By Coral Gables Gazette staff
Before the revolution ended it, before the diaspora scattered it across New York and Miami and Mexico City, there was a moment when Havana was the center of the popular music world. Not a tributary, not an influence — the center. In the 1950s, the music being made in the cabarets and radio studios and dance halls of the Cuban capital was so rhythmically alive, so formally sophisticated, so genuinely joyful, that it rewired the musical instincts of everyone who encountered it. Benny Moré led the greatest big band on the island. Celia Cruz fronted La Sonora Matancera and was becoming the voice that would define Cuban music for the next half century. La Lupe was performing at a small Havana nightclub called La Red to a devoted following that included Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Marlon Brando. The bolero, the son, the mambo, the Afro-Cuban rumba were the living present tense of popular music.
On Saturday, April 4, at 8 p.m., Pro-Arte brings that moment back to Coral Gables. Feeling Havana: Tribute to the 50’s takes the stage at the Sanctuary of the Arts, 410 Andalusia Avenue, with three acclaimed vocalists — Emilio Frías, Miriam Mar, and Ramón Álvarez — performing alongside a big band-style orchestra. Tickets range from $68 to $103 including fees.
The voices honoring the legends
The figures this concert pays tribute to are not simply historical names. They are the foundation on which Cuban popular music — and by extension, much of Latin American popular music — was built.
Benny Moré was widely considered the greatest voice in Cuban popular music. He led the leading Cuban big band of the 1950s, commanding audiences with a vocal range and rhythmic authority that moved effortlessly between son montuno, mambo, guaracha, and bolero. Celia Cruz was establishing herself in that same decade as the definitive interpreter of Cuban popular song — a status she would carry into exile after 1959 and into international fame as the Queen of Salsa. La Lupe, born in Santiago de Cuba and performing in Havana by the mid-1950s, was something altogether more volatile — an artist whose on-stage intensity was described by one audio engineer as a talent hurricane, a performer who turned boleros into emotional confessions and left audiences stunned.
Vicentico Valdés and Miguelito Cuní complete the honorees — beloved soneros whose voices embodied the elegance and improvisational intelligence at the heart of Cuban popular style. Together they represent a musical universe that was abruptly severed from its home in 1959 and that has been reconstructed, piece by piece, in the Cuban diaspora communities of Miami, New York, and beyond.
The lead vocalist and his journey
Emilio Frías brings to this concert a biography that gives its subject matter particular weight. Known as “El Niño,” Frías founded his orchestra El Niño y la Verdad in Havana in 2013, building a following through his commitment to traditional Cuban roots music — son, rumba, guaracha — blended with contemporary sensibility. His influences include the same Miguelito Cuní and Rolando Laserie whose legacies Feeling Havana honors.
His relationship with Cuba changed when he released a song called “Cambio” — a social commentary on the island’s migration crisis. The song was not embraced by Cuban state media. His access to major venues disappeared. He was eventually unable to continue working in Cuba under conditions that felt tolerable. He left, first to Mexico, then to the United States, where his first American performance took place in February 2024. He has been performing in Miami since, part of the community of Cuban musicians in exile who have made South Florida the most vital center of Cuban music outside the island.
When Frías sings Feeling Havana‘s tributes to the voices that shaped him, he does so not as a student performing academic exercises but as an artist living the continuation of a story that began in 1950s Havana — the story of music that survives the conditions that produced it.
The venue and its resonance
The Sanctuary of the Arts at 410 Andalusia Avenue is one of Coral Gables’ most intimate performance spaces, and for a program like this one, intimacy is the right scale. The music of 1950s Havana was built for rooms — for the close quarters of a cabaret, the warmth of a radio broadcast, the felt presence of a singer and a band in the same space as the people listening. A big band in a concert hall of this size produces the physical experience of the music the recordings can only approximate: the brass section at full voice, the percussion working underneath everything, the vocalist drawing from the tradition and adding something irreducibly present.
Coral Gables has a large Cuban-American community whose connection to this music is not academic. For many residents of this city, the names on Saturday’s program — Benny Moré, Celia Cruz, La Lupe — are not historical footnotes. They are the voices of a world their families came from and the music those families carried with them when they left. Feeling Havana offers a Saturday evening in which that world is reconstituted, for two hours, in a room on Andalusia Avenue.
The concert is presented in both English and Spanish.
FEELING HAVANA: TRIBUTE TO THE 50’S
What: Pro-Arte concert featuring Emilio Frías, Miriam Mar, and Ramón Álvarez with big band orchestra
When: Saturday, April 4, 8 p.m.
Where: Sanctuary of the Arts, 410 Andalusia Ave., Coral Gables
Admission: $68 – $103 including fees
Tickets: Available through Pro-Arte Grateli
