Celia Cruz
1925 – 2003 · Cuba
Known for: The Queen of Salsa, the defining voice of Afro-Cuban music in the twentieth century
“Azucar.”
Biography
Celia Cruz was born Celia Caridad Cruz Alfonso in the Santos Suárez district of Havana on 21 October 1925, the daughter of a railway stoker and one of fourteen children in a crowded house. She sang her younger siblings and cousins to sleep, sang at school and in the neighbourhood ensemble Botón de Oro, and absorbed the Havana of the 1930s: guaracha, son, rumba and bolero, together with the Yoruba songs of Santería that she learned from a neighbour and later recorded. Her father wanted her to become a teacher and she enrolled at the Normal School for Teachers, but one of her own teachers pointed out that a singer could earn in a day what a Cuban teacher earned in a month. She entered an amateur contest at the radio station Radio García Serra, sang a tango into a microphone for the first time and won a cake, and then went on winning.
From 1947 Cruz studied voice, piano and theory at Havana's National Conservatory and sang in the city's cabarets, and in 1950 she became the lead voice of the Sonora Matancera, an association that lasted fifteen years and made her the Guarachera de Cuba. When the revolution nationalised the music industry she left the island in 1960 and never returned, settling first in Mexico and then in the United States, where she became one of the voices of the Cuban exile. In New York she recorded with Tito Puente, and her signature number Bemba Colorá came out of that partnership. In the 1970s she signed to Fania Records, sang with the Fania All Stars and worked with Johnny Pacheco and Willie Colón, and the world began to call her the Queen of Salsa. Quimbara belongs to those years, as does the shout of Azucar with which she seasoned every performance.
Age did not slow her. La vida es un carnaval and La negra tiene tumbao came late in her career and became standards, and her version of Guantanamera with Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. She appeared in films and telenovelas, and behind the wigs and the enormous stage presence stood thirty seven studio albums, more than thirty million records sold, two Grammy Awards and three Latin Grammy Awards. Celia Cruz died on 16 July 2003, and crowds queued in Miami and New York to take their leave of her. In 2026 she was inducted posthumously into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early musical influence, and her cry of Azucar remains one of the most recognisable sounds in Latin music.