Miami honors its Latino roots with mural of great international salsa stars

Miami’s Little Havana, the city’s Hispanic district par excellence, reinforces the Latino character of this city in southeast Florida with the presentation this Thursday of a mural made by Venezuelan artist Pedro Aguiar in homage to great salsa legends.

The Miami commissioner for District 3 -which includes Little Havana-, Joe Carollo, mayor of the US city for two terms, told EFE that he supports the initiative for the recognition it gives to Latino culture, in front of a mural with portraits of Celia Cruz, Oscar D’León, Rubén Blades, Tito Puente, Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón.

“They had taken away our culture”, Carollo pointed out about what he understands as the progressive loss of the Latino character of Little Havana, which now resumes the Hispanic flavor with this mural 5 meters high (16 feet) and 20 meters (65 feet) wide with the portraits of those emblematic salseros.

He stressed that this new mural by Latino artists will also serve to promote the arrival of tourists to the neighborhood and, with this, promote its economic development.

The singers immortalized in the mural, at the intersection of legendary 8th Street and 19th Avenue, were chosen for the impact they had on the Miami cultural scene during the past decades of the 1960s and 1970s.

The mural, the work of Pedro Aguiar, based in Miami and known in the artistic world as CYST1, had the support of the Kcull Life Foundation, a non-profit organization created to preserve the cultural legacy of Miami’s neighborhoods.

Aguiar told EFE on Thursday that the objective of the initiative is “because of what was the area of ​​Little Havana for the Latino culture of Miami” and in order to preserve the city’s Hispanic and salsa heritage.

“It took me three and a half weeks to paint the mural,” He said about his work, which, as he stressed, “touches the foundation of Hispanic music in Miami.”

“With this project I followed my dream”, stressed Aguiar, for whom, over the years, “the neighborhood was nothing like before.”

The Kcull Life Foundation continues with this initiative its project “Latino Music and Art Series”, an effort to beautify the neighborhoods of Miami.

The president of the Kcull Life Foundation, the Puerto Rican Walter Santiago, told EFE that all the artists represented in the mural “are admired legends and a symbol of Latino culture” in Miami and the United States.

“We are delighted to have Pedro on board for this project, with his self-taught evolution that sets him apart from other artists”Santiago said.

Other initiatives by Fundacion Kcull Life include the 2021 mural dedicated to Celia Cruz by artist Miss Lushy, located next to Celia’s star on the Little Havana Walk of Fame.

The campaign between the Kcull Life Foundation and local artists to improve historic neighborhoods and preserve Cuban-American culture saw Miami get a new mural in honor of Gloria and Emilio Estefan in Little Havana in 2022, the work of the artist Disem305 who painted the enormous portrait of the couple in the eighties.

WITH INFORMATION FROM EFE.