‘She had no interest in the comfort zone': celebrating the centenary of Celia Cruz, Cuba's Queen of Salsa

The Guardian

18-04-2025

On 13 November 1973, at Roberto Clemente Coliseum in Puerto Rico, Celia Cruz took to the stage in a bejewelled, psychedelic blue dress and vast afro, saluting the 12,500-capacity arena with her trademark rallying cry: 'Azucar!' – sugar.
The Cuban singer had been a star for more than two decades by this point, but this concert marked a rebirth. Backed by the Fania All-Stars, the in-house orquesta of the label that brought salsa to the US, Cruz performed Bemba Colorá. Devotees have variously decoded its lyric and 'big red lips' metaphor as a repudiation of a neighbourhood gossip, a commentary on anti-Black racism or an anthem for female empowerment. Stretched out to a righteous 12-minute call-and-response in Puerto Rico, she recast the song as a cry of anguish over her exile from her homeland, adding lines like 'Yo como el pájaro quiero / mi libertad recobrar' ('Like the bird / I want to regain my freedom') that channelled the pain of the dispossessed.
Whether exiles themselves or simply economic migrants, many in the concert audience – just like many in her fanbase across the Latin American diaspora – sensed the sadness beneath her words, the vulnerability within the strength. They crowned her the Queen of Salsa. 'Celia had power in a male-dominated world, she changed the game,' says Cuban singer Daymé Arocena. 'She had no interest in the comfort zone.'
Cruz's influence is still keenly felt today in contemporary stars such as Cardi B, who saluted her in the video for I Like It and arrived at last year's Met Gala dressed like her; UK dance star Barry Can't Swim rewired Cruz's 1974 song Quimbara for his own 2024 mega-banger Kimbara. And salsa, the music Cruz helped pioneer, is enjoying a renaissance, in the form of smash hits such as Bad Bunny's Baile Inolvidable and Rauw Alejandro's Tú con Él.
Cruz was perhaps the greatest Latin American icon of her era, dominating the Latin music charts, decorating her walls with gold records, three US Grammys and four Latin Grammys – alongside prizes from Billboard, the Smithsonian Institution and more – and receiving the keys to New York, Los Angeles, Miami and many other US cities. 'I have lots of keys,' she later lamented, 'but they don't open any doors.' Last year, Cruz also became the first Afro-Latina to appear on the US 25-cent coin, with Ventris Gibson, then director of the US Mint, declaring the singer 'a trailblazer in music and civil rights'. Cruz's centenary will be celebrated this year with a series of reissues, alongside events and exhibitions across the US.
Cruz had never planned on being a performer; her childhood ambitions were to be 'a mother, a teacher, a housewife', she once said. Nevertheless, she triumphed at talent shows, thrived at Havana's National Conservatory of Music and, in 1950, joined La Sonora Matancera, a long-running band that specialised in son cubano, guaguancó and chá-chá-chá, the rhythms that later coalesced into salsa. Over the next decade, they became leading lights of the golden age of Cuban music.
Then Castro took power. Keenly understanding the power of radio, Castro removed the dance music La Sonora Matancera specialised in from the airwaves, replacing it with propaganda messages. He admired Cruz, however – he would clean his gun to her song Burundanga in the days before the revolution – but these feelings were not reciprocated. Castro would send agents to her house, requesting she perform at his official events; Cruz hid in a closet, sending her brother to say she wasn't home.
As work for La Sonora Matancera dwindled under Cuba's new regime, in June 1960 they left Havana for a gig in Mexico; en route, bandleader Rogelio Martinez told his musicians: 'This is a one-way flight.' They never returned, resettling in the US in 1961; Pedro Knight, the band's trumpeter and later Cruz's husband, reasoned that if they had remained in Cuba, 'we would have ended up like some of our compatriots who have no way of getting out'. But exile wore heavily upon Cruz, who never saw her parents again. 'I don't have a mother, a father, I don't have a country,' she mourned 25 years after fleeing Havana. 'I only have Pedro.' Outwardly, however, she generally chose to radiate joy: 'My message is always felicidad – happiness.'
In 1965, now living in New York, Cruz went solo, backed by the orchestra of Spanish Harlem's Tito Puente. She became ever more successful, though the ingrained racism in the US was a culture-shock for this proud Afro-Cuban. 'Celia celebrated her African roots,' says Angélique Kidjo, the Benin-born singer, five-time Grammy winner and a friend and superfan of Cruz. 'She grew up singing Yoruba songs – her phrasing is embedded in the African tradition. But the white Cubans did not want her to succeed, nor to be associated with her. And her answer to that was: 'Azucar!''
Cruz first coined the catchphrase when a waiter in Miami asked if she wanted sugar in her black coffee. Explains Kidjo: 'She was saying [to white Cubans]: 'You may not like it, but you are able to drink coffee due to my ancestors, with the sugar you add. I'm the one who brings flavour to everything you do.''
