omer Pardillo-Cid, but he only demonstrates the proof, revealed in the FOIA releases, that the late singer had donated funds to an anti-Castro group in 1964, but he is not quoted in the story as to her communist party connections.

The Connections

Different spins can be put to this revelation. Before I give my own, I'll brush over the conventional one the Herald puts into its story.

The Herald speculates that because the radio station that featured a young Cruz, Radio 1010, was owned and operated by the PSP, her membership was merely incidental. Perhaps it was an unwritten employment expectation.

This spin not only denies Cruz any agency - a young Black woman deciding herself that, like the Communist Party USA, it was, at the time the only broad force battling racism, poverty, and workers' rights - but the Herald's spin also misses some coincidences: Cruz joined the Party's youth wing earlier as a teen [probably when she began her teacher education], before she chose a career in music. The Herald story does not remind us that a young Raul Castro was also a member of this same PSP youth wing. Further, the story does not remind us of the friendship between Cruz and one of Raul's and Fidel's sisters, Agustina, who remained in Cuba, supported the Revolution, and made US headlines when she attended a Mass in honor of Cruz in 2003 after the singer's death.

The Herald's spin also does not explain why the La Sonora Matancera bandmembers, who performed on Radio 1010, were not Party members - at least, they were never subjected to anticommunist scrutiny like Cruz was.

These are dots that may have no connection at all but should certainly have intrigued a reporter who went this far for this paper to report such a story.

While older brother Fidel's Marxism has been cloaked in mystery before the 1959 Revolution, Raul's and Che's is without doubt. It was their Marxism that brought Che and Raul together in Mexico, possibly from PSP connections there.

Raul as a Young Communist League member organized for the PSP in Cuba and was sent to Europe for a Youth Festival. He was also put in contact with Soviet officials who later facilitated Cuba-Soviet relations post 1959.

While a picture of Cruz's ideological bent is not disclosed from the declassified documents, the Herald reveals that Roca, who distinguished himself as a top recruiter for the Party, was her main handler, and she was sent to Venezuela to meet with its communist party leaders under the auspice of a 1953 concert performance in Caracas.

Otherwise, a complete story of Cruz's activism is still obscure partly by US State Department documents that have not been declassified, but also admittedly by the Cuban government itself who found no further reason to promote her after she left with the band in 1960.

PSP general secretary Blas Roca

Mind you, none of Cruz's activity was missed by the red-obsessed United States government, who had agents in Cuba and which was orchestrating witch hunts under every bed, on the Hollywood film lots, at the docks, and within Black civil rights organizations.

One of the later declassified FBI documents from 1955 describes Cruz as the "well-known communist singer and stage artist."

Another document has her showing support as a co-signatory for a PSP front group, the Pro-Peace Congress, in the PSP's magazine, Hoy.

The Herald piece reveals that at least on three occasions after Cruz had been hired by the famous band, the US State Department denied her a visa to perform in the US due to her PSP membership.

One of the ironies of both Cruz and Raul's PSP membership is that the PSP opposed both the Fidel-led July 26th rebellion of 1953 and the armed struggle from the Sierra Maestra in 1956-1959. The PSP also had endorsed the Orthodox Party, under which Fidel ran as a Cuban senator, in 1952 - elections which the US had cancelled with a Batista coup.

The PSP dismissed the rebels  as "adventurers." As PSP members we do not know what Cruz or Raul thought, but the appellation "adventurer' reminds me of how some in the Communist Party USA allegedly labelled a young Angela Davis after her indictment and arrest. According to former CPUSA member and close friend of Davis, Bettina Aptheker, the Central Committee of the Party considered expelling Davis as "an adventurer."

It was not until the 11th hour, after US-backed Fulgencio Battista had fled and Cuba's mercenary armed forces had surrendered, that Blas Roca sent an emissary to the Sierra Maestra to offer the PSP's support.

For her part, Cruz, by then one of Cuba's most popular singers, joined the bandwagon with her PSP comrades and sung homages to Fidel.

Exile?

Cruz and the La Sonora band left Cuba in June 1960. This circumstances surrounding this are cloaked in contradictions. 

According to Cruz, she did not know they were taking a one-way flight until they were out of Cuban airspace, and bandleader, Rogelio Martinez, who had hired Cruz against record label SEECO's opposition, announced "this was a trip with no return." 

The myth we are told is Celia fled communism with the band. This lie is retold despite Cruz herself and her family in Cuba contradicting it.

