HERALD EXCLUSIVE

BY CAROL ROSENBERG

The year was 1955, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, and Celia Cruz, 29, was a star on the stage and airwaves with Cuba's celebrated Sonora Matancera band. And, at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, she was banned from visiting the United States as a suspected communist.

In fact, the singer known affectionately as Celia to generations of Cuban exiles was at least twice refused an artist's visa to visit America in the 1950s, according to a recently declassified U.S. document that described her as a ``well-known communist singer and stage star.''

It was an era before Fidel Castro was in power, a time when McCarthyism and the Red scare bred a Hollywood blacklist. The U.S. Congress was consumed by communism, and federal agents were hunting communists, real and imagined, in government and show business.

The Herald discovered the previously unknown chapter of Cruz's life, the nearly decadelong struggle to clear her name, after receiving her once-classified FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act.

Her biographies do not mention the episode, and the people tending to her estate, including her husband of 41 years, said she never spoke of it.

''She never told me about that. She never talked about politics,'' said her widower Pedro Knight. The alleged activities predate their relationship, to a time in her teens and 20s.

''It would've been a hard thing because, especially afterward, she was identified so much as a symbol of anti-Castroism,'' said Alejandro de la Fuente, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in race relations in Cuba.

Back then, ''it was not unusual at all for artists and intellectuals to have some sort of contact with the Communist Party,'' he said. ``It was a progressive, liberal force at the time. There was nothing to be ashamed of at the time. That changed in the late 1940s, after the end of World War II.''

FILE FROM COLD WAR ERA

U.S. EMBASSY REPORTED

ON CRUZ'S BARRED ENTRY

At her death a year ago, Cruz, 77, was an anti-communist icon of the Cuban-American exile community.

But even as thousands mourned her in New York and Miami, her Foreign Counter Intelligence file sat at FBI headquarters. In it were 32 pages from the Cold War era when John Foster Dulles was secretary of state, J. Edgar Hoover was FBI director, and his agents kept files on everyone from Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz to Marilyn Monroe.

The Cruz file obtained by The Herald is not complete. But the 18 pages released so far begin on July 23, 1955. Marked ''SECRET,'' an operations memorandum from the U.S. Embassy in Havana says the singer was refused entry into the United States under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that weeds out suspected subversives.

The memo also says that Cruz was earlier refused a visa in May 1952. It quotes reports that claim she was among a group in 1951 that signed a letter published in the Communist Party newspaper, Hoy, that endorsed a Pro-Peace Congress, and was a member of Cuba's Socialist Youth movement, at age 20.

It also claims she met secretly at age 27 with Cuban Socialist Party Secretary General Blas Roca Calderío, and had used an October 1953 concert as cover to meet covertly with communists in Caracas, Venezuela.

None of the records released, however, provide proof of these claims.

Also of concern, according to more than one memo, was her work at the communist radio station Mil Diez, where she performed a decade earlier -- in 1944.

Mil Diez emphasized entertainment over politics, had the fourth-largest audience in Havana, and carried a daily quiz on Marxist theory and application. The station was also a popular 1940s venue for emerging musicians to perform.

At the time, these activities were legal in Cuba. But U.S. immigration law forbade entry to foreigners found to have communist affiliations or anti-government sympathies.

Both the CIA and the FBI had agents in Havana, and it was embassy policy to submit each visa applicant to a political activity background check.

According to the documents, FBI headquarters in Washington did at least nine file background checks over several years -- looking through case files for references to Cruz, some explicitly for links to subversives.

An American who worked at the embassy then, and spoke with The Herald on the condition that he not be identified, said Cruz's 1955 visa application would have been rejected automatically -- because of government guidelines and the fact that she had already been rejected in 1952.

A few years later, the former embassy official said, U.S. policy would change as Cubans started to flee the island in earnest. People found to have flirted with communism were then given free passage from Castro's revolution.

But, given U.S. regulations and an internal report that called the entertainer a ''well-known communist singer and stage artist,'' 1955 America was off limits to Cruz.

Still, Cruz was also a celebrity among the 400 to 500 people who lined up each day to apply for visas at the U.S. Embassy. So American Vice Consul George Thigpen explained why her visa request was spurned -- in a two-page memo that went to Washington by diplomatic pouch.

It was part of a paper trail between Havana, the State Department and Hoover's FBI.

Today, at 81, Thigpen is retired in Virginia and says he does not recall the episode. ''I'm a great admirer of Celia Cruz, through her music,'' he said. ``She was just a very simpatico person.''

Thigpen said he thought he had seen Cruz only on television -- until a Herald reporter read him the memo by telephone.

PERMISSION IS GRANTED

SINGER VISITS U.S.

