Lights line the walkways, illuminating the trees, the cages of exotic birds, and the small tents selling flutes of champagne. Couples walk arm in arm. Laughter carries in from the casino. Two swans drift past the fountain. This is Castell de Peralada, a 13th-century castle in Catalonia where, as part of the town’s annual arts festival, Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club will this evening make a stop on their farewell tour, nearly 20 years after they began.  The ensemble, named after a Havana members’ club that closed in the 1940s, started as a collaboration between the American guitarist Ry Cooder and the Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos González, the pair summoning a number of feted Cuban musicians to record an album in just six days. It became a global phenomenon and led to live performances in Amsterdam and New York, as well as an Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Wim Wenders. In its wake came further recordings, world tours, solo albums and, for a while, this cluster of Cubans seemed inescapable – the distinctive strains of Chan Chan, Dos Gardenias and Candela winding their way around restaurant tables, bar stools and dinner parties the world over. Salman Rushdie even referred to this is in his 2001 novel Fury, describing the warm New York months of 1998 as “that Buena Vista summer”.  But in the last two decades much has changed. Six of the original members – Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo, Rubén González, Orlando “Cachaíto” Lopez, Pío Leyva, Manuel “Puntillita” Licea – have passed away. Although singer Omara Portuondo and guitarist and vocalist Eliades Ochoa remain, for the past few years the group has toured as the Orquesta, with a shifting lineup. The repertoire remains much the same, though.  Cuba has changed, too. In the 1990s, after the Soviet collapse and the hardship that followed, the country was just beginning to open up to the outside world: package tourism was in its infancy, and record companies from abroad had only just begun their musical truffle-hunt on the island. Today, Cuba is one of the most popular Caribbean destinations, with travel bans for its citizens lifted, economic reforms initiated, trade restrictions softened, and a thaw in relations with the US under way. While these changes would surely have come about eventually, the musicians of Buena Vista Social Club played an undeniable part in changing the world’s perception of their country.  “There were about 16 musicians in the room,” says Nick Gold, recalling those magical six days in Havana in 1996. The producer and head of the band’s London-based record label World Circuit, he was in Cuba to work on another project with Cooder and De Marcos, but when that fell through, the trio decided to set down some Cuban son music, reminiscent of the country’s “golden age” in the 1940s and 50s. “There was this incredible atmosphere. In one corner, you had Eliadas playing bolero. In another, you couldn’t get Ruben off the piano. No one knew what it was going to become – but just to be working and playing was something. They were revelling in it.”  Not far from the castle, Portuondo sits in a cafe, eating a croissant and reminiscing – about performing with Nat King Cole, and touring the world as a solo artist. She is 84 now but, even in her loungewear, there is something stately and spectacular about her: the fine angles of her face, the earthy ferocity of her voice. She was about to go off on a tour of Vietnam when she got the call from De Marcos. “They needed a female singing voice,” she says. “He had this idea – to take Cuban music back to its roots, to spread it around the world. It was such an important idea that I cancelled everything to do this music I love.”  Gold adds: “One thing these musicians had – and still have – is a huge faith in their music, in the Cuban son. They’ve looked after it like a baby; they’ve brought it up. And they know they’re good.” Gold and Cooder felt a similar a sense of care and responsibility for the recordings they made. “Each morning, we played what we had recorded the day before,” Gold says. “We knew it was wonderful. When you listen to it, you’re right there.” This was partly due to the positioning of a pair of microphones high in the studio to capture the ambience of the room. “The studio has this one fantastic large room. It just has this lovely feel.”  But when the pair took the recordings to California to be mixed, they immediately stumbled. “We weren’t hearing that special something,” says Gold. “There was a clarity missing.” They began a frantic search for a mixing desk that resembled the one used in Havana, eventually locating the same model in a Christian recording studio in Los Angeles. “And there it was – that sound back in all its clarity! Ry said, ‘It’s like someone’s wiped the windows clear.’”  But this hard-won sound doesn’t just stem from a room full of musicians recording in 1996. It also belongs to that golden age before the revolution of 1959. This was the big-band era, dominated by the Tropicana Cabaret orchestra and its leader, Armando Romeu Jr, as well as Benny Moré and Dámaso Pérez Prado, all of whom helped shape modern Cuban music – melding Afrocuban with local jazz, mambo, US big-band styles, slipping from son montuno to cha cha cha, bolero, guaracha and beyond.  When tourists hear it, it’s a connector, it’s a positive thing getting them to appreciate Cuban music  For some, this trip down memory lane was to be viewed positively: Carole Steele is an American percussionist who has recorded with artists from Steve Winwood and Peter Gabriel to Joan Baez and Eric Clapton, and began visiting Cuba in 1987 with the intention of working with two of the country’s most revered Afro-Cuban musicians, Lazaro Ros and Esteban Vega Bacallao. “For some percussionists it’s Africa that calls them, others it’s Brazil,” she explains. “But for me it’s Cuba, that’s the motherland. I don’t think I can describe how Cuban percussion affects me in words but it’s a feeling, deep in my solar plexus.”  