By Oakland Ross the star

KANSAS CITY, MO.—Nearly 1,600 mostly well-heeled denizens of the U.S. heartland stood at attention one night this month as Cuba’s national anthem was played for their benefit.

Then they burst into eager applause.

The next evening, a substantial gathering in Urbana, Ill., did exactly the same thing, followed just 24 hours later by a similar occurrence in Ames, Ind.

Is Middle America going Communist?

Not in this millennium.

Instead, for the first time in its 53-year existence, the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba is on a tour of enemy territory, a month-long journey through 10 states of the union, winding up in West Palm Beach, Fla., five days after the U.S. presidential vote.

It’s a rare friendly exchange between two countries that are notorious for their mutual hostility.

“I didn’t even know they did that,” said Gary McElwain of Macon, Kan.

But they do, albeit not very often and hardly ever on this scale — 72 Cuban musicians putting on 21 U.S. concerts in 27 days.

As with any international foray by Cuban entertainers, athletes or artists, the underlying worry is that some will defect, just as several members of the country’s national soccer team did earlier this month on a visit to Toronto.

“We don’t know what to expect,” said Pennsylvania-based concert promoter Eric Amada, who dreamt up the tour. “We want to stay as far away as possible from politics.”

He conceded that this policy may be difficult to sustain during the orchestra’s final six concerts, all at venues in Florida, where a large and vocal Cuban-American community exerts national political influence far out of proportion to its numbers.

Meanwhile, as almost everyone connected with the venture keeps repeating — and repeating — the current Cuban musical tour is about art.

The National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba is not your standard, run-of-the-mill classical musical ensemble, at least not in its present iteration.

In most conventional symphony orchestras, the members of the first violin section do not leap to their feet to dance while they play, but the Cubans do.

The conductors of most standard classical orchestras do not enlist the audience’s hand-clapping assistance on percussion during a sensational Latin-infused encore, but Cuban conductor Enrique Perez Mesa does.

And most classical musical ensembles do not include a jazz pianist named Ignacio “Nachito” Herrera, who sports a flaming red guayabera on stage, along with a pair of equally flamboyant white-and-scarlet shoes, but the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba does.

In other words, the patrons who crowded into Kansas City’s striking new concert hall for the Cubans’ inaugural performance earlier this month were not in Kansas, or Missouri, anymore — or not entirely.

Instead, they were temporary residents of the republic of music, where politics are set mainly to mute and where an audience of middle Americans see no contradiction in honouring a state-owned appendage of a godless Marxist regime with one standing ovation after another, five of them in all.

Which makes you wonder why it took more than 50 years to bring this group to the United States (short answer: politics) and also why no Canadian stops were included on the tour.

In fact, a Canadian appearance almost did take place.

“We were very close to coming to Toronto,” said Amada.

Amada even had a date and a venue set aside for the Toronto performance — last Sunday at Koerner Hall.

Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security agreed to let the Cubans into the U.S. but would not grant them the multiple-entry visas they’d have needed for a Canadian detour.

There may well be another chance to bring the group to Canada but probably not soon. Concert tours by a large Cuban orchestra take years, not months, to arrange.

“I’ve had this idea for several years,” said Amada. “I didn’t know for sure till last night that they would get here.”

It was a Tuesday morning as he spoke, and the urbane young impresario was standing in the lobby of the Clarion Airport Hotel near Kansas City, now jammed with more than 70 bleary-eyed Cuban musicians all seemingly hollering away at the same time, with the rapid-fire, almost consonant-free delivery characteristic of Cuban-inflected Spanish.

The players — all 72 of them, plus three support personnel — had arrived late the previous night, after a roundabout airborne journey that brought them from Havana to the city known as “the Paris of the Plains,” a community that prides itself on being located near the exact geographical centre of the lower 48 states.

Kansas City, Missouri.

Cuba, of course, has long been renowned internationally for the quality of its musicians, but most people associate the island’s musical culture with jazz or with danceable music forms such as salsa or cha-cha.

The country is not widely known for classical music. But almost all of Cuba’s most celebrated musicians are classically trained, which is one reason they’re so good.

Few are better than Herrera — a classically trained pianist — who is both the designated showman of the tour and its musical centrepiece.

“I’m more than happy — what can I say?” he enthused, collapsing into an easy chair in the hotel lobby. He wore flip-flops, baggy cotton pants and a white T-shirt and had a simple gold earring in his left ear. “Almost two years ago, this was just a dream.”

