NOTE: Names of ADVANCE registrants will be on a list at the door for check-in!          

Book Talk Title: Beyond Celia Cruz: How Cuban Migration Transformed Cuban Music Around the World?    
      Most people know the iconic voice of the Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz, one of the world's greatest ambassadors of Cuban music and culture. But what happened to Cuban music after successive waves of migration carried Cuban musicians, artists, and cultural producers across the globe?
     In this talk, Dr. Eva Silot Bravo examines how the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Eastern socialist bloc, and Cuba's economic crisis of the 1990s reshaped the trajectory of Cuban music. As musicians established new lives around the world, they forged vibrant transnational networks of collaboration that transformed how Cuban music has been created, shared, and reimagined across borders.
     Drawing on the research behind Cuban Fusion: The Transnational Cuban Alternative Music Scene (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), the presentation traces the evolution of transnational Cuban jazz and fusion scenes over the past three decades. The book documents an extraordinary diversity of talented Cuban musicians living and creating across the world, bringing to light a vast and dynamic musical ecosystem that has remained largely overlooked. It also explores how fusion has emerged as the most prevalent musical language of contemporary Cuban music, revealing how migration, artistic collaboration, and transnational circulation have reshaped Cuban music into a truly global phenomenon.
     Whether you are interested in music, Cuban culture, migration and global cultural studies, this talk offers a new way of understanding one of the world's richest musical traditions through the stories, collaborations, and creative journeys of Cuban musicians across the globe. 

Book Link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-53692-2

Book Playlist: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHL7szp59hu68fgDx7y0SGiVGdnZ4gC9N

About the Author
     Dr. Eva Silot Bravo is an Afro-Cuban author, interdisciplinary scholar, educator, and former United Nations diplomat and international negotiator. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, Spanish and Literatures from the University of Miami, an M.A. in International Studies from Florida International University, and a B.A. in International Relations from the Higher Institute of International Relations in Havana, Cuba.
     She is the author of Cuban Fusion: The Transnational Cuban Alternative Music Scene (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), an interdisciplinary study of Cuban music, migration, and transnationalism. Her research documents global networks of Cuban musicians and examines how successive waves of migration since the 1990s have transformed Cuban musical production, cultural identity, and transnational artistic collaboration. She has published scholarly articles, interviews, and essays on Cuban music, literature, film, and the arts.
     Committed to documenting the voices of migrant, Afro-descendant, and women artists, she founded the blog Cubanidad in Between and the bilingual podcasts Miami Alternativo and Word Culture. She has curated cultural events, produced concerts, and collaborated with cultural institutions to promote Cuban alternative music and the arts.