Buena Vista Social Club - Social Club

Social Club

The Buena Vista Social Club was a members-only club located in the populous Marianao neighborhood, in Cuba's capital Havana. Buena Vista means "good view" in Spanish. According to Juan Cruz, a former master of ceremonies at the Salon Rosado Benny Moré nightclub in Havana, the club was located "on Calle 41 between 46 and 48". When musicians Ry Cooder, Compay Segundo and a film crew attempted to identify the location of the club in the 1990s, local people could not agree on where it had stood.

The club was run along the lines of a Cabildo, a community cofradía (fraternity or guild) dating back to Spanish colonialism. Cabildos in Cuba developed into Sociedades de Color, social clubs whose membership was determined by ethnicity, at a time when slavery and racial discrimination against Afro-Cubans was institutionalized. Sociedades de Negros (Black Societies) existed throughout Cuba, and Havana boasted a number of closely linked organizations including the Marianao Social Club, Union Fraternal, Club Atenas—whose members included doctors and engineers—and the Buena Vista Social Club itself.

According to American guitarist Ry Cooder,

Society in Cuba and in the Caribbean including New Orleans, as far as I know, was organized around these fraternal social clubs. There were clubs of cigar wrappers, clubs for baseball players and they'd play sports and cards—whatever it is they did in their club—and they had mascots, like dogs. At the Buena Vista Social Club, musicians went there to hang out with each other, like they used to do at musicians' unions in the U.S., and they'd have dances and activities.

Prominent musicians that performed at the club during the 1930s and 40s include bassist Cachao López and bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez. Rodríguez's pianist Rubén González, who played piano on the 1990s recordings, described the 1940s as "an era of real musical life in Cuba, where there was very little money to earn, but everyone played because they really wanted to". The era saw the birth of the jazz influenced mambo, the charanga, and dance forms such as the pachanga and the cha-cha-cha, as well as the continued development of traditional Afro-Cuban musical styles such as rumba and son, the latter transformed with the use of additional instruments by Arsenio Rodríguez to become son montuno. Son, described as "the bedrock of Cuban music", has shaped much of twentieth-century Latin music, and had a strong impact on popular music, not only in Latin America, but also in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.