My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  So of course Sidney came back to me and uttered Hollywood’s most destructive word: “sequel.” “Not this time,” I said. “I think we got lucky; we got away with something. But let’s not tempt the gods.” I was especially nonplussed because the part he wanted me to play this time was so small! It was almost a cameo. Nothing in it stirred my interest. I think Sidney felt I was being ungrateful; after all, I wasn’t the most sought-after actor in the world. He felt he was doing me a favor. I didn’t. Undeterred, Sidney developed not just one sequel, but two: Let’s Do It Again and A Piece of the Action. Both made money, a lot of money, in fact, and Sidney, who directed and produced the whole trilogy, enjoyed a new ride of economic power in Hollywood. I had no regrets about having turned down the work. But I know Sidney felt slighted, and while that hardly produced another rift, a little coolness crept in.

  More than a decade had passed since Midnight Special, the album a young Bob Dylan had played on. In that time, I’d come out with more than a dozen albums, from my own studio recordings of folk, calypso, and love songs, to live albums (one at the Greek Theatre in L.A., one in Toronto, Canada), to collaborations with Miriam Makeba, Nana Mouskouri, and Lena Horne. But rock ’n’ roll was so powerful and pervasive now! The charts were packed with those titles, and stages I’d once thought were mine were being claimed by James Brown, the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and a multitude of others. Where was my new field to plow? I thought I might have the answer. I hadn’t forgotten the waves of acclaim that met me all over Europe in the summer of 1958. Since then, I’d gone back for the occasional concert—Greece in 1960, those fundraisers for Martin in Paris and Stockholm, a couple of showy galas in Monaco hosted by Princess Grace—but with the constant demands of the civil rights movement, I’d mostly toured the United States. Were they still there, those European audiences? Would they still come out to hear me?

  Soon enough, my new Danish promoter, Arnie Warso, put my fears to rest. Barely old enough to drink—or so he seemed—Arnie bore an uncanny resemblance to the little kid on Dutch Boy paint cans, complete with blond bangs. The first time he came to my office in New York to sell me on the tour he felt he could put together, I swept by him through the office’s waiting room, sure he was just a messenger. But Arnie was as good as his word; he built up a tour that went from Scandinavia and Belgium through Germany and Austria, Italy and Spain, all in major venues that sold out almost overnight.

  For our debut, in Hamburg, Germany, Arnie arranged to have press fly in from all over Europe. This wouldn’t just be a concert; it would be a news event! I was eager to face that bank of cameras and microphones—it’s amazing, after the reporters go away, how soon you want them back again. And then, once my bags were packed and I was at the airport waiting, I got word that my father had died. When I called Arnie to give him the news, and canceled my flight, a flock of European journalists waiting at the other end concluded that my opening-night concert was off, my whole tour in jeopardy. Arnie put out all the brush fires he could. The concert wasn’t canceled, he said, nor was the tour. I would get there as soon as I could.

  In our last years, my father and I had reached a real understanding. The terrifying giant of my childhood, beating me bloody, had aged into a passive figure incapable of hitting anyone. Instead of yelling, he talked, and I listened. I didn’t entirely forgive him his rages, but I felt I understood the misery he’d lived in with my mother, and the role she’d had in making it worse. With Edith, he was happy, and that impressed me; it impressed me that he made her happy, too. Edith was a U.S. citizen, American-born, and once they were married, my father had qualified for citizenship himself, but for some years he’d hesitated; the old fears of deportation died hard. Finally one day he’d gone to take his oath of allegiance, and I’d vouched for him, swelling with pride as he clutched his little packet of citizenship papers to his chest. Now he was gone.

  My mother, still parked in her studio apartment on 143rd Street, wanted no part of the arrangements. As far as she was concerned, my father had died the day he walked out on her. So I sat down with Edith and my brother, Dennis, and we agreed my father would be cremated at a later date. Dennis and I would cast his ashes out to sea off Jamaica. With the details settled, I caught the next flight to Hamburg. Since I’d originally planned to arrive three days ahead of the concert, I still had time. Only now I was arriving just hours ahead. Late, too, was all our equipment—our sets, lights, microphones, amplifiers, and more—which had gone by boat through Holland and been held up for lack of the proper carnet. Our crew was still frantically assembling it all as the concert hour approached. When the black-tied guests streamed in, they were steered to the bar and told to start drinking at our expense. Ninety minutes after the concert’s scheduled start, they took their seats, the theater went dark, and I walked out onstage.

