2022 SummerFest

Cuban dance achieved worldwide popularity in the 1930s and ’40s with the rumba. After World War II Latin bands playing the mambo became wildly popular with performers like Pérez Prado, Machito and his Afro Cubans, Celia Cruz and the New York-born Puerto Rican timbalero Tito Puente.

The great Cuban musicians toured the United States, and Americans went to Havana to enjoy daiquiris and baile at clubs like the famous Tropicana. Director Lex Gillespie takes his camera to Miami Beach, the Catskills and Havana where one of the mamboniks gives a tour of the places in the Cuban capital that he used to frequent back in the day. In New York the epicenter of mambo was the Palladium at 53rd and Broadway. Jews, Blacks and Puerto Ricans mixed happily there in an era when de facto segregation was the rule, even in New York.

“If you knew how to dance, you were accepted,” recalls another mambonik. Latin music was ubiquitous at bar and bat-mitzvahs and weddings and ruled at summer resorts in the Catskills. Latin music “appeals to the Jewish soul” explains one of the mamboniks, and such was its popularity that Jewish performers who played the music even began adopting Latin names. The Mamboniks shows this affinity as it really is: a heartfelt, profound and joyous kinship with another culture.