SXSW Cuban Showcase Forerunner To Obama's Diplomatic Efforts

AUSTIN, TX -- While President Barack Obama is in Cuba this week restoring relations with Cuba, organizers at the just-concluded SXSW did their part thawing remnants of the Cold War between both countries through the soul-warming strains of music.

The March 18 “Sounds of Cuba” showcase at the expansive Speakeasy bar downtown featured some of the best-known musicians from the Caribbean island nation. The historic event marked the first time Cuban musicians have been able to participate in SXSW, given past flight restrictions that have become relaxed since Obama’s overtures.

Obama is the first sitting president to visit Cuba in more than 80 years, since the days of Calvin Coolidge. Albeit on a smaller scale, the SXSW Cuban showcase made history in its own right by featuring the music of Cuba direct from the source.

All told, 12 Cuban musicians from five bands made it to SXSW in Austin -- fertile ground from which to expand an artist's fan base given the tens of thousands of music fans that descended to the city during its 10-day run earlier this month.

And the machinations behind getting the musicians to Austin proved as delicate and multi-faceted a process as the diplomacy that led to Obama’s historic trip to Cuba on Tuesday. Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain -- himself a SXSW participant -- was approached to foot the considerable bill for the Cubans’ visit, an offer to which he happily agreed given his fondness for the island nation.

In the end, the Cuban-centric showcase was a hit, its reverberations continuing in light of the president’s historic trip to Cuba this week.

Just a week before the Cuban showcase occurred, President Obama himself came to Austin on March 11 to participate in a conversation at the Long Center about the tactics of civic engagement via the use of technology. Had he hung around longer (but then again, he’s kind of busy), he would’ve feasted his senses with the sounds and images of Cuba’s music ahead of his official trip.

The SXSW show featured rapper/singer Telmary Díaz; R&B singer Daymé Arocena; Afro-Latin jazz quintet Yissy & Bandancha; jazz/hip-hop/funk/electronica veterans X-Alfonso Y La Flota; and Kelvis Ochoa, who Billboard describes as a “Cuban national treasure...whose unique sound mixes traditional rhythms from conga and merengue with funk and rock.”

The historic show was presented by food and music magazine Roads & Kingdoms. The magazine’s co-founder/publisher Nathan Thornburgh said staging the substantial showcase was a no-brainer.

"There are things you do because they make sense for your company and things you do because you just love to do it and it's something you really care about,” Thornburgh told Billboard magazine in explaining why he worked so tirelessly months in advance to ensure the historic showcase took place.

It was no easy task. Against a backdrop of some remaining tension between the two countries, there were multiple moving parts in launching the show -- the biggest hurdle being money to finance musicians’ trips. SXAméricas Latin music coordinator Alicia Zertuche told Billboard a few big-name underwriters emerged.

"One of the things we do here is piece together the puzzle of how we can make showcases come to fruition and produce them for the event," she says. "It was so challenging to get these guys here that if I wasn't super committed and didn't have a very long relationship with Cuban music I wouldn't have done it."

Thornburgh’s participation was fueled from a deeply personal motivation. The former writer for Time magazine “...spent a life-changing summer in Cuba in 1999 playing saxophone with some of the island's musicians while soaking in Cuban history and cuisine, which he says pushed him toward his journalism career and formed the genesis of a lifelong devotion to the sounds of Cuba,” Billboard writes.

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With time running out to bring the musicians to Austin from Cuba some 1,.400 miles away, Zertuche's team reached out to Thornburgh with a last-ditch effort: Asking Bourdain to foot the “not-insignificant cost of flights for the 16 musicians.”

SXSW acts aren’t paid, and organizers rely on the kindness of strangers and not-so-strangers in helping pay for musicians’ travel costs and making sure they’re well-fed once they arrive.

Bourdain once unflinchingly yet fondly featured Cuba in his popular “Parts Unknown” program aired on CNN, which made it something of a foregone conclusion he’d agree to foot the travel costs. Himself a SXSW panelist this year, Bourdain financed the trip without hesitation.

"Cuba has always been an important source for powerful, compelling and influential music -- so, strictly for selfish reasons they have something we enjoy," Bourdain told Billboard about his enthusiasm in getting involved with the project.

But his decision to open his wallet also was informed by ramifications extending beyond music on a global stage: "But also geopolitically,” he added. “A window has opened, a door, hopefully forever -- and the artistic and cultural exchanges that are happening now are important. They hold out the possibility of raising up people who deserve better. Cubans have been shut off from the world for so long -- it's exciting to see the conversation get wider and louder."

Thanks to Bourdain’s largesse, the actions have yielded substantial dividends for the Cuban musicians -- and by extension, Austin. On March 21, NPR devoted an entire segment to Arocena, another one of the Cuban performers who made the the trip to SXSW.

"She's like a mix of Aretha Franklin and Celia Cruz in the same breath," NPR Music’s Felix Contreras, host of the he podcast Alt.Latino, said. "She is working a part of the music scene that is far from the pop world but very artistically complex and compelling.”

Just 24 years old, Arocena is already well known in her native Cuba, having performed in bands and choirs publicly for a decade.

“And she's got this wonderful warmth and personality that comes across, even on record. But live, everybody in the place fell in love with her."

Not everybody’s happy about the president’s extending a hand of friendship to Cuba. Yet in Austin, the SXSW Cuban showcase proved a belated Valentine to the Caribbean country.

And with music’s charming attributes said to have the power to tame the savage breast, it ultimately might be melodies that melt icy relations evermore.

>>> Images courtesy of SXSW