In 1996, the blues guitarist Ry Cooder gathered together some wonderful Cuban musicians in their seventies and eighties for a successful recording project. Two years later, Cooder went back to Cuba, this time accompanied by cameras and the German director Wim Wenders, seeking out the men and women of Cuban music on the streets and in the old dance halls of Havana. In this beautiful city that got left behind by the global economy, the bedraggled stone buildings and pre-revolutionary Chevys and Dodges have aged into pure soulfulness. So have the musicians, who still look great, play beautifully, and exude a stirring seriousness and dignity. The movie comes closer to pure happiness than anything else in the theatres at the moment, and it has an intriguing and moving subtext: the Cubans' buried but irrepressible love of things American.
