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In 1995, the idea to come up with this project was thought up. Now as it closes in on its twentieth anniversary, the band will embark on its farewell world tour before passing it on to a new breed of Cuban musicians

A revolution in Cuban music came to pass in the mid-1990s: the phenomenon known worldwide as the Buena Vista Social Club

Musical Rediscovery
The band –originally called the Afro Cuba All Star- popped up as a musical development on all major international scenes, paving the way for the 1998 Grammy Award in the Best Tropical Music Album category with the CD “Buena Vista Social Club”. From that moment onward, the band was named after that first album, the same name that put it on the map and showed that the main roots of salsa, a rhythm that had at the time amassed enthusiast dancers from all around the world, were in Cuba’s traditional music.
The Buena Vista troupe was the brainchild of Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, a Cuban musician and leader of the Sierra Maestra band, in a bid to bring together boldface names of Cuban traditional music, such as Compay Segundo, Ibrahím Ferrer, Manuel Licea (Puntillita), José Antonio (Maceo), Pío Leyva, Raúl Planas, and other musicians like Guajiro Mirabal, Bárbaro Torres, Javier Zalba, Orlando López (Cachaíto), Rubén González, Amado Valdés and Miguel Angá. Others top performers also jumped on the bandwagon, like lead vocalist Omara Portuondo, a former member of the legendary vocal female quartet Las D’ Aida. After that long stint, Omara grew to become of the finest singers of all time. Santiago-born trova singer Elíades Ochoa, leader of the Conjunto Patria band, has also featured as the band’s lead vocalist.
Buena Vista dusted off a rep of songs from traditional music, the very best of son, and put many of those songwriters back in the limelight –they had fallen into oblivion even on the island and all of a sudden they were back on the world hit charts again. In 1996 and under the former Afro Cuba All Star name, the band launched three albums, with two of them winning Grammy Award nominations:
A toda Cuba le gusta and Buena Vista Social Club; the latter grabbed the coveted gramophone and was eventually renamed after the cover title.
The band name actually stems from a club of colored people that was headquartered in Havana back in the early 20th century. This meeting place had been founded in the Buena Vista neighborhood in 1932. The celebrated Tropicana Cabaret opened in 1939 and due to its proximity to the Buena Vista Social Club, the venue moved out to the former Alturas de Almendares neighborhood, where it started offering activities for club members. One of the highlights was no doubt the weekend ballroom parties.
Those ballroom bashes caught on rapidly among club members, as well as among neighbors and passersby. Many of them simply stayed near the club, right in the streets, to listen to the good music by hit-parade performers and chart toppers. Arsenio Rodriguez even wrote a song (Buena Vista en Guaguanco), while Israel López Cachao wrote Club Social Buena Vista, a tribute to a privileged site of Cuban pop music and somehow in an effort to recreate the glory days of bands and charangas.