AND LATER GETS ASYLUM

Cruz would get permission to visit the United States two years later, in 1957. She traveled to New York again in 1960, to perform.

But the once classified documents reveal a nearly decadelong struggle to overcome the government's communist suspicions -- until she finally was granted asylum in 1961.

In America, Cruz appeared largely apolitical -- aside from very personal jabs at Castro, whom she blamed for making it impossible to return to Cuba in 1962 for her mother's funeral.

''She was anti-Castro. In all the interviews of her life, she told everybody that she was not going back to Cuba until Castro was out,'' said Cristóbal Díaz Ayala, 74, a Cuban music historian who lives in Puerto Rico and grew up near Cruz's family.

Yet she never mentioned her early blacklisting. Rather, says Díaz Ayala, she chose to portray her life story as sweet, like the sugar she took in coffee, not bitter. She grew up in a solar, a communal home for impoverished people, said Díaz Ayala, and ``Negro performers did not have the same opportunities as white entertainers in Cuba. But she never mentioned that. Not in Cuba. Not in exile. She was kind of a lady.

``She created her own world -- of things she wanted to forget, and things she wanted to remember.''

In her memoirs, written after her death from taped interviews, Cruz describes the 1950s as a halcyon time of chauffeurs and club dates, shimmering successes that made her seem transcendent, such a huge star that her race was inconsequential.

But at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, diplomats noted her race -- with interest.

In an urgent April 1957 telegram from Havana to headquarters, which characterized Cruz as a ''colored Cuban entertainer,'' an embassy official pleaded her case for a visa to perform in New York for the first time.

The telegram grappled with the question of whether she had been a member of the Popular Socialist Party, or PSP:

``Seven days signing (sic) engagement Puerto Rico Theater Bronx. Will receive gold record as recording artist from Sidney Siegel President of SEECO Records Company. Applicant continues denying PSP affiliation. Claims probable involuntary affiliation during employment at Radio Mil Diez.''

The cable urged reconsideration of her visa request, closing with ``Collect telephone reply requested.''

It was signed by U.S. Ambassador Arthur Gardner and addressed to the secretary of state. Gardner was an outspoken anti-communist envoy who went on to blame State Department careerists for Cuban President Fulgencio Batista's 1959 fall.

The cable also offered a curious incentive to approve her visa: ``In addition to public and press interest case is also matter of racial interest here.''

Fifties Havana was a color-conscious culture, with an unofficial but widely understood system of segregation, said de la Fuente, author of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba.

Black people were ''colored'' then, and while Cruz was a star, he said, she likely played at venues where black patrons did not go.

At the U.S. Embassy, in the years before Castro, American officials monitoring the island's communist movements saw the Popular Socialist Party as particularly attractive to blacks because it spoke of empowering the underclass.

So, by the 1940s, U.S. diplomats were trying to woo Cuba's black community -- inviting Afro-Cubans to embassy social events and pointedly visiting black clubs. Vouching for Cruz's visa made sense, de la Fuente said.

''They were trying to break a tight link between communism and Afro-Cubans,'' he said. "If they thought she was not a hard-core communist, I can see that they would see some advantage in trying to help her. That would fit with some sort of effort to court some support among Afro-Cubans.''

SINGER KEPT A SECRET

SHE SETTLED IN N.Y.

AND FOCUSED ON MUSIC

But throughout her life, Cruz kept that chapter secret. Even as late as 1961, six months after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, Cruz was aware of her record. In Mexico with Sonora Matancera, she sought a U.S. visa to play the Hollywood Palladium.

''SUBJECT EXPRESSED DESIRE CLEAR NAME,'' said a confidential Oct. 11, 1961, telegram from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. ``PLEASE FORWARD ANY DEROGATORY INFORMATION DEPARTMENT MAY HAVE SO EMBASSY CAN INITIATE DEFECTOR STATUS ACTION.''

A security source, cited by the embassy, ``BELIEVES SUBJECT COMPLETELY ANTI-COMMUNIST AND ENDORSES REQUEST.''

In exile, Cruz settled in the New York City area -- never moving to politically volatile Miami. She married her Sonora trumpeter, Knight, and reinvented herself from La Guarachera de Cuba to The Queen of Salsa, symbolizing her wider Latino appeal.

She recorded and toured relentlessly. She appeared in American films and Mexican soap operas, once as a santera, and for 20 years made an annual pilgrimage to Miami to sing on a Spanish-language TV telethon for the League Against Cancer, the disease that killed her last year.

When she worked on her memoirs, said co-writer Ana Cristina Reymundo, 'she never wanted to discuss politics. She would say, `I am an artist. And whenever politics comes in, art goes out the window. I learned that a long time ago.' ''