Mitsukko
Prof. Caban, Ruben
MUL2380 MDC Summer 2015

Azucar! Celia Cruz was one of the most famous Cuban salsa singers. She was nicknamed the Queen of Salsa, with more than thirty-six albums that where recorded with other singers in the Latin music industry. Celia worked as a singer for more than forty years, during that time she became well known for her work, great personality, and her emotional way of singing. During her performances something that made her stand out was her ability to improvise lyrics most known as a Sonera. Her success made her an inspiration for more than six decades to the Latin community as well as the rest of the world.

Celia was one of 14 children born on October 21, 1925, in the Santo Suarez a neighborhood in Havana, Cuba (A&E). Her singing talent started when she was young but instead of pursuing a career in singing, she studied to be a teacher (Marceles). Her father told her that he did not believe that singing was a profession for a woman, not putting any thought into what her father said she still went after what she taught right, a career in singing after the strong encouragement coming from her mother, teacher and aunt. Celia began singing in talent shows and doing recordings for radio stations, but neither were sold for money she did it recreationally. Her first recordings were made in 1978 in Venezuela with the Turpial label (A&E). She sang these with the Leonard Melody and Alfonso Larrain orchestras (Marceles).

Later In 1950, she was called in to be the lead singer of a Cuban band, La Sonara Matancera. At first, the public did not like her because she was black, and as we know a few years back blacks where very discriminated in the music industry or any kind of industry. Eventually after all her hard work, and the fact that the orchestra stood by her, the public accepted her and she became famous all throughout Cuba. Celia was a member of La Sonora for fifteen years (Angelou).

On July 15, 1960 she decided to migrate to the United States to chase her singing dream and pursue her career (A&E). After becoming a citizen in 1961 which only took her a year, the Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro was furious and prevented Celia from returning to Cuba, even after her parent’s death. She made a promise to herself to never return to Cuba until the communism was over with. Although she had made numerous recordings with La Sonora Mantancera, she didn’t have much success in the United States in the 1960s. Celia spoke English very well, but she refused to record in the language. Younger Latin Americans at the time were amazed with rock-and-roll, both the Latin and Non-Latino. Knowing that during that time the most famous singer was Elvis Presley.

Celia began to improve when she combined her talents with those of the musicians and bandleaders who were creating the new music called salsa, among them Tito Puente the very famous timbales player, Johnny Pacheco and Willie Colón. (Marceles) Celia was able to control her audience so well and not only because of her very flamboyant, stage-filling attire, but also because of her ability to engage them in call and response patterns (Angelou). Celia was any music promoter’s dream because of the value and interest she brought to every contract. Celia was out of the ordinary she had a unique orchestra sound, staging, scenery, and props, backup choruses, and a lot of color and special effects. Celia was very fond of sunglasses. They had to be prescriptions and she ordered them in exaggerated sizes and adorned with small, bright-colored stones to make them more fun and crazy looking. Wigs were the second most important prop for Celia in the creation of her image. (Angelou) Besides Queen of Salsa, she could also be considered the Queen of Wigs. She had them in every color even though she preferred blond or silver let me not say every style, to cover her curly hair. Wigs were one of her stage trademarks.

From the beginning of her singing career, Celia was a permanent guest at Cuban radio stations which large crowds enjoyed, not only on the island but in the whole Caribbean area. In Cuba, as well as in Latin America, musical programs and soap operas were really popular. The radio provided practically the only entertainment beside movies, which a lot of people seemed to loved. Celia’s first experience as an actress came to her through her friendship with Maria Teresa Coalla, who created a character especially for Celia in a soap opera broadcasted by Radio Progreso in the 50’s. (Angelou). Celia was afraid of making a fool out of herself, but her friends and colleagues at the radio station encouraged her to take this new challenge. There was a rival station who also had a soap opera called Divorciadas, with the highest rating but after Celia joined, it over passed the competition. Let’s just say that the best actress award that year went to Celia. (Marceles) Another of Celia's performance trademarks is to shout of "Azucar!” She explained its 1970s origins in a 2000 Billboard interview. (Angelou) "I was having dinner at a restaurant in Miami, and when the waiter offered me coffee, he asked me if I took it with or without sugar. I said, 'Chico, you're Cuban. How can you even ask that? With sugar!' And that evening during my show ... I told the audience the story and they laughed. And one day, instead of telling the story, I simply walked down the stairs and shouted 'Azucar!' (Angelou)