  As usual, a grand piano was set center stage, with my eight-piece band and four backup singers behind it. In front of the piano, framed by its curve, stood a little table with a glass of water, a black napkin, and, on top of the napkin, my microphone. I liked to walk out unencumbered, bow to the audience, then turn upstage, walk a few steps, and pick up the mike—checking, as I did, to see that my whistles were lined up beside it; I used them when I performed my “Carnival” medley. On this night, when I turned back to face the audience, the whole house was standing. I’d never gotten a standing ovation before I even started to sing. I had to swallow hard to launch into my first song. I started a cappella and the band swung in. What happened after that was pandemonium. Euphoric cheering, thousands singing along, dancing in the aisles, more standing ovations, encore after encore. The next day, headlines like TRIUMPHANT BELAFONTE bannered in newspapers across the continent.

  The love that came at me every night of that tour coursed through me in a whole new way. The nightclub applause of my early days was probably just as strong, but I’d never quite believed it was real. On that fateful night at the Royal Roost, I’d walked onto a stage by chance: I felt sure they’d see through me soon enough. Eventually, I’d come to expect the cheers. Not take them for granted—never that—but to assume that as long as I did my best, those waves of tribute would keep rolling in. They did, but I couldn’t kid myself. I was in my mid-forties now, with my first gray hairs and a whole generation of talented entertainers coming up behind me. What I felt in Europe was that none of that mattered.

  What made all this especially gratifying was that in Europe, I wasn’t admired in spite of being an activist. I was admired for my activism as much as for my performing. European audiences saw me as an emissary, expressing liberal American views that were somewhat at odds with official U.S. foreign policy. I never spoke disrespectfully about my country. But I did publicly and repeatedly endorse the nuclear-freeze movement, and I did condemn South Africa’s apartheid government.

  Occasionally, I challenged the country where I was performing on its own political issues. I had a huge and mostly young audience in East Germany—here, too, my human rights work stirred as much if not more excitement than my singing—and so, rather warily, in 1983, the Communist government of Erich Honecker let me be invited to perform at East Berlin’s annual youth festival. I’d never appeared in East Germany before. I said I’d go on one condition: that I be allowed to share the stage with another act of my choosing. I didn’t say who. A few days before the concert, my German promoter, Fritz Rau, let slip to the East German press that I’d be sharing the stage with … Udo Lindenberg. The press was stunned. Udo Lindenberg was the Bruce Springsteen of West Germany, but with a hard political edge. In his songs he gleefully mocked East Germany’s government and its rigid head of state. His latest hit song, played widely underground in East Berlin, declared, “I have a flask of cognac with me and it tastes very yummy / Which I slurp at ease with Erich Honecker / And I say: ‘Hey, honey, I sing for little money in the Palace of the Republic if you let me …’ ”

  The Honecker
government could have banned our appearance, but its apparatchiks knew better. Even in a repressive society, youth had power if roused to fury. The morning of the concert, I held a press conference with Udo at my side. The first few questions were all for Udo—dressed scruffily as usual—and he disappointed no one with his teasing, wry replies. Then a journalist stood to address me, and threw me a curve. “Mr. Belafonte, what do you think of the U.S. invasion of Grenada today?”

  I couldn’t believe I’d heard him right. I thought he meant the United States had invaded Spain. In the Caribbean? The whole idea was preposterous. It sounded like a Marx Brothers movie. I stammered that this was the first I’d heard of it, and I could hardly comment until I knew more. With that, the press conference fell into chaos. Udo and I traded looks of disbelief. We’d thought we’d one-upped the East German regime; instead, President Reagan had one-upped us all with the most unlikely invasion in American history. We did put on a hell of a concert that night, though, and the crowd went wild for us.