At the time of that June 1960 flight, Cruz's mother had terminal bladder cancer, and Cruz, besides helping her family financially, was paying for her mother's hospice care. Cruz says her mother was given four or five years to live, and Cruz wanted to ensure she was well cared for.

So it seems hard to believe Martinez, who would have known this, would keep such a one-way flight, if true, a secret from Cruz.

La Sonora Matancera had a performance contract in Mexico. Cruz says she went because that's how she made her money to pay for her mother's care. Cruz says she did not know until they were in air flying over the Gulf of Mexico that the band had no intention of returning to Cuba.

Cruz's family in Cuba are on record stating not only that she was not fleeing communism but to the story that she was denied entry to bury her mother a few years later, that they were unaware she had ever asked to come back. Family members in Cuba stated that Cruz by that time was in the US, was contracted to perform, and this was how she helped support her family on the island.

She had even fulfilled a performance contract the day she found out her mother died in 1962.

Hard to tell who this hard-to-believe story serves, but an FBI memo dated September 3, 1959 states of Cruz: "Subject is inadmissible to the United States because of her affiliation with the Cuban Communist youth organization and the Communist Party of Cuba."

The FBI memo was written in response to Cruz's 1959 application, along with other Cuban musicians, to perform in New York City and Miami to raise money for the new revolutionary government.

So was the tale that Cruz and La Sonora were on a one-way trip invented later, to solidify her anticommunist bona fides, as she would be forced to do to a suspicious US State Department?

All this changed a few years after the Revolution. 

Photo taken at Havana's Airport June 1960 as Celia and La Matancera leave

But Cruz being allowed into the US from Mexico in order to perform in Los Angeles begins the turn to the right where Cruz was to position herself, to an increasing extent, for the rest of her exile.

Clearing Names

The initial Herald story quotes cables from the US embassy in Mexico that Cruz had reached out and  "wanted to clear her name" in order to accept the Hollywood Palladium contract. 

"Clearing her name," I'd argue, is code to students of the McCarthy period.

This is the odious task that some Party members relished doing and many others were coerced into. It was what got them off the blacklist. It entailed making public anticommunist confessionals and, moreover, naming and exposing your comrades. It was a nasty business.

It happened to Black singer Lena Horne, who was recruited into the CPUSA by her friend and Party member Paul Robeson. But when the blacklist hit, Horne was put out of work and went to Nevada, then a no-man's-land, to make ends meet. As this proved difficult for any artist of the day, and especially a Black woman, Horne reached out that wanted to "clear her name," which included naming her friend Robeson. She was restored back to Jim Crow Hollywood.

While Horne would maintain a secret friendship with Robeson, no evidence yet exists what Cruz did to remove her name from the US State Department blacklist and gain entry into the US or what comrades she remained close with. But her anticommunism was born and only grew more pronounced - especially during the last years of her life.

The second Herald report reveals that when Cruz was ultimately allowed into the US it was on a US State Dept. waiver necessitated by US law restricting known communists. This law was used to deport CPUSA leader, Claudia Jones to the United Kingdom. How and why she qualified for this waiver is unclear.

The report further reveals that while in the US, every city she was to perform in, she had to apply and obtain a separate US State Dept. waiver to do so.

It's clear, the US was just as ready to deport Cruz as they were allow her to stay.

The Herald report says Cruz was subject to this until 1965 when the US State Department allowed her permanent residency.

What changed? Again, according to declassified FBI documents, Cruz got prominent Cubans to vouch for her [none are named] and made three $92 payments to an anticommunist, anti-Revolution group in Miami for the explicit purpose "for the war against communist tyranny."

Ninety-two dollars in 1965 is over $800 in 2021.

This twist is interesting and one I'd like to imagine had to be very difficult for Cruz. 

As Cruz's family in Cuba has said, even after her mother's death in 1962, she continued to support her family with remittances, right up until her death in 2003.

Maybe she disassociated what those rifles could do to the family she had in enemy territory, so to speak. Of her siblings, only a younger sister came to the US; the others remained in Cuba, along with nieces, nephews, and cousins. Some even visited the US, but always returned.

Pedro Knight and Celia Cruz, circa 1965

Also, given the scrutiny Cruz was under from 1960 to 1965, her marriage to the Knight in 1962 when she did not know if she'd be allowed to remain in the US is curious. And Knight's claim from the Herald's first report he knew nothing of this situation is more unlikely.

Radical Conclusions

Unlike the Herald narrative which seeks to explain Cruz's PSP membership as simply a career move, I have other conclusions that make some overlooked historical points.

