by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 07-20-2003



The Queen of Salsa never made it home.

In an odyssey that stretched across more than 40 years, Celia Cruz heard the roar of crowds from New York to Tokyo, from Mexico City to Paris. She came before them in celebration of those things that always go beyond the dictates of commissars of left or right: music, dance, the words of flirtation and the hope that someone across a room on a lonesome Saturday night might actually love you back.

The audiences did not always understand the words, but they always understood what Celia Cruz was saying. And they roared: for her, and for what she was telling them. That is, they roared for life.

Sometimes she was a blond. Sometimes her hair was lavender. Or a dazzling crimson.

The color was part of the message, saying that even in deepest solitude, you can try something new, even as a sly joke, un chiste. Always she wore towering, backless high heels, never faltering as she took over a stage. They were part of the message, too, saying that even in a woman's late years, my sweet, there could be an audacious sexuality. You could have the life you want to have, and the obstacles would not matter. The audiences listened. And they roared. And she would shout the one word that was her benediction: "Azucar!"

The word for sugar. The word for the product of her lost Cuba. The word that stood for sweetness. For memory. For defiance. "Azucar!" Celia Cruz shouted to Americans and Mexicans and Spaniards and the French. And the hippest shouted back: "Azucar!" But Celia never did make it back to the home place, to the island that formed her, to the place of azucar.

In the summer of 1960, with Fidel Castro high in power in Havana, Celia Cruz made a trip to Mexico City with the great Cuban band Sonora Matancera. Neither she nor the band ever went back. She made her way to Miami and then to New York, settling in New Jersey with her new husband, trumpet player Pedro Knight. There were no palm trees, no pulsing life in the streets of the old barrios. Yes, she was free. But she also had entered the chillier country of exile.

In that experience, Celia Cruz was not alone. The wretched 20th century produced too many exiles. After 1933, they fled the Nazis. After 1939, they left Spain to avoid capture by Francisco Franco's secret police. They left before Stalin's torturers could carry them to Lubyanka prison. They fled Warsaw and Prague. Later, they left on boats from Vietnam and Cambodia.

Exiles were not the same as immigrants. They didn't want new lives. Every exile thinks refuge is temporary. German writers such as Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht waited out Adolf Hitler in California, then headed home. A dwindling number of exiled Spanish Republicans went home after Franco died. Alexander Solzhenitsyn went home to the Russia that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the early years, Celia Cruz, like hundreds of thousands of other Cubans who had left, thought she would be gone for a few years and then return.

"I never thought I'd still be here now," she told me one night in the 1970s, backstage at a huge concert by the Fania All-Stars at Madison Square Garden. She shrugged, and smiled sadly. "Imagine. He's still there, and I'm still here."

She meant Castro, of course, and her sadness came from her understanding that Castro would be around perhaps for the rest of her life. She might never walk again through the Havana barrio of Santa Juarez, where she was born Oct. 21, 1925. She might never drink tiny cups of coffee in street corner bars, nor would she walk again at dusk along the seaside promenade called the Malecon when the Caribbean sky is gigantic with color.

"I miss many things," she said that night in New York. "I'll always miss them. But I know that someday I'll see them again. That helps me live."

Most exiles believe the separation from the home place will end. Uncountable Irishmen died in New York believing in final liberation from the British. Many diaspora Jews were certain that they, or at least their children, would make it back to Jerusalem, as early, perhaps, as next year. Today, a similar longing is felt by many Palestinians.

Once, in Tangiers, I visited an old Arab family that still held keys to the family home in Granada abandoned during the expulsion by the Spanish armies in 1492. "Someday" and "eventually" are crucial to the language of exile. They were part of the private language of Celia Cruz and are still spoken by old men sitting on benches on Calle Ocho in Miami.

"The only time it's hard," she said that night, "is when I wake up in the morning. I feel like I'm home. For a little moment. And then I'm not."

When her mother was dying in Havana, Celia Cruz could not visit her one final time. She never got to come back to Havana with Tito Puente and Johnny Pacheco and Willie Colon, to fill a stadium with gladness, to sing "Quimbara" or "Yerberito Moderno." She never would appear as the Queen of Salsa in the country whose music was that music's engine. To show up in those impossible high heels. To smile her amazing smile. To move with her invincible fire and grace. And shout to a roaring throng: "Azucar!"

In the end, exile is always a chilly country. It is never a good place in which to die, especially for a queen.