A couple of weeks ago, we had the great pleasure of hosting the Cuban Choir, Schola Cantorum Coralina, Alina Orraca, conductor.  The director, Alina Orraca, is standing to my right in this combined group photo with the Grinnell Singers and Coralina above.  The twenty-two musicians stayed in the homes of local hosts from Monday evening until Thursday morning (November 5-8).  They gave workshops in the local middle school and high school as well as with the Grinnell Singers, and they participated in an open forum at the college on "Cultural Diplomacy."  Their visit culminated in a fabulous concert on Wednesday evening, November 7.  There were so many momentous and even historical aspects to their visit: Rewind back exactly a half century to 1962, and Cuba, the US, and the Soviet Union were poised on the edge of disaster in what we in the US call the Cuban Missile Crisis  -- and Cubans call "The October Crisis."  It's sobering to think about how close the world came to a nuclear conflagration at that time.  (Fifty years is a long time.  Still, given the longevity of Cuba's leaders, in a sense it's not so distant: in 1962, Raul Castro, the current Cuban president, met secretly with Krushchev to discuss the construction of missile sites.)  Although Coralina has toured 

CIA reference photograph of Soviet R-12 intermediate-range
nuclear ballistic missile (NATO designation SS-4) in Red Square, Moscow.
(from "Cuban Missile Crisis" Wikipedia article.)

internationally numerous times since the group was formed two decades ago, the frosty relations between the US and Cuba have prevented the ensemble from traversing the mere ninety miles that 

separate our two countries until this year.  Philip Brunelle, music director of VocalEssence in Minneapolis, and Classical Movements, a tour agency in the US, took the initiative to organize the tour, and the Obama administration's recent easing of travel restrictions helped to remove barriers that have prevented such exchanges in the past.   As it happens, the choir's visit to Grinnell coincided with the Americn elections.  The director and several of the choir members were at our house on election night, and together we waited and excitedly watched the announcement of Obama's victory.  Our Cuban guests were rooting for Obama; they wondered aloud whether the re-elected Obama might be the first president to visit Cuba since the revolution.  As if these all these historical milestones weren't sufficiently dramatic, Superstorm Sandy happened to hit Havana a couple of days before Coralina left on their tour.  They then experienced Sandy a second time in Washington DC and Philadelphia, where one of their concerts had to be cancelled.   

Here's a short video clip of Alina and the choir working with middle school students.  You'll see the members of the choir singing with their arms around some of the middle school students.  Alina was teaching about 200 middle school students to sing a song in Spanish and to dance the Cha Cha Cha.  For some bizarre reason, the middle school was hosting a bike show later that day.  The bike performers had their ramp set up in the middle of the gym, and the burly crew was ready to step in and set up the sound system as soon as the choir was done singing (why a middle school would host a bike show is beyond me; do the kids really need encouragement to do crazy acrobatics with their bikes?).  Anyway, toward the end of the workshop, Alina decided to move to the top of the bike ramp to better show the kids who were seated on the floor, how to do the Cha Cha Cha.  Several men from the choir helped her get to the top of the six-foot ramp.  You can see her in this clip as she dances and sings for the kids.  We have a lot of great footage of the choir.  More to come.