I am Cuba (1964)

HAVANA ’58, the decadent jet-set heaven when Cuba was a tropical playground. A pleasure dome of sensual overload and rum-fuelled abandon, where shows and showgirls were dazzling, gambling was high-stakes, and revellers included Marlon Brando, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Sinatra and J.F.K., to name a few. Mojitos, Mobsters, Mambos & Muchachas. A forbidden, hedonistic world of Rum, Rumba and Roulette. The full range of Sexual freedom, official corruption, and Mafia control ignited the rampant party - until Sylvester 1958 when Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries took the floor.

On three discs contain live material from 1966 to 1969, and a fragment of Paul Simon's concert in 1980. This live recording and its release, has not been authorised by Simon & Garfunkel or their recording company.

It was a musical cocktail born in a marketing meeting: Two parts easy listening, one part jazz, a healthy dollop of conga drums, a sprinkling of bird calls, and a pinch of textless choir. Serve garnished with an alluring woman on the album jacket for best results. Liberty Records co-founder Si Waronker called it Exotica; the soundtrack for a mythical air conditioned Eden, packaged for mid-century, tiki torch-wielding armchair safariers. In the five years after Exotica—Martin Denny’s 1957 landmark Liberty debut—arrived, hundreds of other ethnographic forgeries washed up in record racks all over the U.S., bearing titles like Sophisticated Savage, Sacred Idol, Chant of the Jungle, Polynesian Paradise, Exotic Paradise, Taboo, Primitiva, Forbidden Island, Afrodesia, Hypnotique, Percussion Exotique, and a barrel’s worth of other portmanteaus. “All of those ica and itiva endings I came up with because I thought I was being cute,” Waronker said. “And I don’t know why, but nobody got wise.”