Fonógrafo Cubano

RK: Did that plant the seed in your mind to figure out where it was, how to get your hands on it?

EE: I was three thousand miles from the East Coast, which I thought of as the center of record collecting. So the idea of records of that nature—that old and hard to find—filtering to the West Coast seemed too remote at the time.

RK: When was the first time that you went to Cuba to look for records, or talk to musicians, or find history?

EE: The first time I went to Cuba to look for records was in 1999. There was a little store on Calle Neptuno in Central Havana called Seriosha’s Shop, which a guy named Gutierrez had a stall in, and it was packed with LPs, 45s and 78s. I must’ve bought twenty Habanero 78s from that man.

MGY: I think it’s important to add, for context, that when Sexteto Habanero was recording and these albums were being sold, they were incredibly popular internationally. Cuban music was, like jazz, a music that traveled the world. There’s a really good book called Noise Uprising, by Michael Denning, which discusses how recorded music traveled through port cities, and it was through these port cities that modern music was born. There’s this idea that the really early recordings were primitive, or untouched. But he discusses how these Cuban records have sometimes even showed up in India. The easiest pressings to find of Cuban records from the ’20s were pressed for the West African market.

RK: Which is like a circle, right? The music being recorded at that time would have been heavily influenced by earlier African music?

EE: Yes, the Europeans brought their musical traditions over, but so did the Africans. And over time, these traditions mixed together.

MGY: You see the Afro-Cuban influence of Abakuá in many of these records. The bongoceros, almost all of them were Abakuá, which is a fraternal order much like the Masons. Occasionally in the chorus someone will sing in Abakuá dialect from a specific ritual, and it just makes my hair…

RK: Come up on the back of your neck.

EE: They’re invoking the gods right then and there on the records.

MGY: It’s radical, and I think primarily possible because the Americans recording them were clueless. On a lot of early Cuban recordings—we’re talking 1907, 1908—some of the narratives are extremely political and kind of revolutionary. I have a friend in Spain who has a record from 1911 or 1912 where the group goes into Abakuá for a good minute and a half, which is just so wild to hear.

EE: The record executives used to tell the musicians, “Whatever you record is all right. Just don’t make it dirty.”

RK: And because they probably didn’t speak Spanish, they didn’t even have any idea whether it was dirty or not.

EE: Exactly.

MGY: There’s another book, by Ned Sublette [Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, 2007], which makes the argument that Cuba is where American music was born, with all the cross-cultural interaction happening through the slave trade. A lot of these records sold really well outside of Cuba, and were primarily recorded in New York, the earliest ones in Havana. The record companies sent people around the world, which is also what Denning talks about.

EE: A lot of the spread of the music that we’re speaking of here has to do with the Victor Talking Machine Company itself. Victor was the largest purveyor of Latin American music for decades, and it had arrangements with the Gramophone Company in England, which issued those recordings under the label His Master’s Voice all over the world. They also had connections with Pathé Records of France. So records were put out on Electrola, and on other labels out of France, England and Germany. Cuban music did well in Germany before 1933, for example. But it was in large part due to the financial arrangements that had been made between the record companies.

RK: Was there a Cuban record industry in the ’20s or ’30s?

MGY: No, the Cuban record industry started in the late ’40s. There were two record labels, Star and Panart.

EE: Star made their records for radio broadcast, not for commercial distribution. I have a Star record, and guess what? The grooves go backward.

RK: Wait, explain that to me.

EE: It’s very simple. Many radio stations also made their own transcriptions. When you cut a transcription disc, it turned out that the shavings, when cut from the outside in, got in the way and fouled up the recording. It got onto the record and the record drew the needle over them. By going from the outside in, the stuff accumulated in the middle of the record. On many radio transcription discs, there’s a check mark saying “outside in” or “inside out.” Star records were pressed inside out.

RK: Meaning that you put the needle in near the label, and it went out from there?

EE: That’s right.

RK: It reminds me of a story, maybe a legend, about the subways here in New York, where people would steal the incandescent light bulbs. So the subway had light bulbs manufactured with the thread going the wrong way, and sockets made specially for them. If you stole a subway bulb, you were shit out of luck, because you wouldn’t be able to screw them into your own socket.[Laughs.] For early Cuban music, when was the switch from cylinder to disc to record?

EE: Well, the earliest Cuban cylinders are from around 1904, and Cuban discs are around the same time. They competed with each other, but cylinders in Cuba fell out of favor fairly quickly because the climate was murder on them. They were made of wax. If you wiped them wrong, you’d wipe the information off of them. They weren’t easy to store, anyway. They were like storing jars.

RK: What’s the earliest recorded Cuban music on cylinder?

EE: It would probably be the recordings made by Rosalia Chalia Herrera on the Bettini cylinders. They came out of France. She was an opera singer. There are reports of some earlier recordings made on cylinders in the very early 1890s, but those were not really for commercial release yet.

RK: Thinking about collectors and musicologists like Harry Smith and John Fahey, who collected very early records around the American South, what’s the history in Cuba of people doing essentially what you’re doing, going to shops and flea markets and door-to-door to understand what has survived and help preserve it?

EE: When you collect records in Cuba you know that there have been people there collecting and archiving for a long time, a lot longer than I have. Their parents and their grandparents did it, and some of these collections survive.

