La Sonora Matancera, or How to Suffer Happily

How the province of Matanzas got its name, I do not know. Matanza is the Spanish word for "slaughter," so I always had this image in my mind of Matanzas, Cuba as a place that was forged in blood and passion. The music produced by the region's artists seems to mirror that history of pain, slavery, and happiness in the face of suffering.

 

In "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" Chief Wiggum decides to pay Tito Puente a visit in order to determine if he's the culprit. Tito Puente breaks out in song, proclaiming, "words won't last long, but an insulting song Burns will always carry with him. So, I settle my score on the Salsa floor with this vengeful Latin rhythm." Chief Wiggum happily and immediately agree that he's innocent. Though Puerto Rican, there's a reason why Tito Puente was frequently confused for Cuban: his music often has that Cuban duality of happiness in misery.

 

No other group is more representative of Cuban music than La Sonora Matancera. Though officially started in 1935, the group's history stretches to the early 1920s under other names and incarnations. The number of artists that have at one point or another played for La Sonora Matancera is too great to list. However, that list includes some of the biggest names in Cuban music: Perez "The King of Mambo" Prado, Bienvenido Granda, Daniel Santos, Celia Cruz, and Manuel "Caito" Diaz.

 

Celia Cruz, in particular, would continue producing hits until her death in 2003. In the near eight decades of the group's existence, the thousands of recording -- many lost -- deal with nearly every subject imaginable. Most songs deal with Afro-Cuban struggle, Santeria, lost love, betrayal, family difficulties, and, somehow, pure happiness. 

 

The two songs I feel most encapsulate La Sonora Matancera are "Obsesions" and "En El Mar." The former deals with the impossibility of love, the latter with pure joy simply for the sake of living near the sea.

 

They just don't make simple, moving recordings like this one anymore. The cigarette alone is enough to move you.

 

 

 

La Sonora Matancera, or How to Suffer Happily

How the province of Matanzas got its name, I do not know. Matanza is the Spanish word for "slaughter," so I always had this image in my mind of Matanzas, Cuba as a place that was forged in blood and passion. The music produced by the region's artists seems to mirror that history of pain, slavery, and happiness in the face of suffering.

 

In "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" Chief Wiggum decides to pay Tito Puente a visit in order to determine if he's the culprit. Tito Puente breaks out in song, proclaiming, "words won't last long, but an insulting song Burns will always carry with him. So, I settle my score on the Salsa floor with this vengeful Latin rhythm." Chief Wiggum happily and immediately agree that he's innocent. Though Puerto Rican, there's a reason why Tito Puente was frequently confused for Cuban: his music often has that Cuban duality of happiness in misery.

 

No other group is more representative of Cuban music than La Sonora Matancera. Though officially started in 1935, the group's history stretches to the early 1920s under other names and incarnations. The number of artists that have at one point or another played for La Sonora Matancera is too great to list. However, that list includes some of the biggest names in Cuban music: Perez "The King of Mambo" Prado, Bienvenido Granda, Daniel Santos, Celia Cruz, and Manuel "Caito" Diaz.

 

Celia Cruz, in particular, would continue producing hits until her death in 2003. In the near eight decades of the group's existence, the thousands of recording -- many lost -- deal with nearly every subject imaginable. Most songs deal with Afro-Cuban struggle, Santeria, lost love, betrayal, family difficulties, and, somehow, pure happiness. 

 

The two songs I feel most encapsulate La Sonora Matancera are "Obsesions" and "En El Mar." The former deals with the impossibility of love, the latter with pure joy simply for the sake of living near the sea.

 

They just don't make simple, moving recordings like this one anymore. The cigarette alone is enough to move you.

 

 

 

Kidnapped and Tortured by the Land of the Free

Khalid El-Masri, a German national, took a casual vacation to Macedonia in 2003. Though an innocent man, Khalid was confused for a high-level Al-Qaeda operative, and the CIA requested he be handed over. Macedonia never held an extradition hearing for Khalid, nor was he afforded any of the rights of due process guaranteed to a free man -- a European citizen no less.

After being apprehended by Macedonian authorities at the behest of their masters at the CIA, Khalid was flown to a CIA black site in Afghanistan. Khalid was beaten, sodomized, frightened, and confused. His CIA captors informed him that he was in a land where the rule of law did not apply. 

For many months, Khalid was subjected to sleep deprivation, sexual degradation, beatings, and other forms of "enhanced" interrogation. It took nearly 40 days of hunger strike for the CIA finally to come to terms with the fact that Khalid's passport was genuine; he had already lost more than one third of his body weight by that point.

It was the Wikileaks diplomatic cables that proved beyond a doubt that Khalid was innocent. A 2007 diplomatic cable reads: "It was a mistake to take El-Masri." The cables also show that the US pressured the Germans into avoiding charges against the CIA, lest bilateral relations be heavily damaged. I guess the Germans would rather an innocent man be tortured than risk an economic war by the US.

Nonetheless, on the 13th of December, 2012, a European court of human rights found the CIA guilty of "torture." It represented the first time that CIA practices have been defined not as "enhanced interrogation," but torture as fact. 

Let us process the fact that a European court just found the CIA guilty of torturing, kidnapping, and indefinitely detaining an innocent European citizen. It goes without stipulating that Obama has consistently worked to cover-up the crimes of the Bush administration. In many ways, Obama has continued many of his predecessor's policies and has entrenched them as law.

Obama just gave the CIA carte blance to continue carrying out its drone war in Pakistan for a year, even in the face of the "playbook" of death that he is crafting to continue his extrajudicial assassination program. 

