Los Van Van Sees Less No! No!
Tomorrow night's show is over half-sold.
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Los Van Van at the 2000 Grammy Awards held in Los Angeles, CA on February 23, 2000 Photo by Scott Gries/ImageDirect
Last time they attempted to play Miami, famed Cuban dance band Los Van Van was greeted with thousands of angry rock- and bottle-throwing demonstrators determined to make a political point.
This time, even one of the city commissioners who helped oust them isn't interested in making a stink over Sunday night's show at the James L. Knight Center.
"My focus,'' says Miami mayor Tomas Regalado, "is to protect the people who wish to go, protect the people who wish to protest and protect the people who wish to use I-395 and I-95 and Brickell."
Traffic over to-do? What a difference a decade makes. Regalado says only a few groups have filed protest permits; the lack of uproar indicates that the prohibitive anger of Cuban exiles is dissipating or being slowly swallowed up as the Cuban-American demographic trends younger and a new American administration adopts more open visa policies.
Though many of the older generation closely link the band to the Castro government -- a feeling made evident when a previous wave of Cuban performances in the late '90s went fine until Los Van Van was booked at the Knight Center -- younger Cuban-Americans and more recent exiles are willing separate the tunes from the regime.
"The audience is a young audience that has just arrived," explained Maria Elvira Salazar, a popular Spanish-language radio talk show host, to the Miami Herald. "You have a new group of Cubans...and they view the situation differently. They agree that Fidel Castro is a dictator, and we need democracy...But they don't have any problems with [Cuban artists] coming to play."
That attitude was evident Thursday night in Key West, when Los Van Van played to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of José Martí and the only statements were made with hips. It left little doubt events like rocker Juanes' September concert in Havana and recent Miami performances by Septeto Nacional and Charanga Habanera are feeding a need by some to have more of a cultural dialoge with their homeland.
As for Regalado, he seems to accept the inevitability of increased concerts by Cuban groups, even if he may not endorse it.
"So many groups have come and gone,'' he says. "I still think that Van Van would create more controversy than any other group here. But we are a big city, and we will survive the Van Vans, and we'll move on."
Posted Saturday, Jan 30, 2010 - 2:41 PM EST
