Q & A with Ciro BenemellisPresident of the Cubadisco 2005 Organizing Committee

Earlier this week, the island of Cuba was home to the Cubadisco Fair & Festival, one of the Caribbean´s major events of the recording industry. Teeming with concerts, live performances, activities and other presentations across the country, Cubadisco drew the attention of scores of musicians and professionals from around the world.

Caribbean News Digital talked with Ciro Benemellis, president of the event´s Organizing Committee, about some of the most luring projects and proposals within the framework of this year´s music festival.

What´s the main reason that moved the Cubadisco 2005 Organizing Committee to pick Japan as this year´s guest country?

The fact that Japan was this year´s guest country has several meanings. First of all, we must say that Cuba and Japan have had longstanding cultural ties and relations in many fields. At the same time, the Japanese people have always had a special flair and passion for Cuban music. Looking back at the 1940s, there were orchestras and bands in Japan that used to play Cuban music. Today, there are scores of Japanese groups that play Cuban music and attend other festivals in Cuba, like the Benny More Festival, the Bolero Festival, events devoted to Cuban songs. You find salsa singers and bands in Japan dime a dozen, as well as other bands that play Cuba´s traditional music and jazz. And there are Cuban salsa and jazz singers, like Chucho Valdes, Cesar Lopez, Ensemble, Omara Portuondo, Company Segundo, the entire Buena Vista Social Club band, that are truly all the rage in Japan.

Some get really surprised to see that a country with so different a culture can feel such a great passion for Cuban music. This is a faraway land that gets in touch with us through music. I might also add that Japan is one of the world´s recording industry heavyweights and the second biggest buyer of CDs and vinyl records in the entire globe, second-best to the United States. Therefore, the presence of Cuban music in Japan is paramount.

The largest delegation to this year´s Cubadisco Fair & Festival was from Japan. Comparatively speaking, Brazil has been the other country with a huge delegation like this one. This time around, the Japanese brought quite an entourage of soloists and bands worth listening to.

For us is a great honor that such an economic power like Japan pays so much attention to the music of a Third World nation like Cuba. That´s what really set this edition of Cubadisco apart from previous events. As to other attending countries, well, we had delegations from the Bahamas, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, the Dominican Republic, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Bangladesh, just to name but a few.

What other activities did you include in this year´s edition of Cubadisco?

Cubadisco is not only a fair of artistic presentations, but also a symposium of high academic level organized by the Center for Research and Development of Cuban Music in which experts from the turf and around the world meet and share views. This time around, we dictated master lectures and presented white papers. We also held roundtables on very specific issues and theoretical sessions dedicated to the presence of women in Cuban music.

Cubadisco is an ecumenical event that gathers music as a whole. For instance, Cuba´s National Symphonic Orchestra made a special presentation with Japanese acts. We also held several concerts, some of them staged by outstanding female singers and crooners.

Can you refer to the prizes for a while?

Well, every year we dole out prizes in nearly two dozen categories, like Producer of the Year, Lifetime Achievement Awards, Best National Act, Best International Act, and, of course, the Grand Prize. That´s always the big sweepstake up for grabs. This year, we logged 103 titles and 59 of them were nominated for the big prizes. I must say the Grand Prize is dished out on a purely academic basis. The jury was headed by maestro Roberto Varela, one of Cuba´s greatest musicians and composers, as well as by other excellent Cuban performers and musicologists, journalists, TV critics and art critics.

The Cubadisco 2005 awarded four Japanese acts, two Japanese orchestras from the 1940s, and maestro Riu Murakami, who´s also a great moviemaker, intellectual, writer and lover of Cuban music. The jury also presented Japanese maestro and guitarist Antonio Koga with a Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his 40-plus-year-old career and for his tremendous effort to help the Cuban people develop in the field of music. Quite recently, Mr. Koga donated nearly a hundred pianos for conservatories, schools and other places across the country.

Any plans for the future?

Our main goal is to make Cubadisco the biggest and most important musical event of its kind in the Caribbean and Latin America, to turn Cuba into a bridge between this whole region and the rest of the world. This year we presented Japan as the guest country; next time around, China will steal the spotlight. That´s going to be the guest nation at the Cubadisco 2006.

We are intended to be not only a cultural bridge, but also a unifier of all Caribbean and Latin American values and traditions. We need to stand up for ourselves, I mean as a region, and we need to turn things around and shed some light on our own culture. We´re not against commercial stuff, but we don´t want our products to be stripped of their basic, down-to-earth values.