The Cuban Cowboys Album Available in July!

The Cuban Cowboys’ debut album, “Cuban Candles,” comes out this summer. The album tells the story of a family’s Cuban exile. From a mother’s arrival at La Guardia International Airport in 1959 to a son’s take on modern-day Cuba, the disc promises to be more than a collection of catchy tunes: it’s an album in an age of downloadable singles; a finely crafted hybrid of indie rock and Sabor Cubano.

Here’s an excerpt from the album’s liner notes:

Some would call my way of being Cuban the worst: I am a Miami Cuban, the first Navarro born in the United States. I recently attended a lecture by a well-known musicologist examining musical connections between Havana and
New Orleans. A comparison was made between the first wave of Cuban exile immigrants to Miami, and their French-speaking counterparts in New Orleans two hundred years earlier: mostly white, formerly-landed gentry and their minions. They refused to assimilate, amassed far-reaching political power, and spent considerable time spinning their history and clinging to epic, melancholy tales of a far better life way back when. I thought immediately about my grandfather and my father, and I winced. My country’s history with Cuba is full of violence and hypocrisy (See: Guantanamo for the latest, the trade embargo for the cruelest), yet there seems always to be a profound sweetness to the bitterness: the undeniable
power of el ser Cuban, whose music first came to me through the din of drunken men making plans, dreaming big, and struggling to live in two worlds at once.
This record is an album. It’s my Cuban-American story.

Expect some weirdness.

Jorge A. Navarro
San Francisco, 2007