Unlike the other musicians on the tour — all of whom live in Cuba — Herrera makes his home in the United States, after settling there 12 years ago, along with his wife, Aurora. Both now live in St. Paul, Minn.

A musician of dazzling virtuosity, with a personality to match, Herrera played a central role in bringing the Cuban orchestra to the States, assisted by his wife.

“They had all the contacts,” said Amada.

No doubt because of his legal status — a Cuban with U.S. citizenship and residency — Herrera spoke easily and at length with a visiting newspaper reporter.

Not so the rank-and-file musicians, who buttoned their lips as soon as they were approached by a stranger armed with a notebook and pen.

“Was your trip here a long one?” one player was asked.

She frowned and replied that she did not know.

Her apparent discomfort stemmed from politics, of course — a subject that can scarcely be avoided in any discussion involving both Cuba and the United States.

One way or another, the two countries have been at loggerheads for more than half-a-century and remain so still.

Many expected the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president four years ago to herald a significant improvement in relations between Washington and Havana, but they have been mostly disappointed, even as the Cuban government under Raul Castro (Fidel’s somewhat younger brother) oversees a succession of tentative liberal reforms to the island’s dilapidated socialist economy.

The current orchestral tour is unusual because of the large numbers involved, but cultural exchanges between the U.S. and Cuba have been a sputtering reality for some time.

They increased in frequency under former president Jimmy Carter, slowed under Ronald Reagan, picked up again under Bill Clinton, before grinding almost to a halt under George W. Bush.

Now, under Barack Obama, they have been on the rise again.

The Cubans aren’t getting rich this way. U.S. law prohibits them from collecting wages for their performances on American soil. To get around this restriction, more or less, the organizers of the current tour are paying each of the players a per diemof $50 — a lot of money to most Cubans.

On the first day of the tour, however, questions of politics and economics were overshadowed by the minor, last-minute emergencies common to just about any cultural event on this scale.

French-horn player Dania Perez discovered her instrument had been badly damaged while being scanned at the airport in Havana and was now unplayable. A bass clarinet player had lost his instrument stand. A trombonist had misplaced his mute. Another musician’s suitcase had failed to arrive, so he had nothing to wear for the evening’s concert.

One way or another, the problems were fixed, and the players piled into a pair of hired buses and rode downtown, to be greeted by a monumental sight — Kansas City’s new opera house and symphony hall.

Designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie and completed only a year ago, the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts is a huge pair of articulated, gold-tinged pods floating upon a bluff that overlooks the central city.

That night, before a nearly sold-out house, the first-ever U.S. concert by the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba commenced with an inspired gesture — a stirring rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner, followed by Cuba’s national anthem.

The orchestra then flung itself into a program that included George Gershwin’s rousing Cuban Overture, as well as his famous Rhapsody in Blue, each of which earned a standing ovation. They were followed by an early encore — a sensational, rumba-flavoured number called Guaguanco (pronounced “wah-wahn-KOE”) that was composed by the orchestra’s guest conductor, Guido Lopez-Gavilan, and that brought the audience to its feet again.

After the intermission, the orchestra returned to perform La Comparsa, a piece by Cuban composer (and fervent Castro critic) Ernesto Lecuona, followed by a sinuous rendition of Felix Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony.

The final encore — El Danzon, composed by Cuban musician Alejandro Garcia Caturla — was probably the high point of the night, with Herrera flailing away at a Steinway grand piano as if he possessed at least two pairs of hands and with the entire audience clapping along.

After another standing ovation, the historic performance was over.

Late that night, as they tumbled back into their hotel lobby, the Cubans were breathless with excitement at having been so enthusiastically received and in the United States, of all places.

No longer reticent in the presence of a reporter, they couldn’t seem to stop talking.

Flautist Zorimia Vega Garcia was especially bestirred, not least because it was her grandfather — murdered by a convict out on bail one afternoon long ago in Havana — who composed El Danzon, the biggest hit of the night.

“For me, it was beautiful because he was my grandfather,” she said. “And I am the only classical musician in my family. I feel very, very emotional.”

Everyone did.

But, professional musicians that they are, the Cubans were up before dawn the next morning, to clamber aboard their two buses for the seven-hour road trip to Urbana and another friendly concert in an enemy state.

For more on this story go to:

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1277334–cuban-musicians-venture-into-enemy-territory-to-celebrate-art-not-politics