By the 1970s, Latin music was thriving in the US in the form of salsa, championed by the fledgling Fania Records. 'Salsa was this melting pot of Afro-Cuban music, mixed with Puerto Rican and other roots rhythms,' says Bruce McIntosh, vice-president at Craft Latino, the label putting out the centenary reissues. 'It was basically created in New York by Fania and its musicians.' The label cultivated a loyal following of listeners who, McIntosh says, 'longed for the homeland, and this music, like Latin food and culture, fed that longing'.
Fania's initial audience was overwhelmingly male, however. 'Salsa was the street music of its time – it was hip-hop before hip-hop, full of urban folklore and very male-oriented,' McIntosh says.
But Johnny Pacheco, the composer and bandleader who founded the label, was in love with Cruz's voice and her spirit, and signed her. 'Celia had been a star since the 50s, and she brought a bit of professionalism to Fania,' says McIntosh. 'She also brought a whole new demographic, broadening the scope. When she arrived, there were basically no other women singing salsa. After Celia, women were more drawn to it.'
And Cruz was more than able to hold her own against Fania's young bucks. On Quimbara from 1974's Celia & Johnny, her first smash-hit collaboration with Pacheco, Kidjo says 'her voice was like a percussive instrument, giving you the beat so you can dance salsa'. In 1974, Cruz accompanied the Fania All-Stars when they performed a festival in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to coincide with Muhammad Ali and George Foreman's Rumble in the Jungle bout.
'Salsa was huge in Africa, especially west Africa,' says Kidjo, who saw Cruz perform in Benin in her teens. 'If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed a woman could lead a salsa band. The musicians were performing for this woman – she conducted them without even raising a finger. It was a defining moment for me.'
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Further collaborations with Pacheco followed, plus albums with Fania legends Ray Barretto and Willie Colón. It solidified Queen Celia's reign, which continued until her death in 2003. 'She had hits in the 90s and the 00s,' marvels McIntosh. 'She was an ambassador for the music and the culture worldwide.'
Back in Cuba, however, her music was banned, with Cruz heading an unofficial (but effective) blacklist of artists who had spoken out against Castro's regime or left the island after he took power. The ban was not overturned until 2012, four years before Castro's death, and this was done quietly and never officially acknowledged. 'I'd never heard of Celia until I arrived in the US and NPR said I sounded like her,' says Daymé Arocena. 'We weren't allowed to listen to her music.' When she researched Cruz, however, Arocena realised she had grown up mere blocks from her childhood home, and drew inspiration from her music. 'Bemba Colorá has become an empowering song for me. They tell Black women not to wear red lipstick, that it makes our lips look bigger, and it's a way of oppressing us. So every time I wear red lipstick on stage, I think of that song.'
Aymée Nuviola, another Cuban singer, also knew nothing of Cruz when she heard the comparison while touring abroad. 'People would tell me I was a bad Cuban for not knowing Celia!' she laughs. When she finally heard Cruz's records, she recognised the melodies from pregóns – songs sung by street vendors in Cuba – that she had heard as a child. Castro's ban couldn't erase Cruz from Cuba's folk-memory. Nuviola finally saw Cruz perform in Mexico, late in her career. 'She only had to say, 'Azucar!' and everyone screamed and I began to cry. She was magical.'
In 2015, Nuviola was cast as Cruz in the Colombian TV drama Celia, which she describes as 'a great honour. I absorbed how she moved her hands, how she walked, how she sang.' She struggled with Cruz's trademark long fingernails – 'I'm a pianist!' – but Nuviola understood the central tragedy of Cruz's life, having also left Cuba early in her career. 'Celia had to fight so hard for her life – she had to leave Cuba, and she loved Cuba so, so much.' Later this year, Nuviola will release a duet, adding her vocals to Cruz's original track Ríe y Llora (Laugh and Cry). 'It's from Celia's final album,' says Nuviola, 'a very emotional album called Regalo del Alma. The title means 'a gift from my soul'. She gave so much.'
Kidjo, meanwhile, befriended Cruz in her later years, and remembers 'sitting together at the Grammys, cracking up with laughter – she called me 'hermana Africana', her sister from Africa.' Kidjo later recorded Afrobeat interpretations of Cruz's music for her 2019 album Celia, celebrating the star whose example had been so foundational.
'When I saw her perform when I was a teenager, she became everything I wanted to be,' she says. 'This ball of smiling and joy and happiness on stage, like, 'Nothing's gonna stop me, this is where I want to be. This is what I have to give to the world.' Celia didn't choose to be born in Cuba, she didn't ask to be a descendant of slaves. But African music and spirit has survived through her determination to become whoever she wanted to be.'
Reissues of Son Con Guaguancó, Tremendo Cache and Only They Could Have Made This Album are out now. Celia y Willie is released 6 June