MGY: It’s interesting. For decades after the Revolution, you wouldn’t see early records available because people still had the possibility of playing them. Soviet turntables were coming in, and even though not a ton of people had the means to play them, people still kept everything in their homes. When people left their homes and others moved in, a lot of the stuff would still be there, just kept that way. Once the Special Period hit after the fall of the Soviet Union, people started trying to find new ways to make money because there was such desperate need, and antiquarian vendors started gathering in plazas in Havana to sell books and records. People were like, “Oh, I can get money for this?” So they went into their houses and started pulling out all the old records.

EE: They would put them on stairways. The stairways went up one side and there was a little doorway going down, and people would have little racks on that bottom part, selling books and records privately, under the radar.

MGY: There’s always been a black market in Cuba, but in terms of older records, a lot of stuff really came out of the woodwork during the Special Period.

EE: It was people trying to clean out their houses and get by, and even now, there’s a lot left to find. I’ve found some very obscure records that nobody had heard of in this country. For example, a group called Sexteto Gloria Cubana, the first to use a piano in the performance of a song on a record. Fortunately, between trips, friends of mine have looked out for things and held them for me. Getting out of the country has always been a big pain in the butt, because of customs.

RK: What’s it like going through customs with records?

EE: Well, I can tell you about one incident. It was 2010, and the attitude of the guy at customs was, “You’re taking our patrimony.” But the thing was, these are not unique works. They’re mass-produced recordings. The officer’s superior came out and said, “Will you please let those people through? These are records. Don’t worry about it, just let them through.” That’s what has to be remembered about recording companies as well—when the industrial production ceased, many of the companies just got rid of their inventories. I’ve heard of tons of records being dumped into the river outside of the RCA Camden plant in New Jersey, just to junk them. RCA used to have ledgers of everything they recorded. I understand that a lot of that was dumped as well. Physical records were not considered works of art at the time. They were not considered cultural artifacts to be preserved. They were industrial commodities. They got rid of them.

MGY: I’ve gone into a warehouse of records in Cuba where all over the floor are shattered 78s of really important music being thrown away because there are no resources to keep them and priorities lie elsewhere. When people are hungry—and there are a lot of food shortages in Cuba right now—the priorities are elsewhere, and so a lot of this material just gets neglected. Most people don’t have a turntable. I think of a friend of ours, a historian of Cuban music, Ricardo Oropesa Fernández. Someone from Canada or Europe brought him digitizing equipment, and he donated a lot of it, really vital tools, to the National Museum of Music. So much in Cuba has to slip in through the back door because of the embargo. Every time I go, it’s incredibly frustrating because of the policies, and you see the effects very clearly.

EE: If you go to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, you’ll find this there too, and not because of an embargo, but because of the poverty, starvation, narcotics, all of the problems. Trying to find discography or music from Central America—

MGY: It’s impossible.

EE: It’s way harder even than it is in Cuba. My wife’s grandfather introduced jazz to Central America. I’m not saying that lightly; it was mentioned upon his death in 1945 in Billboard magazine. And yet nobody can find his records. You’re not going to find those records, because there have been earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, revolutions, as well as a lot of corruption.

RK: That seems to make the work that you and others are doing in Cuba and elsewhere, to document and save music, even more important, because of all of the forces that continue to contribute to its loss.

MGY: Emiliano, I remember you told me that on one of your trips, someone from the museum ended up giving you a letter, like an honor, which made things easier.

EE: It greased things up a lot, yes.

RK: Marcelo told me about this—that you compiled a hard drive of thousands of collected recordings and that your archive has been very important within Cuba?

EE: Here’s what happened. Every Monday night for thirteen years, I would go to my studio and digitize Cuban records. It started in 2006, and finally stopped with the pandemic. Every Monday night, I would copy about thirty records. No cleaning, no filtration. I just digitized them to get them out into the world. I ended up with close to fifteen hundred 78s copied, a huge hard drive of music. When I started going to Cuba, I would run into people who worked at the Museo de la Musica, and one of them was a gentleman who educated me in Cuban music history, and led me to contacts where I could find records. So I decided to make copies of my digitized collection for him and for the Museo as a gift. I gave him a copy of the hard drive and he said thank you, and that was that. Then a couple of years later, the Cuban jazz band Maraca was touring in San Francisco. I was in the green room with them between performances, and my wife goes to introduce me to the young pianist, and before she can say my name, he says, “Emiliano Echeverria. You’re famous in Cuba!” I’m going to myself, “Oh no, what did I do?” He says, “Everybody’s talking about this wonderful gift that you gave.” I found out that the man from the Museo de la Musica had hundreds of copies of my collection made and distributed the recordings to all the music schools in Cuba. It was an example of returning the patrimony to the source, and I’m very proud that I did it and proud about what resulted from it. Nothing pleases me more than reaching out to, and sharing music with, Cuban people.

MGY: And in recent years more people on the island have been able to get the equipment to digitize material and upload it to YouTube. Emiliano’s hard drive has kept circulating.

RK: It’s now like a kind of commons that people are adding to?

EE: It’s wonderful. There are many people there who care deeply. It’s a huge struggle because no one is helping anyone out in terms of the government and the resources are always stretched so thin. But there are people who, on their own initiative, in whatever way they can, are trying to preserve a culture from dying. We’re working together to help something important survive. We all do it our own way. In the end, the sum is always greater than the parts.

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Emiliano Echeverria is an author, radio DJ and music scholar. Contributing extensively to the world of radio, he has curated and presented hundreds of programs featuring Cuban and other Latin American music for KPFA-FM and KPOO-FM in San Francisco and the online platform Radio Cuba Canta.

Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez is a photographer and art historian living between Brooklyn, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.