*From Manuel Flanagan, a trumpet player who knew Chano: “I remember when Chano died. I was down on 52nd when I heard the whole thing. Chano was up on 116th Street at the Caribbean Bar and Grill, looking for this man who’d sold him stuff. That was in the morning. He’d injected it, gotten sick, and then later went out on the street looking for him. He found him in that bar, pulled a knife on him, and demanded his money back. Now, the man wasn’t afraid of Chano and Chano wasn’t afraid of the man; Chano had already been shot up and stabbed in Havana and had survived it, you know, so that Chano took his knife out and lunged at the man, even though he’d pulled out a gun: Chano kept coming at him because he thought the spirits were protecting him, but these spirits, Yoruba spirits, couldn’t stop the bullets from tearing him up and that was that.”
*“Cu-bop” being the term used to describe the fusion of Afro-Cuban music and hot be-bop Harlem jazz. Its greatest practitioners were the bandleader Machito Mario Bauzá, Chano Pozo, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, who hooked up to create that sound in the late 1940s. The American jazz players picked up the Cuban rhythms, and the Cubans picked up jazzier rhythms and chord progressions. Machito’s orchestra, with O’Farrill’s arrangements, became famous for dazzling solos played over extended vamps called montunos. During these furious breaks, when drummers like Chano Pozo and players like Charlie Parker went nuts, dancers like Frankie Pérez took to the center of the ballroom floor, improvising turns, dips, splits, leaps around the basic mambo steps, in the same way that the musicians improvised during their solos. (Yeah, and there was that other sneaky move he’d picked up from Cesar Castillo. While dancing with a pretty woman he would touch his forehead with his index finger and make a sizzling sound as if he was on fire and then he would fan himself, to cool out from love’s mighty heat, sizzle some more, hop around as if on hot coals, fan himself again, and blow a kiss, all the time feeling cu-bop crazy, man.)
*Women worked hard to enhance their loveliness so that they could find themselves a good man for life, evade loneliness, kiss, hug, sleep, fornicate, so that each could tremble in a man’s arms and find a man to take care of her, protect her, love her, a man to keep her warm against the chill winds of life. (Now a look at these women getting dressed. Quick fluff of powder around the breasts and nice nipples, quick dab down below, a flame-shaped burst of thick black pubic hair snow-powdered and nice, on with the panties, the garters, the nylons, the skirt, the brassiere, the blouse, earrings, lipstick, rouge, mascara, all to be removed later, tugged at, torn, smeared, somewhere in some bedroom or against a wall, in an alley, an apartment, in a parked car, on a rooftop, in the tranquil park. The man dancing and pressing close to her, his bone—and the bigger the better, now tell the truth, ladies—the woman wanting the man inside her but fighting him, legs shut closed, her insides softening, the man kissing her all over and promising her things, until either he proposes to her or leaves her for someone else or she tricks him, weeping crocodile tears, and he marries her and he’s earnest and gentle and courteous and sometimes they age happily together, but there are others . . . The man always looking for another woman and the woman knowing about it, but what can she do when she’s been losing those precious looks that hooked him up in the first place? With a ring of fat around her gut, so tight the snaps pinch her plump skin and leave screw marks . . . What can she do, ladies?)
*Who were the gallegos? The most arrogant Cubans, say some; the most hardworking and honest Cubans, opinionated, ambitious, strong-willed, and proud, say others. The term gallego referred to those Cubans whose ancestors had come from Galicia, a province of seaports, morning-mist-ridden farmlands (blue-green and foggish land, like Scotland), and rugged mountains, situated in the northwestern corner of Spain. North of Portugal—Port-of-Gauls—and jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, Galicia had been invaded by the Romans, the Celts, the Gauls, the Suevi, and the Visigoths, who left the Galicians with a taste for fierce battle and a sometimes melancholic outlook. El Cid was a gallego. So were the majority of Spanish soldiers sent to put down revolts in Cuba in the nineteenth century. Another gallego? Franco. Others? Ángel Castro, a Spanish soldier who settled in Oriente Province, Cuba, became a land baron, and whose son, Fidel, ambitious, arrogant, and cocky, would become absolute ruler of the island.
Most recently, the term gallego is used in Cuba to describe light-skinned Cubans, or non-Cuban Spaniards, passing through.
*“If you knew what I have to go through every day with this woman. These American women are enough to drive you nuts! My mother told me a million times: Ricky, never marry an American woman unless you’re looking for one big headache. And she was right, I should’ve married that girl back in Cuba! Now there was a quiet girl who never bothered me, who knew where her bread was buttered. She wasn’t crazy! She always left me alone, you know what I mean, compañeros?”
*Always a nice hello and sometimes a reunion, the fellows inviting each other out to jam sessions. In the Hotel Splendour he remembered that one of his favorite jam sessions took place when Benny the conga player invited him over to the Museum of Natural History, where he worked, in his reincarnated life, as a guard. Around nine one night, when it was really dead, Cesar showed up with a few other musicians and they ended up playing in a small office just off the Great Hall of Dinosaurs, Benny playing the drums and a fellow named Rafael strumming a guitar and Cesar singing and blowing the trumpet, this music echoing and humming through the bones of those prehistoric creatures—the Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brontosaurus and woolly mammoth, breathing heavy in the vastness of that room and click-clacking onto the marble floors melodies caught in their great hooked jaws and in the curve of their gargantuan spinal columns.
Table of Contents
SİDE A: In the Hotel Splendour 1980
SİDE B: Sometime later in the night in the Hotel Splendour
Toward the end, while listening to the wistful “Beautiful María of My Soul”
Oscar Hijuelos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
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