Dash of Big Brother in the Salsa

On Saturday, as fans enter Miami Arena to hear Los Van Van, a popular progressive-salsa band from Cuba, an improvised “big brother” brigade intends to photograph and videotape them. Their pictures, suggests Juan Amador Rodriguez, a Miami radio commentator, should be printed and broadcast to expose what he calls “Fidel Castro sympathizers.” In the minds of Amador and other anti-Castro warriors, a liking for Cuban salsa apparently equates with Communist leanings.

The temptation is strong to just laugh at this plan, but there is an alarming whiff of intimidation about it. The scheme also raises serious concerns about privacy rights in a free country. In truth, the actions of these vociferous Cuban American exiles mimic the totalitarian attitudes of the dictatorship in Cuba that they so forcefully reject.

Los Van Van has played without much incident all over the United States, including at the Monterey Jazz Festival and Universal Amphitheater, but it’s a different story in Miami, the home of the largest U.S. concentration of Cubans.

It is not legitimate to have forced the band out of the hall in which it had been booked, as Amador and friends were able to do, or to finger the thousands of people expected at the rescheduled concert as agents of Cuba and bully them with cameras. Miami’s anti-Castro fanatics, aging and dwindling, are apparently clueless about this music, which has nothing to do with Fidel. But they do know how to intrude on the freedom of others.