Today she leads music-based tours to Cuba for National Geographic, and presents lectures on Cuban music and dance “from son to timba in an hour and 15 minutes”. For her, the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon should be seen as a starting point, a way in to the country’s rich musical history. “It’s really funny to me, because people think Buena Vista Social Club is Cuban music and it’s just one style,” she says. “But it made the world aware of that one particular style of Cuban music, and to me the project is so much bigger than them, it was more than just a CD. When tourists hear it, it’s a connector, it’s a positive thing getting them to appreciate Cuban music, and the job has been done well.” Gold puts it even more simply: “It helped people listen to music that wasn’t in English.”  Some people, however, believe Buena Vista’s portrayal of Cuba might be a little distorted. “In academic writings on Buena Vista, there’s a big deal made of the nostalgia and mystique and the fact it invokes an earlier era,” says Robin D Moore, professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Texas, specialising in the music of Cuba. In that era, Moore adds, Cuba was something of an American playground: “There was a lot of money. The mafia was there. Gambling was legal there – as opposed to most of the US. Folks say there were more clubs and live music venues, too.”  But the issue, he says, is that the Buena Vista story, particularly as told in Wenders’ documentary, ignores several decades of Cuba’s social, political and cultural history. “There’s an odd, selective presentation of history, music and culture in the film that’s a bit disturbing,” he says. “When I saw the film, I was writing a book on the Cuban revolution and it struck me that these guys lived through amazing changes on the island – and they’re not being asked about any of that at all.”  Some ethnomusicologists, he says, were annoyed by the portrayal of the musicians as “country bumpkins who had never seen skyscrapers”. After all, many had visited the US before the revolution. “And in the 60s, when tourism ended, all these artists came on to the government payroll, and the government did organise mass tours to East Germany and Russia, Japan and China. But I was happy that the artists were getting recognition, because of the difficulty they had been through. The US and Cuban governments had damaged their careers.”  Cubans themselves were, he says, “broadsided by the success” of Buena Vista Social Club. “I think a lot of people on the island considered these musicians old hat, like pushing Cole Porter.” He questions the notion of “featuring older musicians and ignoring everything that had happened musically in the following 40 years. There is a huge disconnect between what Cubans are listening to and what tourists want. There is more modern and international-sounding dance music. There is timba or salsa cubana, a mixture of son, US funk, jazz and reggaeton, and local folklore drum styles. It’s very modern-sounding, very dense rhythmically.”  Yet still, he says, you hear the music of Buena Vista played everywhere in Havana. “The Buena Vista phenomenon has created a huge number of copycat bands. You’ll hear the same songs everywhere – Chan Chan, Dos Gardenias. It’s as if it has become a parody to cater to tourists. The Buena Vista collective was very much an artificial creation, a record-company creation, and its rise coincided with the rise of tourism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and all sorts of legal changes that had started to connect Cuba to the capitalist world.”  While all of this may be true, it’s an analysis that is at odds with the empassioned recollections of Portuendo, or Gold’s explanation of how this “artificial creation” came about. “It was only afterwards,” he says, “that we thought to call it Buena Vista Social Club. I was aware of these social clubs, but it wasn’t until I heard the song Buena Vista Social Club played in the studio that I became aware of this club – it was written by Cachaíto’s uncle, who played at the club and whose family lived nearby in an area known for its music.”  The castle show is a more formal event than the previous evening’s: a raucous, tub-thumping performance in the south of France. As the band soundcheck, I watch two attendants mop the auditorium’s white plastic chairs after a light sprinkling of rain. The soundcheck proves unexpectedly moving: a chance to see both the affection and the great musical conversation that exists between these musicians. They play from their setlist, but they improvise, too, enjoying themselves in this beautiful setting. It is hard to stand among them and not feel sad about this musical conversation coming to an end. When they take to the stage that evening, to a politely rapturous crowd, there is already a sense of absence – a space where the very particular talents of Ferrer, González, Segundo, Cachaíto and the others once stood.  “Who’s still going?” Steele had wondered. “I imagine it’s bittersweet for Omara. She can go out and people adore her for the fantastic singer she is, but she’s got to miss them all. All their ghosts must be there on stage for her.”  When Portuendo appears, she does so in a long purple dress threaded with silver, her hair held back from her face. She stalks the stage, cheekbones gleaming, singing with fire and moving with a profound sensuality. But, as you hear her voice unanswered, you can’t help looking for ghosts. I think of something she told me earlier, about Ferrer having been her greatest singing partner. “Though he is not here,” she said, “the love and affection of this great friendship is still alive. It still lasts.”  • Lost and Found, an album of previously unreleased tracks, is released by World Circuit today. The group tour the UK 4-13 April.
It was the soundtrack to every late-90s dinner party. But did Buena Vista Social Club sell a distorted, tourist-friendly view of Cuban culture? As the farewell tour heads for Britain, Laura Barton meets its surviving members