Casa de la Música de Miramar

This guide to the Casa de la Musica de Miramar in Havana starts with a masonic lodge built in the 1940s for closed-door ceremony, and traces its slide through a theater troupe and a heritage office before Cuba's Special Period crisis of the 1990s. You'll hear how the state recording company EGREM reopened it as a music hall in 1995, and about the night six months later when Chucho Valdes and his band Irakere played a set still traded on tape. Get close to the stage the way the regular dancers do.