  I disagreed with almost every tenet of U.S. foreign policy, from the Cold War freeze on any relations with Iron Curtain countries, to Vietnam and its aftermath, to the backing of right-wing tyrants through Africa and Latin America. But I felt a special frustration with America’s stance toward an island close to home: not Grenada, but Cuba. To me, Fidel Castro was still the brave revolutionary who’d overthrown a corrupt regime and was trying to create a socialist utopia. Our trade blockade pleased the right-wing Cuban-American community in Miami, but who were those angry partisans? A lot of them were cogs in the corrupt Batista machine who’d lost their plunder and were still mad about it! Long after the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis, I still felt the United States should forge an alliance with Cuba that benefited both countries and gave Castro enough space to make his experiment work.

  I guess I made that view pretty well known, because one day in early 1974, I got word that Castro would be honored to have Julie and me as his guests at the Havana Film Festival, which turned out to be one of the most impressive film festivals that I have ever seen. We flew to Montreal—the U.S. ban on all direct air travel to Cuba was in effect—and then to Havana. I assumed we’d have a short meet and greet and pose for a picture or two. I had no inkling that this would be the start of a long friendship.

  This was my first visit to Castro’s Cuba, but not my first to the island. In the mid-fifties, when I’d played the Eden Roc in Miami, I’d taken to flying a prop plane over to Havana for a night of great food and gambling at a casino. Castro was already in the hills with his troops, planning his next moves, and most Americans I met there were cheering him on against the wildly crooked Fulgencio Batista. Soon after Castro marched into the capital in January 1959, I’d seen him in some big rooms in Harlem, raising funds to support the revolution, which needed all the help it could get; Batista had looted the treasury of $300 million as he fled the country.

  As part of the blockade, Americans were allowed to spend only a nominal amount of money in Cuba. For us that wasn’t a problem; we were guests of the Cuban government. A car whisked us from the airport to the Hotel Habana Riviera, the famous high-rise casino resort on the Malecón waterfront built in the mid-fifties with the secret backing of Meyer Lansky and other Las Vegas mobsters. (Such were the U.S. citizens who’d lost their properties in the revolution, to the lasting indignation of their government.) When, we asked, would we meet our host? Our driver and translator smiled apologetically. As the target of literally hundreds of assassination attempts, they explained, Castro never announced his schedule in advance. We should expect that at some point we’d be interrupted in whatever we were doing and taken to an undisclosed location.

  For a day or so we explored Havana and lolled by the pool. Then came word that we should be in the hotel lobby at a certain time. We were warned that we might wait awhile; Castro, as usual, was running late. We didn’t care. We were going to meet Fidel! Unfortunately, the hotel lobby seemed to have no air-conditioning. For more than an hour, we sweated in stifling humidity, until I announced to Julie that I could stand no more; I was going up to our room to shower and change.

  I was just drying off from a cooling shower when the phone rang. “Señor Belafonte?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are in your room.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not in the lobby.”

  “No.”

  “Where is your wife?”

  “In the lobby.”

  “Is there anyone else in your room?”

  “No.”

  I’m not sure how I understood this exchange, because I spoke no Spanish.

  “Stay where you are, Señor Belafonte.”

  About three seconds later came a knock on the door. I opened it to see an incredibly handsome young Cuban in military mufti—not rugged jungle but beautifully tailored: revolutionary haute couture. I, on the other hand, was wearing Jockey shorts—and nothing else. I saw, past his shoulder, that the room across the hallway was open and occupied by four or five other military men in mufti, all with sidearms and a couple of AK-47’s. My eye went immediately to the one in the full black beard, who strode over to take my hand in his. “Welcome to Cuba, Señor Belafonte,” exclaimed Fidel Castro, with a grin at my Jockey shorts. He was as tall as I was—six feet two—which I hadn’t expected, with proud, flashing eyes and a broad grin. “You have made the Cuban people so happy!”

