A new batch of federal documents showed that salsa queen Celia Cruz received permission to stay in the United States because she publicly crusaded against communism.

BY CAROL ROSENBERG

The U.S. government took famed salsa singer Celia Cruz off its blacklist of suspected communists in 1965 because, while in exile, she performed and raised money for anti-Fidel Castro causes, according to newly released records obtained by The Herald.

Cruz had kept her decade-plus struggle with J. Edgar Hoover-era suspicions a secret, which the Cuban-American icon took to her grave at age 77 a year ago.

The documents show that she was finally granted permission to stay in

the United States in 1965, ending a string of visa rejections in U.S. consulates from Mexico City to Montreal to Havana that started in 1952.

''The record indicates that in July 1960 she fled as a defector from the Communist regime of Cuba,'' according to an Oct. 28, 1965, immigration service memorandum recently obtained by The Herald. ``Since that time she has actively cooperated with anti-Communist, anti-Castro organizations through artistic performances and by campaigning for funds for those organizations.''

Cruz even got anti-communists to vouch for her in the bid to win permanent residence in the United States. The same memo said, ``She has presented statements from a number of responsible persons attesting to her active opposition to Communism for at least the past five years.''

They are not named in documents.

The Herald discovered Cruz's secret U.S. government blacklisting this summer after receiving her FBI counterintelligence file through the Freedom of Information Act. The documents reflect a time when U.S. agents and Congress were hunting communists in U.S. society and were particularly interested in the entertainment industry.

Now, 11 more declassified documents received from the immigration division of the Department of Homeland Security describe Cruz's effort to stay permanently in the United States after she fled Castro's revolution for Mexico City in 1960 with the Sonora Matancera band.

ACTION AND REACTION

They reflect internal U.S. government debate each time she sought to play a concert -- sometimes in Puerto Rico, at times in Hollywood, Miami and New York -- over whether she should be granted a waiver and allowed to perform. U.S. bureaucrats branded her a communist for her 1940s work at a pre-Castro Cuban communist radio station, and membership in the Popular Socialist Party.

Cruz's last manager, Omer Pardillo, said in an interview that he did not know what proof she provided.

But he dug through her personal papers recently and found three certificates from an anti-Castro guerrilla group.

Each one represented a receipt for $92, and declared that she donated the money to the Junta Revolucionaria Cubana to buy three rifles in January 1964, a year before she was finally cleared.

The group was formed after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and the receipt declared the donation of a rifle ``for the war against communist tyranny.''

Reached by telephone in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the man who led the movement at the time, Manuel Ray, said he did not recall Cruz telling him of her communist blacklisting.

But ''at that time, the CIA was very discriminatory,'' he said. ``I would've helped her in any way possible. I had a high regard for her.''

The latest batch of documents also reveals an interesting twist: In the first year of Castro's revolution, Cruz was among some entertainers who sought to play in Miami and New York to raise money for an island rebuilding project in the aftermath of the guerrilla fight that toppled former Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista.

FBI EVALUATION

''Subject is inadmissible to the United States because of her affiliation with the Cuban Communist youth organization and the Communist Party of Cuba,'' said an FBI memo, dated Sept. 3, 1959.

``She is a popular Cuban singer, and was seeking to enter the U.S. for about two days as a member of a group sponsored by the Cuban Tourist Commission, to make appearances at Miami and New York to raise funds for the restoration of a Cuban city devastated during the recent hostilities there.''

Cruz's husband, Pedro Knight, said in an interview this summer that he was unaware of his late wife's U.S. visa troubles. The couple wed in Connecticut in 1962, while Cruz was splitting her time between New York and Mexico, where she had sought U.S. waivers to perform in the United States.