Some people dream with their heads in the clouds. Others learn to dream with both feet planted firmly on the ground.
The sisters of Buena Vista Social Club somehow manage to do both.
Haydee is the older sister. The protector. The realist. She loves Omara fiercely, but understands something her younger sister has not learned yet: la libertad often comes with a price. Haydee dreams beyond the walls of the Tropicana, but survival has taught her to dream carefully.
Young Omara is softer. Curious. Hopeful. Still discovering herself and what her voice means. The diva comes later, when we meet an older Omara who knows exactly who she is. But beside Haydee, we meet the woman before the legend.
“I’m done singing for everyone else. I want to sing for us.”
Whew.
Tourists came to the Tropicana for la música, the rhythm and a taste of Cuba. But Omara begins to wrestle with the difference between sharing your culture and performing it for someone else’s consumption.
And then there is race.
The sisters are daughters of a Black baseball player and a Spanish noblewoman, raised with enough privilege to be somewhat shielded from their African ancestry. Their great-grandmother sings them Afro-Cuban spiritual lullabies. Their parents forbid it.
Haydee keeps that part of herself at a careful distance.
Omara reaches toward it with curiosity and love.
Same blood. Same house. Same history. Two entirely different ways of carrying it.
One sister learns how to survive the world she inherited.
The other wants to sing something new into existence.
Buena Vista Social Club is joyful, complicated and unapologetically Cuban. Its music carries ancestry, resistance, amor and home.
Atlanta gets its turn when Buena Vista Social Club takes the stage at the Fox Theatre October 27 through November 1.
Come for la música.
Stay for what the ancestors whisper between the notes.
Article by Juju Ramos
Photography by Matthew Murphy and Provided
Originally published in SOFU Lifestyle