E-Mail This Article to a Friend Worldly winds Egrem opens the vaults on 40 years of Cuban music BY JOSH KUN

In 1954, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a sarcastic little book he called A Universal History of Infamy (E.P. Dutton). Borges always liked dates, whether they were real or not, so even his "universal" history of infamy started somewhere: 1517, the year Spanish missionary Bartolome de la Casas gave laboring Caribbean Indians a rest by replacing them with Africans. What resulted was pretty much the entire future of the Americas, and Borges listed some of his fave offspring: "W.C. Handy’s blues," "the entrance of the verb ‘to lynch’ in the 13th edition of the dictionary of the Spanish academy," "the deplorable Cuban rumba ‘The Peanut Vendor,’ " and just about anything else born of shackled African feet hitting Indian-blessed soil.

Now we can add to Borges’s list Havana Night Club, the Cuban stage show that starts in Africa and ends at the Stardust in Las Vegas — all on Siegfried and Roy’s promotional dime. Conceived by German producer Nicole Durr after a trip to Cuba in 1997, Havana Night Club is billed as "a tropical fiesta" that celebrates the "legendary nightlife of Havana." When it came to Vegas at the beginning of the year, the show’s pre-revolution nostalgia featured a troupe of post-revolution Cuban dancers who didn’t waste any time choosing their era. They defected just as the show went up, bringing it almost as much press as Roy’s tiger tangle and earning it sensationalist bragging rights ("the show Cuba doesn’t want you to see"). Expect a serious ovation when it reaches South Florida this spring.

It’s a miracle the Vegas Cubans even got here to defect. Only three months earlier, the Bush administration had blocked Cuban academics from attending a Latin American studies conference in Vegas, and so many Cuban musicians have been denied travel visas in the past few years that it’s becoming part of what it means to be a Cuban musician. So we’re stuck with what the embargo allows, like the Buena Vista Social Club franchise — album after album of gorgeous old-timer son and bolero numbers that have hoodwinked the Starbucks intelligentsia into thinking they now hold PhD’s in Cuban musicology.

But to hear Ned Sublette tell it in his meticulous 2004 manifesto Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago Review Press), the embargo is actually robbing us of our own musical history. For Sublette, there is no such thing as American music, or any music for that matter, without Cuba. His "history of music from a Cuban point of view" turns out to be a Borges-like adventure through plenty of transatlantic infamy but also unprecedented global syncretism. Sublette calls it "the Other Great Tradition," the one that has given the US the music it thinks it invented. ("Louie Louie" is a cha-cha.)

Sublette doesn’t need Vegas or even Havana. He’s got the Iberian Peninsula and the whole fifth century BC. He’s got the Visigoths and Muslim Spain. His book is like none other out there — a chronicle as much of the music itself as of the histories embedded in the sounds: histories of conquest, slavery, Cuban nation building, Chinese immigration, Meyer Lansky, and Cuban socialism. At times, it becomes the book’s burden: every vocalist, every genre, every rhythm feels too important not to write down and seek out. Reading about Cuban music becomes an exercise in learning just how much you don’t know about the air you breathe.

Of course, Sublette isn’t inventing any of this. He’s translating what the music’s always known. While you read his book, put on El gran tesoro de la música cubana (Egrem), an eight-CD box set released late last year after Cuba’s national recording company, Egrem, finally opened its vaults to capitalist ears in honor of its 40th anniversary. The set’s nearly 200 tracks start not with the first drum but with some of the first recordings made by the Cuban label Panart in the ’50s. From there, it’s on to endless heaps of classic son, rumba, charanga, bolero, and timba played by a who’s who of giants including Beny More, Irakere, Arsenio Rodríguez, and Bebo Valdés.

Yet more than once a disc, the audio archive of Cuba sounds nothing like what you’d expect. We hear Farah Maria’s cloud-surfing angel rock, Amado Bonela Guapacha’s Italiano piano scatting, Ajo y Su Organo Oriental’s analog organ funk, and even Moneda Dura’s ’80s synth rock. The combination of the embargo, our visa policies, and our Buena Vista blinders has made Cuba synonymous with antique, rootsy tradition. The Egrem box unravels a Cuba driven by artistic innovation and risky craft. It’s what Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier once described as the sound of Cuba "opening its arms to the great winds of the world." Instead of letting themselves be upstaged by Vegas, both governments would be wise to remember what those great worldly winds sound like.