The rich congueros

By Varela

Last September, Emilio and Gloria Estefan tried to sing in Havana’s Revolution Square with Juanes. At the time, the Ladies in While had spent years parading with gladioli and rolling around on the streets.

Apparently, when it came to sing on the Square, the “abuses heaped” on the Ladies in White and their “anguish” were not a moral impediment for the Estefan duo.

Six months later, the Miami Beach couple called for a march on our Calle Ocho to support those Ladies in White (in fact, a group financed by the U.S. government within the framework of a political war against Cuba), an event attended by the cream of the local ultra-right, one old terrorist included.

Without wasting time, the Estefans offered a fund-raising cocktail at their Beach home ($30,000 per couple; if you break a glass, it’s $775 extra) for the Democratic Party, with the U.S. president as the guest of honor. That snack earned them the animosity and shrieks of the ultra-right, on radio and television.

The way things stand, the couple has helped only one “name” musician of all the ones that have come from Cuba in the past 30 years. That was Albita Rodríguez, who came at the right time to the right place, as guajira songs suddenly became popular among the YUCA population (Young, Upwardly-mobile Cuban-Americans.)

But Amaury Gutiérrez, Pancho Céspedes, Manolín el Médico de la Salsa, Mirta Medina, Raúl Gómez, Osvaldo Rodríguez, Leonor Zamora, Maggie Carlés, Annia Linares, Malena Burke and other Cuban singers who moved to the confusing and brutal north got no welcome, no handshake and no recommendation from the music-and-gastronomy Estefan Emporium.

Many of those artists have bounced around from one third-rate night club to another, for $50 on Saturday nights, or charging according to the box-office take and the sale of drinks. Meanwhile, Emilio and Gloria look after their Bongos and Lario’s and go on million-dollar tours accompanied by Colombian and Spanish superstars they themselves created.

Funny thing, when a Puerto Rican pianist (Eddy Palmieri) took the Estefans to court over a tune he said they had stolen from him, they hired a musical expert in Cuba and obtained copies of the musical archives of Cuban radio to show to a judge in Miami that the tune was a Cuban tumbao that was popular way back when. And they won the case.

My question is as follows:

• If the Estefans don’t help the musicians who emigrate to Miami but call a march to give symbolic support to opposition groups financed by the U.S. government on the island;
• If, when they need experts and archives to win a case in court, Cuba is not a tyranny, but when they raise funds for the president, Cuba yes indeed is a tyranny (including Glorita’s speech in which she said she’d give her life for her native land, even though she has never donated a penny to the Cuban Red Cross;
• If, to sing on Revolution Square with Juanes, the social system is unimportant but later, when they worry about the mother of a dead hunger striker, they accuse that social system;

… are the Estefans opportunists, phonies, patriots or politicians?

Let me answer before you do. As far as I’m concerned, they’re filthy-rich congueros.