AZÚCAR! Famous across the globe, many in Cuba never got to see her in person or hear her voice on the radio as the revolution banned her music from the airwaves around 1962. According to her biography Celia: Mi Vida (2004), she was living and performing in Mexico and the US as a member of Sonora Matancera when her mother died in 1963.

When she tried to return to Cuba to bury her mother, Fidel Castro denied her re-entry. She was never allowed to return to Cuba for the rest of her life.

The Cuban revolution may claim to have supported artists, but many were banned, censored, imprisoned, sentenced to labor camps and banished to exile. Celia