The communist parties, with and without the oversight of the one-time Communist International, were singularly at the forefront of progressive, anti-racist, pro-labor movements. We take these progressive movements for granted today, and the ways both capitalist parties have co-opted the narratives of these movements has been cunning and derailed those movements of backbone. They are performative today, and often linked in one way or another to the capitalist power structures. This was not so in those early days when a young, Black student teacher joined such a movement.

And it is not an overstatement to say that movements for workers, for Black liberation and civil rights, too briefly and unevenly for feminism, all originated from the radical roots of the communist parties.

The PSP is no exception to this rule. Cruz, a Black woman from a poor family, but who had trained to be a school teacher recognized the terrain of struggle in Cuba, and identified the PSP as the political entity wanting to upturn the existential threats to her working class as a whole and to Black people. She would have seen the PSP's work all over Cuba.

Whatever Cruz's feelings later in life, it diminishes her as a human being and a Black woman to deny her the possibility of this perspective, which the Celia Cruz Legacy Project, by stark omission, does.

To the controversy about Cruz being denied entry or if she even asked to return to Cuba, I have a theory. Given that she had been blacklisted and was in the early process to "clear her name," it is totally inconceivable she'd seek to travel back to Cuba, which had already declared the Revolution as "Marxist-Leninist." Such a move would have cast fresh suspicions upon her. 

I think her family in Cuba is correct that she never asked, and that Celia invented the story of being prohibited, like she did about the "one-way flight" as a story to show her anticommunist proclivities.

Also, interestingly, it was revealed [to me] after her death that she had been a longtime admirer and avid reader of Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings memoirs and other writings, and Angelou the same in return. In fact, Angelou pens the preface to Cruz's posthumously published autobiography. 

The intersection of these two Black women is fascinating grist to be studied. Angelou was not only a talented writer; she rubbed shoulders with and worked with some radical civil rights icons in the 60's, like the Communist Party USA's Vicki Garvin and former CPUSA organizer Audley "Queen Mother" Moore. She details these friendships and her leftist activism in her memoirs. 

These memoirs and this narrative would seem an odd choice for the rabid anticommunist we are told to believe Cruz was. But maybe that's why we'd never heard it mentioned.

Whenever Cruz came to perform in San Francisco, I was there. I even gave her a bouquet of flowers when she performed for the San Francisco Jazz Festival. But something I noted then, noted at her last appearance for a Telemundo homage, was Cruz's closing words at these concerts. She always thanked the hotel staff, the cooks, and the cleaning personnel who made the hotel and the events run.

While these words may mean nothing, the constant thought of the workers is a point I immediately connected when I learned of her earlier PSP activism.

Also, when Cruz was allowed into the US from Mexico as a Cuban exile, she cited her occupation as a "domestic," which would have been one of the only open to a Black woman with no English ability who was re-launching her career.

This investigation by the Miami Herald reflects the observable shifts on the ground in southern Florida. While the US establishment still clings to the Cuban reactionary community to sustain its backward narratives, the number of that older generation of Cubans is dying out and being replaced with younger Cubans for whom this story is a non-issue. After the initial waves in 1959, many left Cuba not because of communism but for economic reasons, and they arrive in a US where class struggles continue.

What are we to conclude about Cruz's character from her turnabout? Hollywood director and former CPUSA member Elia Kazan has remained a very controversial figure for throwing his former comrades under the bus in HUAC testimony. When a lifetime achievement award was maneuvered for him at the Oscars, many actors in the audience refused to stand or applaud. One film critic argued that such awards are for the totality of one's work, and that Kazan's career was built on the ruin of his comrades.

Horne's history is all but obscured, and we honor her.

Do we keep our seats and refuse applause to Celia Cruz? As a huge fan, I'd argue not. I would bring her bouquets still. But also, while she has been known as an anticommunist, this Black woman has used her career to raise money for AIDS and cancer research. And unlike Kazan, reports indicate she may not have been as virulent an anticommunist as she is made to appear. Not only the posthumous revelation of her admiration for Maya Angelou but also many Cuban musicians who remained loyal to the revolution have spoken of meeting her outside the US, in Europe and Latin America, and how receptive she is of them. She has also made a point of continuing to cover their music, their songs, bringing them more notoriety.

Unlike Horne, however, Cruz seems to have gone full throttle anticommunist with the rest of her life. Especially after the fall of the USSR, her antagonism to her homeland's economic project became more strident, even while her friends and family lived there. She could have just kept singing.

Nevertheless that she once joined a national movement connected to a global movement, that opposed racism, and stood for peace and social justice is worth including in anything that calls itself the Celia Cruz Legacy Project.