But “long live Celia, always,” added the Cuban musician.
MIAMI, United States. ― The Cuban musician Alain Pérez described this Tuesday as “pitiful” the official veto of the tributes for the centenary of Celia Cruz and considered that cultural institutions make a “mistake” by trying to “blind” and “limit” the meaning of the Queen of Salsa. as stated to the EFE agency after a mass celebrated in the capital in memory of the singer.
“It’s unfortunate. Very personally I think that institutions at this point in the world make a mistake of trying to blind and limit Celia’s meaning,” said the musician. “Long live Celia, always,” he added, alluding to the regime’s pressure to prevent public events in honor of the Guarachera of Cuba.
The religious ceremony was, according to EFE, the only public event held in Cuba for the centenary of Cruz’s birth, amid official silence. According to the records of CubaNetit would be the second mass dedicated to the great interpreter in Cuba. The first date from 2016 and was celebrated in the same church (Parish of Our Lady of Charity of Cobre) for the singer’s 91st birthday.
At the end of last week, the Programming Subdirectorate of the National Center for Popular Music, attached to the Ministry of Culture (MINCULT), censored a gala organized by the theater group El Público to celebrate the centenary of the Queen of Salsa, at the Fábrica de Arte Cubano (FAC).
“The Programming Subdirectorate of the National Center for Popular Music informs (…) that the presentation of the theater group El Público, scheduled for this Sunday the 19th, at 8:30 pm, in Hall 3 of Fábrica de Arte Cubano, will not take place,” the entity reported on Facebook.
However, the censorship of the gala was denounced this Sunday with a discreet – but symbolic – action at the FAC headquarters. The musicographer Rosa Marquetti, author of the book Celia in Cuba, noted on Facebook: “At the time when the CENSORED play CELIA should have gone on stage, at the El Público theater… An hour of absolute silence and an illuminated chair. Then, a DJ playing music by the Queen, the Guarachera of Cuba, the Queen of Salsa, the most universal Cuban. #CeliaVive No to censorship! Out with the censors!
Indeed, CubaNet confirmed that, for an hour, a chair remained on the illuminated stage, in the midst of the most absolute silence, which gave way to the reproduction of the most emblematic songs of the Guarachera of Cuba, which continue to be silenced on the island’s radio and television.
The FAC itself also reported on the completion of the performance: “A work of art that was not, an armchair, silence and the art of resistance… Celia lives. October 20, 2025. National Culture Day”, the institution wrote on its Instagram profile.
Alain Pérez, multi-instrumentalist and winner of a Latin Grammy in 2021, worked with Celia Cruz in the United States. Born in 1977 in Manaca Iznaga (Sancti Spíritus), he is recognized as one of the most versatile Cuban musicians of his generation and has collaborated, among others, with Irakere, Issac Delgado, Celia Cruz herself and Paco de Lucía, with whom he participated in the project good things.
In 2021, the Latin Recording Academy credited the Latin Grammy to Best Traditional Tropical Album by Cha Cha Chá: Homage to the Traditionala project with Issac Delgado and the Aragón Orchestra. Besides, has been nominated for the Latin Grammy four times throughout his career.
Celia Cruz, the most successful Cuban singer of all time, developed most of her career in the United States, the country where she lived in exile, from the early years of the 1960s until 2003, when she died. On Cuban (state) radio and television, his music is still censored. Even on her centenary, the Government of the Island did not allow any tribute to what is considered, unanimously throughout the world, the Queen of Salsa.
