Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club Begins Farewell Tour

HAVANA TIMES — The legendary Cuban band Buena Vista Social Club will begin its long farewell tour on June 25 in Europe with a concert in Prague. The tour will take the group to several countries including Spain, the United States and in South America.

The “Farewell Tour” will begin at the Congress Palace in the Czech capital and is set to close within 16 months with a final concert in Havana, reported dpa news.

The long pilgrimage will include stops at the festival La Mar de Musicas in Cartagena, Spain (July 22) and at London’s Royal Albert Hall (April 5, 2015), detailed the official Granma newspaper.

Other venues are in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Mexico.

The tour, the last of the band that rose to fame in the 90s, including a documentary of the same name by German director Wim Wenders, will close with a concert at the iconic Karl Marx Theater in Havana, scheduled for October 2015.

After the tour the orchestra will no longer play together as “each of the musicians who have been part of it continue to perform with their respective solo projects,” notes band director Jesus “Aguaje” Ramos.

The Buena Vista Social Club was originally a famous dance and music club in the densely populated Havana neighborhood of Buena Vista, in the district of Marianao. The local was closed after the 1959 revolution.

Reborn nearly a half a century later, the orchestra plays different types of Cuban music such as son, bolero, salsa and danzon. The band was unveiled in 1996 with a recording in Havana with US guitarist Ry Cooder with outstanding Cuban musicians Compay Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer, now deceased, and singer Omara Portuondo.

A resounding performance at Carnegie Hall in New York and earned the Buena Vista Social Club a Grammy in 1998, and Wim Wenders’ documentary 1999 then catapulted it to world fame.