Celia Cruz

Cuban-born American jazz singer

• Born: October 21, 1924
• Birthplace: Havana, Cuba
• Died: July 16, 2003
• Place of death: Fort Lee, New Jersey

Cruz had a flamboyant stage presence and a supple, powerful vocal style characterized by a raspy sensuality and a flair for jazzy improvisation. In a forty-year career largely centered on her embrace of the percussive Afro-Cuban music known as salsa, she helped engender the international popularity of contemporary Latin music, inspiring a generation of young Latino singers who saw in Cruz’s passionate celebration of her Latina identity a model of ethnic pride, uncompromising integrity, and prodigious artistic achievement.

Early Life

Celia Cruz was born amid the narrow streets and row houses of the impoverished barrios outside Havana, Cuba, into a family with fourteen children, a mix of cousins as well as brothers and sisters. As a young child Cruz showed remarkable musical gifts. Neighbors listened as the girl would sing beautifully cadenced lullabies to the younger children. Indeed, with her family’s encouragement, Cruz entered and won talent contests sponsored by churches and radio stations throughout Havana. When she was still a teenager, she performed in small cabarets, escorted by her aunt and often joined on stage by some of her cousins. However, it was Cruz, with her striking stage presence, her natural vocal phrasing, and her rich tonality, who caught the audience’s attention. She was a natural on stage; she thrived on the dynamic energy of performance.

Cruz’s father, however, was cautious. With Old World assumptions about the appropriate place of women, and given the male-dominated world of popular (that is, big band) vocal music in Cuba at the time, he advised his daughter to take her considerable musical gifts and channel them into an appropriate (and far more practical) career: that of a music teacher. Cruz attended a local teachers' college but soon dropped out, finding that her studies interfered with what was becoming a hectic schedule of performances. To help temper her father’s reservations, however, she then enrolled at the National Conservatory of Music in Havana until a music professor, entranced by his student’s natural full-throated vocal abilities, encouraged her to pursue performance, telling her that a successful singer could make in one night what a schoolteacher in Cuba would make in a year. Cruz left the conservatory in 1948 determined to succeed in show business; later that year, she cut her first recordings in a small studio in Venezuela.

Life’s Work

Quickly establishing a reputation in Havana as a charismatic performer, Cruz was invited to join La Sonora Matancera, Cuba’s premier touring big band, when its lead singer left unexpectedly to return to Puerto Rico. Although objections were raised about giving such an opportunity to a relative newcomer untutored in the styling of big band vocalizing, Cruz quickly found acceptance, and over the next fifteen years she toured with the orchestra throughout Cuba and Latin America. Indeed, during the 1950s, she emerged as the defining entertainer most associated with the glitz and glamour of the Batista era, with its gaudy, swanky nightclubs and its elegant (and notorious) nightlife. Cruz became known for her high-energy delivery and her raw vocal power as well as for her outrageous stage outfits (gold lamé glitter suits and luxurious gowns; long, painted fingernails; and extravagantly colored wigs) and her trademark exclamation, ¡Azúcar! (sugar), as she strode on stage.

In the wake of Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in 1960, Cruz understood, with great anxiety, the implications of the new regime. During a tour of Mexico in 1961, she flew to the United States and petitioned to become a US citizen, vowing not to return to Cuba until Castro had fallen, which made her a powerful symbol of political freedom for the growing Cuban American enclave in southern Florida. She established herself in New York and over the next ten years produced a significant body of recordings (including eight albums with legendary bandleader Tito Puente Sr.) that were critically well received but that enjoyed only modest success (it was an era dominated by rock and roll and folk music).

In the early 1970s, Cruz’s move into mainstream popularity began with her electrifying Carnegie Hall performance in Hommy, a Latin version of the Who’s rock opera Tommy. With new interest in her powerhouse vocal style, she began a collaboration with bandleader and composer Johnny Pacheco that pioneered an audacious hybrid style of percussive dance music that drew on jazz, pan-African, and Caribbean rhythms and came to be called salsa, from the lyrics of an obscure Cuban dance radio hit of the 1940s. Pacheco was certain Cruz had the voice that could stand against the sonic assault of the salsa sound. He was right.

