The USA and Cuban artists

The weekly new Yorker magazine The Village Voice published this week an article about the Cuban embargo affecting the Cuban musicians who had planned to make performances in the USA; indeed, many well-known artists, including Omara Portuondo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Chucho Valdes or Los Van Van, had to cancel their performances due to their impossibility to get a visa for the USA as Cuban citizens. That consequence of the embargo policy had already been denounced in February 2004 when 45 Cuban artists couldn’t attend the Grammy Awards ceremony for the same reason. According to the Village Voice “The security crunch following 9/11 has given immigration authorities the excuse they've long sought to exclude many foreign musicians from the United States.” The magazine also notes that with that policy the Bush administration is moving backwards in comparison with the Clinton administration which tried to promote cultural exchanges and “people-to-people-exchanges”. The article quotes Bill Martinez, an attorney at law based in San Francisco who has worked with many Cuban musicians: “"This was an affirmative act […]The Bush administration is using artists' visas as an offensive tool to implement foreign policy.”

The article points out the huge cultural loss due to the lack of full access to that kind of music and shows how damaging consequences some drastic policies can have in terms of cultural diversity and open-minding aspects; it also makes us think about how absurd some policies can become when they are enforced to all areas without being necessarily adjusted to each of them.