  I put my pants on at that point, and one of the men went down to bring Julie up. With a beautiful female translator named Juanita at his side, Fidel thanked me for coming and said how much a fan he was of my music. As soon as Julie appeared, I could see he’d just become even more of a fan of hers. We talked in the hotel room for hours, then followed the entourage downstairs to the motorcade waiting outside. Off we sped to the Museum of the Revolution, with its amazing glassed-in atrium of full-grown indigenous trees and plants. The dining room to which we were shown was very grand, the hors d’oeuvres delicious, the dinner superb. As for the cigars—well, that went without saying. Later, when friends asked me if our day with Castro had worn us out, I told them the truth: absolutely not. Castro was so compelling, in both his physical presence and his intellectual passion, that Julie and I were genuinely sorry to say good-bye.

  Castro was a film buff—that was clear from his many excited references to American classics. (His all-time favorite was Gone with the Wind.) At his urging, Julie and I came back just months later. This time we brought Sidney and his lady friend, Joanna Shimkus, a young Canadian actress whom he’d met when the two were cast together in a heist film called The Lost Man. (Like Julie, Joanna was both white and Jewish.) Over the next few days, we saw a lot of films, drank a lot of cocktails with leftist writers like Jorge Amado and Gabriel García Márquez, and listened to some of the world’s best jazz musicians play late into the night: Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, and more. Once again, Fidel’s men in mufti materialized without advance notice. This time, we were taken first to the Museum of the Revolution, and up to Castro’s private office, with a panoramic view of the city.

  Castro came from behind his desk to greet us with outstretched hands. He dazzled Sidney with his thorough knowledge of his film career; he seemed to have seen every film Sidney ever made. (I couldn’t help noticing that Island in the Sun was the one film of mine he knew; he did know most of my songs.) I’d come to realize that he understood English quite well—I could see that from his visceral reactions to what we said—but still he spoke in Spanish and relied on his gorgeous translator. Whether he felt uncomfortable speaking English, or liked his English-speaking guests to feel better informed by having to go through his translator, I can’t say for sure.

  Castro loved having two of America’s top black stars on his turf, not because he was starstruck, but because we were black—Castro took pride in presenting Cuba to the world as a truly prejudice-free nation; it was part of his socialist outlook—and also because he knew we admired what he was trying to do. Sidney’s doubts abo
ut Castro at the time were certainly greater than mine. But we both wanted to believe in the dream, and in the dreamer. Castro was a modern-day Bolívar; there was no other Spanish leader quite like him. Sékou Touré had thrown over his socialist ideals and become a dictator, as had others. I still hoped Fidel would avoid that trap.

  We talked a lot in Castro’s office that day about the U.S.-Cuba relationship. Despite all the assassination attempts made against him—a British documentary in 2006 would put the total to date at 638—Castro expressed no anger toward the United States. He did bring up President Kennedy’s assassination, and sharply rebuffed the conspiracy theories that implicated Cuba. He explained how it made no sense for Cuba’s interests to have taken Kennedy out. Why would Castro have wanted that heat, especially if, as the U.S. State Department feared, he was building atomic missiles and hiding them in the hills? We wanted to believe him, and his logic seemed persuasive. So then were Lee Harvey Oswald’s efforts to fly to Cuba weeks before the assassination just the meanderings of a crazed lone gunman? The fact that the Cuban embassy in Mexico City held up his demand for a visa to Havana for five days would seem to suggest that. So does Oswald’s decision not to go to Cuba when the visa finally came through. But to this day, no one knows for sure—except, perhaps, Fidel.

  “Come back and visit us again,” Castro said as he shook our hands good-bye. I don’t think Sidney ever did, but I made a point of going to the Cuban film festival year after year. When I did, I was put not in the Hotel Habana Riviera but in a “protocol house,” government-owned with household staff. I never knew on those visits if Castro would see me, but he almost always did. One day he took Julie and me on a drive to the prison in Oriente Province where he’d been confined before the revolution. Julie’s parents were with us that time. When he showed us his cell, he grew very emotional; little by little, the man behind the figure was emerging. At other times we joined him for visits to schools, where the students’ rapture at seeing him was unfeigned, as was his pleasure at seeing them. Inevitably on these visits we talked politics, and when we did, I made a point of gently relaying the views and frustrations of Cuban dissidents with whom I’d met—without naming names, of course. Castro would listen, and occasionally take heed, loosening some government edict or other. The most dramatic case came when I introduced him, in 1999, to Cuban rap.