It's Saturday afternoon in Santiago de Cuba, the country's second city and birthplace of singer
Ibrahim Ferrer. Without explanation, an orchestra is forming outside the cathedral. Soon 48 musicians
are in place. The maestro taps his baton and a magnificent sound soars across the main square.
Behind the band, three 1950s Buick sedans drift by. The cars are full. For reasons also unexplained,
each of the occupants is balancing a huge cake on her lap, iced in lemon, pink and tangerine.

If Havana is the fountain of Cuban music, then Santiago is the source. For centuries this heady,
captivating seaport has dispatched its musical innovators from Cuba's far south-eastern coast to the
capital, away in the north-west. The extraordinary Ibrahim Ferrer, leading light of the Buena Vista
Social Club phenomenon that swept round the world in the late 1990s, left here in 1957. Now aged 75,
and a resident of Havana for most of his life, he still calls Santiago home.

This week, Ferrer releases Buenos Hermanos, his second solo album produced, like Buena Vista, by
the American guitarist Ry Cooder. Cynical observers might be tempted to think, "Enough geriatric
Cubans, already." The enormous success of the Buena Vista project has seen a deluge of the island's
traditional music rereleased. The country has certainly had a long stint in the spotlight. But to
overlook Ferrer's new collection is to miss a majestic display from one of the world's most stirring
voices.

"I find it very strange, the effect that my singing has on people," says Ferrer. "They are people on
the other side of the world, who don't speak Spanish and who have never been to Cuba - but
something has touched them."

We are in his new house, in a room dedicated to his recent success. Pictures on the walls show him
playing to huge crowds around the world, receiving awards, meeting the notable.

"I was at the airport in Jerusalem after we played there, and a woman came up to me, crying. She knelt
down, kissed my hand and made the sign of the cross." Recounting the incident to our translator, his
twinkly eyes disappear into the creases of his smile. "I don't know why these people are always
crying. What did I do?"

There's no doubt that Ferrer's voice has immense power. Some of it is to do with his age. Like his
face, his larynx carries the traces of a lifetime. For the most part, we do not hear anyone singing
popular music beyond even 40. To hear the sound of 75 years of triumph and defeat, benevolence
and bile, joy and pain is disconcerting - almost otherworldly.

And with his age comes a lack of artifice. Ferrer's conviction is total; he never sounds as if he is
trying to be anything.

But longevity is not all of it. In a country with extraordinarily high standards of musicianship, Ferrer
is an exceptional and resilient talent. A professional singer since the age of 13, by the 1950s he was
guesting with Orquesta de Chepin and Benny More, two legendary names in Cuban music. After a
long career, he had retired from music and was living on a pension in a tiny apartment when Cooder
came along. To supplement the meagre pension money, he had been working for years as a
shoeshine.

The average wage in Cuba is $US15 ($25) a month, and Ferrer's multimillion sales of Buena Vista
Social Club have made him a wealthy man. He still collects his pension, though. "Since I was a
teenager," he says, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, "every time I've earned 75
cents I've paid 5 to the union. That's a lot of contributions. I have earned the right to collect on that."

Ferrer and his peers are old enough to have lived in pre-revolutionary times as well as under the
Castro regime. I wonder if the 1959 uprising transformed music as much as everything else in Cuba.
He is expansive in his praise for Castro: "Fidel is one of the greatest men who ever lived. In music
also he brought great opportunities for Cubans. He set up many music schools. After the revolution,
children could learn for free, and instruments were provided for them."

With the tourist dollar now vital to the country's economy, the success of Buena Vista has not gone
unnoticed by Castro. "Fidel sent for me and my band to come to his birthday party," says Ferrer.
"Not to play, but as guests. I was very proud. He introduced himself and congratulated me. Then he
saw my watch ..." He flourishes an extremely thin gold-and-platinum Swiss chronograph. "He said,
'Nice watch - can I try it on?' I said, 'Of course, Senor Presidente.' So he put his watch in his pocket
and wore mine for the rest of the party. He showed it off to a group of nurses who had been invited.
They were asking him about his health, which everyone always talks about. 'Don't worry - I'm strong,'
he said. 'I take a lot of vitamins: A, B, B12, D. And plenty of Viagra."'

Castro's influence on the country's music is almost audible. Like Cuba itself, it has spent 44 years
largely cut off from the rest of the world. And, just as visitors to the island are struck by a place
where there is no capitalism and none of the cynicism that accompanies it, so listeners, too, are
drawn to the sense of purity and simple humanity that permeates the music. And then, of course,
there's the sex.

Walking down the main shopping street in Santiago, waiting for a bus, queuing at the bank, buying a
packet of batteries - every tiny interaction in Cuba is saturated in sexual possibility and conducted to
the sound of music. And there's none of the youth apartheid that we have come to accept in the
West. All ages are invited. It's like a never-ending wedding reception. To hear Ferrer rasp out the
rousing final track on Buenos Hermanos - whooping and crowing like a wiry old bantam - is to
glimpse that maybe turning 75 is something to relish, not dread.

So what happens when you do your first world tour in your 70s? Do the groupies come up on a stair
lift? Ferrer cackles. "When I was 40, I could have done with some of that," he says. "Now that I'm 75
and I have to spend most of the time sitting down, I have women throwing their bras at me. I have to
pass them on to the guys in the band. What God gives you, you should bless."

Telegraph, London