Famous Latinx Birthdays

Bebo (front) and Chucho Valdés. Photo from elpais.com. Click HERE.  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ...Bebo Valdés (1918-2013) y Chucho Valdés (su hijo) (1941-    )! Bebo Valdés (full name Dionisio Ramón Emilio Valdés Amaro), a Cuban musician and central figure in the Golden Age of Cuban music, started his career as a pianist in the nightclubs of Havana during the 1940s. Later on his orchestra, Sabor de Cuba, often performed at the Tropicana Cabaret. He was also an important figure in the nascent Afro-Cuban jazz scene in Cuba at the time. In 1960, due to the Cuban Revolution, Valdés defected to Mexico. He then spent time in the United States before moving to Stockholm, Sweden, where he lived for the rest of this life. Valdés won seven Grammy awards during his career, the last being in 2010, for a musical production recorded with his son Chucho, Bebo y Chucho Valdés: Juntos para siempre . The album won Best Latin Jazz Album. They also won a Latin Grammy. In 2011, he was awarded ...

Guillermo Cabrera Infante and his wife, Miriam Gomez, as photographed for The Paris Review, 1983. Click HERE for interview.  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Guillermo Cabrera Infante !  (1929-2005) A Cuban writer, screenwriter, and film critic who at first adamantly supported the Communist Revolution and Castro regime, Guillermo Cabrera Infante (who used the pseudonym G. Caín in the 1950s) went into exile in 1965 and became an outspoken critic of Castro and communism. Considered a member of the "Latin Boom" (alongside writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes), Cabrera nonetheless shunned this label. He was decidedly more libertarian than his contemporaries. As he explained in a 1983 Paris Review interview, which he gave when teaching at the University of Virginia as a guest professor, "Any literary work that aspires to the condition of art must forget politics, religion, and, ultimately, morals. Otherwise it will be a ...