Born in Cuba in 1921, pianist Francisco Emilio Flynn Rodriguez experienced vision impairment from forceps used during his delivery, which progressed to complete blindness by his late teens. He took first place in an amateur contest at age 13, prompting his entry into professional music soon afterward as a member of a danzon orchestra that performed a ballroom genre preceding both the mambo and mambo. He further developed his abilities by attending a specialized institution operated by Cuba's National Association For the Blind, the same body he would later lead as president from 1978 to 1981.
During the 1940s he rejoined musical performance with the band Loquibambia and took part in originating and promoting filin, a form that fused traditional Cuban bolero with U.S. jazz. Notwithstanding his recognition, he remained without funds and supplemented his income by placing cigars with merchants on consignment; his circumstances at one stage left him traversing the streets of Havana without a cane. In the 1950s he became a founding participant in the Club Cubano de Jazz, an ensemble whose descargas, or jam sessions, raised resources to bring jazz colleagues from the United States. By the close of the decade he directed the Quinteto Instrumental de Musica Moderna, a unit devoted exclusively to Latin jazz. His interests nevertheless reached further, leading him to undertake classical studies at that time. Fellow musician and friend Armando Romeu Gonzalez mastered braille in order to help Flynn prepare the first transcriptions of one of his most cherished classical composers, Ernesto Lecuona. Flynn additionally supported other blind musicians by devising a system of music notation that countered their natural tendency to learn by ear.
Only in 1998 did he make his U.S. stage debut, appearing in the Jazz at Lincoln Center program, and he also released several solo albums around that period. By the early years of the twenty-first century he had settled in Los Angeles and conducted a spring series of classes at the Ensemble of Cal State. On August 23, 2001, he died of a heart attack in Havana, Cuba, at the age of eighty.
