Rapper Lumidee makes rare US music video in Cuba
By WILL WEISSERT
Associated Press Writer
HAVANA -- It's well after midnight and the New Yorker is strutting down
a crumbling sidewalk in impossibly high - red-sequined - heels,
lip-syncing a few seconds of her rap while cameras roll for a music video.
Almost inevitably, a misstep on Havana's cracked and uneven concrete
sends her pitching forward.
"Sorry, I'm going again," giggles singer and rapper Lumidee, regaining
her balance and turning sharply on the same heel that nearly toppled her
to head back down the block.
"Yeah," director Michel Miglis yells from behind a camera perched on a
second-floor balcony over her head. "And don't smile!"
Best-known for her summer smash of six years ago, "Never Leave You" -
think "Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh" - 24-year-old Lumidee has come to Cuba to
finish a video for Iranian-born signer Arash Labaf's song "Kandi," to
which she contributed rap solos.
It's Labaf's third video in Cuba, but including Lumidee makes the
production one of very few music videos filmed on the island to feature
an American. Forty-seven years of U.S. economic sanctions have choked
off nearly all travel and trade between the two countries.
Her trip to Cuba is more proof that while the Obama administration and
the government of Cuba talk tentatively about improving relations, the
entertainment world is already well into the thaw.
"When I heard the shoot was in Cuba I panicked. I didn't know what to
expect, and I was a little bit scared to come," said Lumidee, who was
born Lumiana DeRosa Cedeno.
"You don't know how it's going to be. Like you're not wanted here, and
the people would not like you," she said. "But Cubans just seem happy
and laid back."
The video, in which Labaf plays himself and three goofball characters
vying for the girl, includes shots on a beach east of Havana and at the
famed Bacardi Building downtown, which served as headquarters of the rum
giant before it fled the island after Fidel Castro took power in 1959.
U.S. jazz and folk musicians have often worked with Cuban colleagues.
Collaborations have included Ry Cooder in the Buena Vista Social Club
recordings of the 1990s and jazz festival appearances by the likes of
Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette.
Audioslave broke the decades-long barrier to U.S. rock concerts in Cuba
with a thundering show on the Cuban capital's seaside Malecon in 2005.
But Washington's trade sanctions and the Cuban government's ambivalence
toward rock and rap have kept most American musicians away.
Lumidee, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, grew up in Spanish Harlem. She
and an entourage including her manager and husband, makeup artist and a
DJ friend had to fly through a third country because of their U.S.
passports. She asked that her full itinerary not be published to avoid
problems with American authorities.
"It's more old-fashion, more pure," she said of Havana's
stuck-in-the-1950s air. "Coming from New York, you know, everyone's
angry over there. It's nice here."
U.S. actors have long been attracted to Cuba. When Lumidee checked into
Havana's iconic Hotel Nacional, she ran into Bill Murray, James Caan and
Robert Duval, who are here on a "research trip." Puerto Rican-born actor
Benicio del Toro is also in town.
"I think everyone should see it, see Cuba," Lumidee said. "All Americans
deserve to come here, too."
But for now, Americans are still an oddity.
Lumidee did her strutting for the cameras on Lealtad Street amid stately
but decaying old buildings that neither the communist state nor the
people who live in them can afford to maintain.
Several generations of Cubans usually cram into tiny apartments, and as
technicians erected lights, a large crowd of onlookers formed - even
though things didn't really get going until nearly 1 a.m.
Teens heading out to local clubs stopped to gawk alongside neighborhood
kids in baseball caps and shorts, while grandparents ambled onto sagging
balconies to watch from above.
"The people kind of stare a little at me," said Lumidee, who
complemented the killer heels with a pink-sequin vest and blue short
shorts. "I don't think they get to see a lot of New Yorkers."
Rapper Lumidee makes rare US music video in Cuba - Entertainment AP -
MiamiHerald.com (3 August 2009)
http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/AP/story/1169371.html
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