Arturo Sandoval is a Cuban-American jazz trumpeter, pianist, timbalero, and composer. While living in his native Cuba, Sandoval was influenced by jazz musicians Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, and Dizzy Gillespie. In 1977 he met Gillespie, who became his friend and mentor and helped him defect from Cuba while on tour with the United Nations Orchestra. Sandoval became an American naturalized citizen in 1998. His life was the subject of the film For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story (2000) starring Andy García.
Dionisio Jesús Valdés Rodríguez, better known as Chucho, is a Cuban pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger whose career spans over 50 years. An original member of the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, in 1973 he founded the group Irakere, one of Cuba's best-known Latin jazz bands.
Ramón "Mongo" Santamaría Rodríguez was a Cuban percussionist and bandleader who spent most of his career in the United States. Primarily a conga drummer, Santamaría was a leading figure in the pachanga and boogaloo dance crazes of the 1960s. His biggest hit was his rendition of Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man", which was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. From the 1970s, he recorded mainly salsa and Latin jazz, before retiring in the late 1990s.
A descarga is an improvised jam session consisting of variations on Cuban music themes, primarily son montuno, but also guajira, bolero, guaracha and rumba. The genre is strongly influenced by jazz and it was developed in Havana during the 1950s. Important figures in the emergence of the genre were Cachao, Julio Gutiérrez, Bebo Valdés, Peruchín and Niño Rivera in Cuba, and Tito Puente, Machito and Mario Bauzá in New York. Originally, descargas were promoted by record companies such as Panart, Maype and Gema under the label Cuban jam sessions. From the 1960s, the descarga format was usually adapted by large salsa ensembles, most notably the Fania All-Stars.
Roberto Fernández Retamar was a Cuban poet, essayist, literary critic and President of the Casa de las Américas. In his role as President of the organization, Fernández also served on the Council of State of Cuba. An early close confidant of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, he was a central figure in Cuba from the 1959 Revolution until his death in 2019. Fernández also wrote over a dozen major collections of verse and founded the Casa de las Americas cultural magazine.
Reincidentes is a Spanish rock/punk rock band. They were formed in the 1980s as Incidente Local, by Manuel Pizarro on drums, Juan Barea on guitar, and Fernando Medina on bass and vocals. They performed their first live concert in 1987 at University of Seville. After they became finalists at a local rock contest and were joined by sax player José Luis Nieto, they recorded their self-titled debut album in 1989 released by '"Discos Trilita". After signing up to the "Discos Suicidas" label and participating in Seville Expo '92, they started touring Central America. Later, Selu left the band and Finito de Badajoz became the new guitarist. In 1997, the band signed to BMG and shortly thereafter their live album Algazara became their first gold record in Spain in 2000.
Haciendo Punto en Otro Son is a Nueva Trova band from Puerto Rico, founded in 1975. They recorded fourteen albums and performed in Latin America, the Caribbean and United States.
Alfredo Manuel De La Fé is a Cuban-born and New York–based violinist who lived in Colombia for more than 16 years and is responsible for adapting the violin to Colombian traditional dance music creating innovative Salsa and Latin American music. The first solo violinist to perform with a Salsa orchestra, De La Fé has toured the world more than thirty times, appearing in concert and participating in over 100 albums by top Latin artists, including Eddie Palmieri, Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, José Alberto "El Canario", Cheo Feliciano, The Fania All-Stars, Santana and Larry Harlow. His second solo album entitled Alfredo released in 1979 was a Grammy nominee for "Best Latin album".
Juan de Marcos González is a Cuban bandleader, musician and actor, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club and in the 2021 Sony Pictures Animation film Vivo as the voice of Vivo's owner, Andrés.
Antonio Abad Lugo Machín was a Spanish-Cuban singer and musician. His version of El Manisero, recorded in New York, 1930, with Don Azpiazú's orchestra, was the first million record seller for a Cuban artist. Although this was labelled a rhumba, it was in reality a son pregón, namely, a song based on a street-seller's cry.
Federico Arístides Soto Alejo, better known as Tata Güines, was a Cuban percussionist, bandleader and arranger. He was widely regarded as a master of the conga drum, and alongside Carlos "Patato" Valdés, influential in the development of contemporary Afro-Cuban music, including Afro-Cuban jazz. He specialized in a form of improvisation known as descarga, a format in which he recorded numerous albums throughout the years with Cachao, Frank Emilio Flynn, Estrellas de Areito, Alfredo Rodríguez and Jane Bunnett, among others. In the 1990s he released two critically acclaimed albums as a leader: Pasaporte and Aniversario. His composition "Pa' gozar" has become a standard of the descarga genre.
7 Days in Havana is a 2012 Spanish-language anthology film. Set during a week in the Cuban capital Havana, the film features one segment for each day, each segment directed by a different filmmaker. The directors are Julio Medem, Laurent Cantet, Juan Carlos Tabío, Benicio del Toro, Gaspar Noé, Pablo Trapero and Elia Suleiman. The screenplay was written by the Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura Fuentes. The film is a co-production of companies in Spain, France and Cuba. It was shot on location in Havana.
Interactivo is a collaborative group of Cuban musicians, led by the pianist, singer and composer Roberto Carcasses. As an acknowledgement of their growing notoriety, the band has recently been the subject of a documentary directed by Tane Martinez, and premiered at the Havana International Film Festival in December 2010.
Enrique Raúl Planas Fernández was a popular Cuban singer and songwriter. He performed and recorded with many bands and musicians, including Carlos Barbería y su Orquesta Kubavana, Sonora Matancera, Celia Cruz, Conjunto Rumbavana, Conjunto Chappottín, Charanga Rubalcaba, Rubén González, and the Afro-Cuban All Stars.
Juan Pablo Torres Morell was a Cuban trombonist, bandleader, arranger and producer. He was the director of Algo Nuevo and a member of Irakere, two of the leading exponents of songo and Afro-Cuban jazz in the 1970s and 1980s. He has also directed various Cuban supergroups such as Estrellas de Areito and Cuban Masters. He has been called "one of the best trombone players in the Latin-jazz community of the 1990s".
Havana D'Primera is a Cuban Timba band founded by Alexander Abreu on October 4, 2007, the date on which they performed their first live performance, at the Cabaret Turquino of the Hotel Habana Libre in Havana. The band is made up of a collective of high-level musicians in the Cuban music scene with a total of 16 members.
Ernesto Duarte Hernández known as Tito Duarte, was a Cuban musician, instrumentalist and arranger.
Paulo Simeón is a Cuban-American record producer, television producer, creative director, artist manager and art director, known for his work with artists such as Aymée Nuviola, Paola Guanche, Maía, Fanny Lu, Chucho Valdés, Alexander Abreu, Paula Arenas, Majida Issa and Gonzalo Rubalcaba, among others. Some of the albums he has produced have won awards and nominations in events such as the Latin Grammy and Grammy Awards.
De cero is the debut album by Diego Gutiérrez. Its arrangements and sonority range from pop-rock and latin pop to Nueva Trova and cuban music. In 2007, it won three nominations and two Cubadisco Awards in the category of Best Album of Trova-Pop-Rock and Best Video Clip for its single En la Luna de Valencia.
Palante el Mambo! is the second studio album by Diego Gutiérrez. He recreates in this album Cuban genres and rhythms from a very personal vision of songwriting, which earned him immediate attention from critics and audiences. It was nominated for the Latin Grammy Award for Best Tropical Fusion Album category at its 19th edition in 2018.
