Ibrahim Ferrer

Ibrahim Ferrer rose to worldwide renown late in life after the Grammy-winning Buena Vista Social Club album and its widely praised documentary companion. Born on February 20, 1927, he entered the world in the village of San Luis when his mother went into labor at a local dance. Orphaned by age twelve, he scraped by peddling newspapers and produce on the streets. Professional singing began at fourteen when he joined his cousin’s group Los Jovenes del Son; subsequent stints took him through Conjunto Sorpresa, Maravilla de Beltrán, Beny Moré, and Electo Rosell’s jazz ensemble La Orquesta Chepín Chovén, the last of which yielded the 1955 regional hit “El Platanal de Bartolo.” He also worked with Pacho Alonso, whose Santiago-based Los Bocucos relocated to Havana in 1959 after the Cuban Revolution; Ferrer remained with Alonso intermittently for more than thirty years, excelling in the brisk guarachas and sones while also delivering boleros with rare sensitivity to space and silence.

The Revolution’s opening months raised hopes of fresh prospects and wider musical reach. In 1962 Los Bocucos toured Europe at the Communist Party’s invitation, and during a Moscow stop Ferrer met Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev. Days afterward the Cuban Missile Crisis left the musicians stranded in the Soviet capital until the blockade ended. Returning to a country gripped by hardship, Ferrer and his wife Carida settled with their eleven children in the impoverished Havana district of Los Stiltos, where he resumed performing yet still took odd jobs to sustain the household. Barred from American tourism, Cuba offered scant earnings from music, yet Ferrer later observed a benefit: “The music got better after the Revolution because we weren’t playing for tourists so much,” he once said. “There was a greater identification between the musicians and the audience, which was Cuban.” He stepped away from the stage after a 1991 Chilean tour with Los Bocucos and lived on a modest state pension, supplementing it by shining shoes.

Discussions between Cuban musician Juan de Marcos González and American guitarist Ry Cooder, long drawn to Latin-American sounds, sparked the Buena Vista Social Club project. Cooder arrived in Cuba in 1996 seeking further collaborators, and González steered him toward Ferrer. Captivated by the sixty-nine-year-old vocalist, Cooder persuaded him to return to recording alongside guitarist Compay Segundo, then eighty-nine, and pianist Rubén González, then seventy-seven. The resulting 1997 album sold more than four million copies and elevated its participants to global celebrity; its cover showed Ferrer strolling Havana streets in the flat golfer’s cap that became his signature. Filmmaker Wim Wenders accompanied Cooder back to the city for a 1999 documentary also titled Buena Vista Social Club, in which the poised and understated Ferrer took center stage and helped propel sales of his 1999 solo debut, self-titled and produced by Cooder, which approached two million copies. A successor album, Buenos Hermanos, followed in 2003. Ferrer died of multiple organ failure in Havana on August 6, 2005, shortly after completing a European tour.