We can joke about North Korea kidnapping a South Korean to make a Godzilla ripoff, but what can we joke about El-Masri?

Kidnapped and Tortured by the Land of the Free

Khalid El-Masri, a German national, took a casual vacation to Macedonia in 2003. Though an innocent man, Khalid was confused for a high-level Al-Qaeda operative, and the CIA requested he be handed over. Macedonia never held an extradition hearing for Khalid, nor was he afforded any of the rights of due process guaranteed to a free man -- a European citizen no less.

After being apprehended by Macedonian authorities at the behest of their masters at the CIA, Khalid was flown to a CIA black site in Afghanistan. Khalid was beaten, sodomized, frightened, and confused. His CIA captors informed him that he was in a land where the rule of law did not apply. 

For many months, Khalid was subjected to sleep deprivation, sexual degradation, beatings, and other forms of "enhanced" interrogation. It took nearly 40 days of hunger strike for the CIA finally to come to terms with the fact that Khalid's passport was genuine; he had already lost more than one third of his body weight by that point.

It was the Wikileaks diplomatic cables that proved beyond a doubt that Khalid was innocent. A 2007 diplomatic cable reads: "It was a mistake to take El-Masri." The cables also show that the US pressured the Germans into avoiding charges against the CIA, lest bilateral relations be heavily damaged. I guess the Germans would rather an innocent man be tortured than risk an economic war by the US.

Nonetheless, on the 13th of December, 2012, a European court of human rights found the CIA guilty of "torture." It represented the first time that CIA practices have been defined not as "enhanced interrogation," but torture as fact. 

Let us process the fact that a European court just found the CIA guilty of torturing, kidnapping, and indefinitely detaining an innocent European citizen. It goes without stipulating that Obama has consistently worked to cover-up the crimes of the Bush administration. In many ways, Obama has continued many of his predecessor's policies and has entrenched them as law.

Obama just gave the CIA carte blance to continue carrying out its drone war in Pakistan for a year, even in the face of the "playbook" of death that he is crafting to continue his extrajudicial assassination program. 

We can joke about North Korea kidnapping a South Korean to make a Godzilla ripoff, but what can we joke about El-Masri?

Yes, This is my Real Laugh

It was The Onion that so wisely quipped in one of their famous headlines: "Nation's Slicked-Back-Hair Men Rally Against Negative Hollywood Portrayal." Though satire, the simple truth is that Hollywood does play with our perceptions of what is evil. It's fair to say that I've never seen a good guy in a Hollywood movie who laughs like me. 

It was in 6th grade that I first began to realize that I was born for a life of meeting people who would make prejudicial assumptions about me. I was in Mr. Torres' classroom, and it was career day. We had a nice, liberal-minded white lady passionately talking about her work with drug addicts. As your typical ADHD 11-year-old, I was half-daydreaming, half-concentrating when the nice woman said, "some babies are born addicted to crack."

The transition from daydreaming to hearing her talk about crack-addicted babies was all I needed to start laughing. I laughed -- loudly -- and, yes, in a very "evil" way. 

"I don't think babies being born addicted to crack is funny," she angrily snapped back, making me laugh even more maniacally. Mr. Torres finally came around to intervening: "José, deja de reirte por favor." Damn, he busted out the Spanish; that's when I knew it was something serious.

My laugh before puberty was much more subdued and high-pitched that it currently is. It was in 6th grade when it started going the cartoon villain route. I think it's pretty fair to say that if I had been attending school in a suburb full of sheltered individuals instead of in the Bronx, people would have been extremely afraid of me. Nevermind that I usually daydream about funny things. 

When I daydream I sometimes smirk, and I often wake up in hilarious, unpredictable situations. It was when I got to Yale and started living around people too afraid to venture two blocks from where they live, that I began to understand the power of my laugh. 

I was at some frat party with my Taiwanese suitemate when a British girl from California started talking about the war in Iraq and all the suffering and dead. I was daydreaming, smiling, when she angrily interrupted me: "Why are you smiling at dead Iraqis!?"

Not only had she in an angry tone woken me from my daydream, but she had also put me in the spot, making me look evil. I hate being put on the spot, especially by an angry person I don't know. To say that it took everything in me not to smash my bottle across her pretty, freckled face would be an understatement. You can take the man out of the South Bronx, but that night I was forced to prove that you can also take the South Bronx out of the man. 

Some people are more discreet and polite when they make presumptions about your face. During my freshman year Environmental Economics 117 class, the professor  -- a newly-arrived Greek who always seemed to sweat profusely and nervously -- told me after class, over a month into the semester, "excuse me, you're always smiling and it keeps me from concentrating."

I was thereafter too nervous to attend the class, and decided to drop it before it appeared in my transcript.  At the time, I had no idea I was ADHD and couldn't even begin to deal with the complexity of the situation that the professor had placed me in.

I've since come to learn that making presumptions about people's emotions based on learned cultural facial expressions is tantamount to discrimination. In Cambodia, people laugh and smile in the face of tragedy. Tell a person in Cambodia that your father just died, and the nervousness of the situation will likely make them laugh. Friending Cambodian people has helped me dealt with the rage that used to overcome me when someone made prejudicial assumptions about my emotions. 

However, I'm certain that somewhere out there, some kid is being angrily placed on the spot for daydreaming and laughing out of turn. Unlike me, however, that kid may not be living in a place like the Bronx, and he is slowly becoming angrier and angrier because the adults don't understand him.