Celia continued a full schedule of concerts and recordings throughout the 1980s and beyond. (Marceles) She received a Grammy award for the album Ritmo en el corazón recorded with conga player Ray Barretto, in 1990. (Angelou) Still a major star in her own right, Celia became an inspiration for numerous younger performers such as Gloria Estefan in the 1990s; (Angelou) her audience hardly aged along with her. "We've never had to attract these kids," she told Time. "They come by themselves. Rock is a strong influence on them, but they still want to know about their roots." (Angelou)

Celia Cruz has been and remains a loved figure, an icon of the Latin culture. There were three great loves in Celia’s life, Pedro Knight, music and su tierra Cuba. Celia’s love life was a secret well kept by those close to her as well as anything that happened in her life, she liked to keep things as private as she could, after all it was her life. How Celia and Pedro fell in love is a modern day fairy tale. There was an affection that grew out of friendship, developing slowly until eventually it led them to get married (Angelou). As Pedro tells it, “We got to know each other while working with the Sonora, and became fast friends. There is no way to say when our romance started. Celia was a sensible, reliable young woman, and in time our friendship turned to love. Neither of us thought that we were going to end up getting married one day, but that’s what happened” (Angelou).When Celia and Pedro Knight met, he was still married to his first wife, with whom he had six children. A year after Celia joined the Sonora, in 1950, Pedro obtained his divorce. They were married on Saturday, July 14, 1962. By then Celia was already thirty six and Pedro thirty nine. Since Celia was still mourning over the death of her mother, Ollita, there was no party or honeymoon. Their marriage was a few years after her mother’s death. She could not share her marriage with her family in Cuba because the Cuban government did not allow her to reenter her country. So Pedro according to Celia replaced both her mother and her father. (Brown)

Celia was detected with cancer in the breast, the same illness that killed her mother. In August, at the Hackensack Hospital in New Jersey, Celia underwent surgery to remove her left breast, while pedro was also undergoing colon surgery. In September she returned to the hospital for a second operation. She was later diagnosed with a brain tumor. Despite how optimism she was and full of energy, she could not help feeling depressed when the results of the pathological tests came in which confirmed that the excised tumor was malignant. Later, three additional tumors were detected in her brain which doctors were unable to operate. Which lead Celia to established a nonprofit organization devoted to benefitting the musical education of young Hispanics, and raising funds for the fight against cancer that where officially created On February14, 2003, called the Fundación Celia Cruz. (Angelou)

On Monday July 14 was her forty-first wedding anniversary. Pedro knelt beside her and whispered, “Happy anniversary, my love.” (Angelou) A tear ran down Celia’s cheek, but she said nothing. On Wednesday morning, it appeared that the battle had been lost. Surrounding her was her loved ones Pedro Knight, Cuqui Pacheco, her manager and adopted son, Omer Pardillo-Cid, her niece, Linda Bécquer-Dakota, her sister Gladys, her friends Luis and Leticia Falcón, and two nurses Celia Cruz, the legendary singer of Afro-Cuban rhythms, la Guarachera de Cuba and Queen of Salsa died at 4:55 in the afternoon. Her marvelous voice is still with us through her recordings and her luminous call to joy, Azúcar! She will be with us forever. She was a very kind person that gave back hope and inspired many singers, as well as others of different industries. Celia demonstrated to the world that anything you set your mind to be possible with effort and drive.

Works Cited
A&E. Biography.com. n.d. 15 july 2015 <http://www.biography.com/people/celia-cruz-40369>.
Angelou, Celia Cruz with Ana Cristian Reayundo and foreword by Maya. Celia My Life An Autobiography . New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2004 .
Brown, Monica. My Name is Celia: The life of Celia Cruz. 2004.
Marceles, Eduardo. The Bibliography of Celia Cruz. New York: Reed Press, 1947.