In 1950, at 25 years old, Cruz - and her voice, an alto as deep and rich as soil - caught the attention of La Sonora Matancera, Cuba's most popular orchestra. As a girl, she clandestinely sang in cabarets and participated in radio talent contests. Turning The Tables A New Canon: In Pop Music, Women Belong At The Center Of The Storyīorn in Santos Suárez, a working-class neighborhood outside of Havana, Cruz defied her father's desire that she abandon singing for a more respectable career. On the cusp of international stardom, the Cruz who recorded this album is at once a girl in Cuba's countryside, set firmly in the day-to-day landscape and concerns of el campo, as well as a burgeoning star, transplanting these minutiae among the tumultuous United States of 1966.
The album is an artifact of Cruz's 1966 and her life in transition - from Cuba to exile in the United States, and from obscurity behind institutional barriers to international fame despite systemic racism and sexism. In the shadow of her most famous hits from the 1970s and subsequent decades, 1966's Son Con Guaguancó may be no one's go-to Cruz album, but it is perhaps her most significant. For so many, the hope and joy that Cruz embodied made her difficult ascension to fame a footnote to her success.
Her best-loved hits concern happiness in the face of life's hardships: "Ay / no hay que llorar / que la vida es un carnaval / es más bello vivir cantando" (You don't have to cry / life is a carnaval / it's more beautiful to live singing). Today, the world remembers Cruz as the Queen of Salsa, with her towering wigs, cackling refrain of ¡Azúcar! and permanent smile. The world's love affair with Celia Cruz is a story that has a middle but no beginning. For so many, the hope and joy that Celia Cruz embodied made her difficult ascension to fame a footnote to her success.
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