The international popularity of salsa profoundly registered in the emerging generation of younger Latin singers who, as part of the ethnic pride movements of the 1970s, saw in the saucy rhythms of the tropical dance an unabashed celebration of Caribbean identity. Cruz’s signature singing style, her natural sense of swing, her impeccable phrasing, and her inimitable gift for improvisational scatting all gave her the range and command to redefine a kind of music that had been largely conceived as instrumental. As part of the Pacheco’s Fania Records label and his all-star touring company, the Fania All Stars, Cruz emerged as one of the most recognized voices in the world.

Even as her celebrity grew, Cruz never indulged in the “divaesque” pursuit of fame. She kept her private life, on the whole conservative and unassuming, separate from her stage persona. Even as the Communist regimes across Europe fell and Castro remained entrenched, and despite her own disdain for the Communist rule in her native land, she never used her celebrity as a political soapbox. Her dedication was supremely to her audience she saw her music as a way to spread happiness, even if it lasted only until the house lights came up.

In many ways, despite being past sixty years of age, Cruz found her widest popular and critical acclaim in the late 1980s: in relentless touring; a steady production of first-rate, million-selling recordings; and even appearances in films, most notably in 1992’s The Mambo Kings. She was widely credited as inspiring emerging Latin artists including Gloria Estefan, Jennifer Lopez, Selena, and Marc Anthony. Cruz won the first of her seven Grammy Awards in 1989; that same year, she received an honorary doctorate in music from Yale; in 1994, she was awarded the National Medal of the Arts from President Bill Clinton; and in 2001, she was given the Smithsonian Lifetime Achievement Award.

In late 2002, Cruz took a hiatus to have surgery on a knee injured as a result of her grueling concert schedule during her hospitalization, however, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. Cruz died six months later, on July 16, 2003, during a surgical procedure to remove the brain tumor. The memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral turned into a massive celebration of a woman who, in death, had been elevated to iconic status for her music and for her unflagging devotion to her Latin roots (she was buried with a handful of Cuban soil).

Significance

Musically, Cruz reimagined the instrumental foundations of salsa music to reshape its sound with her unique vocal styling: purring, growling, and scatting with full-throated ferocious intensity across a two-octave range. Her recordings from the mid-1970s to her death have become landmark expressions of the resurgence of interest in tropical dance genres. In addition, Cruz stands as one of the most durable entertainers of the post–World War II era in a field and a musical style that demands maximum stage energy and requires peak performances in take after take in studio recordings.

Cruz maintained the integrity and passion of her artistry for more than five decades; however, her greatest legacy is perhaps her ethnic pride. Despite becoming a US citizen and quite fluent in English, Cruz never pursued crossover success in English and the potentially far more lucrative English-language recording market; she recorded only in Spanish. That fact, along with her uncompromising criticism of the Castro regime, made her a potent and much-loved figure in twentieth-century Latin culture.

After her death, Cruz's legacy was honored by the US government and several museums. The National Park Service published a profile of her. One of her glittery stage garments was displayed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, and about forty others were preserved by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; still others were donated to a planned American Latino Museum. In the early 2020s, the US Mint designed a commemorative US quarter featuring Cruz in performance, making her the fourteenth American woman and the first Afro-Latina so honored.

Bibliography

Cruz, Celia. Celia: My Life. HarperCollins/Rayo, 2004.

Kent, Mary. Salsa Talks: A Musical Heritage. Digital Domain, 2005.

Roberts, John Storm. The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Rodriguez-Duarte, Alexis. Presenting Celia Cruz. Clarkson, Potter, 2004.

Sublette, Ned. Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. Chicago Review Press, 2002.

Vilchez, Anagilmara. “Celia Cruz, First Afro Latina to Be on a U.S. Quarter Is Remembered.” NBC News, 22 Sept. 2023, www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/first-afro-latina-us-quarter-celia-cruz-hispanic-heritage-legacy-rcna101438. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023. ‌