SHE MORE THAN MADE UP FOR IT (via Glenn Dryfoos):

An untold chapter in the life of Celia Cruz (CAROL ROSENBERG, 7/25/04, Miami Herald)

The year was 1955, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, and Celia Cruz, 29, was a star on the stage and airwaves with Cuba's celebrated Sonora Matancera band. And, at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, she was banned from visiting the United States as a suspected communist.

In fact, the singer known affectionately as Celia to generations of Cuban exiles was at least twice refused an artist's visa to visit America in the 1950s, according to a recently declassified U.S. document that described her as a ``well-known communist singer and stage star.''

It was an era before Fidel Castro was in power, a time when McCarthyism and the Red scare bred a Hollywood blacklist. The U.S. Congress was consumed by communism, and federal agents were hunting communists, real and imagined, in government and show business.

The Herald discovered the previously unknown chapter of Cruz's life, the nearly decadelong struggle to clear her name, after receiving her once-classified FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act.

Her biographies do not mention the episode, and the people tending to her estate, including her husband of 41 years, said she never spoke of it.

''She never told me about that. She never talked about politics,'' said her widower Pedro Knight. The alleged activities predate their relationship, to a time in her teens and 20s.

''It would've been a hard thing because, especially afterward, she was identified so much as a symbol of anti-Castroism,'' said Alejandro de la Fuente, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in race relations in Cuba.

Back then, ''it was not unusual at all for artists and intellectuals to have some sort of contact with the Communist Party,'' he said. ``It was a progressive, liberal force at the time. There was nothing to be ashamed of at the time. That changed in the late 1940s, after the end of World War II.'' [...]

[T]hroughout her life, Cruz kept that chapter secret. Even as late as 1961, six months after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, Cruz was aware of her record. In Mexico with Sonora Matancera, she sought a U.S. visa to play the Hollywood Palladium.

''SUBJECT EXPRESSED DESIRE CLEAR NAME,'' said a confidential Oct. 11, 1961, telegram from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. ``PLEASE FORWARD ANY DEROGATORY INFORMATION DEPARTMENT MAY HAVE SO EMBASSY CAN INITIATE DEFECTOR STATUS ACTION.''

A security source, cited by the embassy, ``BELIEVES SUBJECT COMPLETELY ANTI-COMMUNIST AND ENDORSES REQUEST.''

In exile, Cruz settled in the New York City area -- never moving to politically volatile Miami. She married her Sonora trumpeter, Knight, and reinvented herself from La Guarachera de Cuba to The Queen of Salsa, symbolizing her wider Latino appeal.

She recorded and toured relentlessly. She appeared in American films and Mexican soap operas, once as a santera, and for 20 years made an annual pilgrimage to Miami to sing on a Spanish-language TV telethon for the League Against Cancer, the disease that killed her last year.

No one should be judged by the political beliefs they hold whenm they';re young and stupid, but it's not okay to have become or remained a Communist after the show trials and unacceptable after the Hitler/Stalin pact.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 26, 2004 10:29 AM