La Lupe's Grave: A Salsa Legend's Hard End and Most Passionate Disciple
La Lupe's Grave
Into this lost age was born, on Dec. 23, 1939, a girl named Victoria Lupe Yoli, who would one day head for New York and, borne up by the post-WWII influx of Latinos into the city, become the queen of salsa. She was known as "La Lupe," or "La Yi Yi Yi"?which was an excited term of endearment bestowed upon her by her rabid fans. She cut more than 36 albums in her career, 15 of which went gold, and her stage shows became legendary for their energy, their sexuality and excess. La Lupe fans will tell you: she didn't just get up and sing and dance, she burned the stage down. You talk to Latinos who are over 40 about La Lupe, and they all agree that she was one of salsa's great female singers. Then they get a faraway look in their eyes, and talk about what a shame her later years in the Bronx were.
Looking into La Lupe's life can be like chasing a ghost, a ghost who was always on the move. Her Cuban years are little researched, the story of her torrid singing career filled with conflicting facts. Her early life: born into and raised by a middle-class family?her father worked for Bacardi?in Santiago de Cuba. Graduated from the University of Havana with a teaching certificate (she never taught a class in her life) and a bit of English. In 1959, left her home in Santiago de Cuba and headed for Havana and its nightlife.
While Castro was working his way down from the Sierra Maestra to throw out Batista and his foreign backers, La Lupe joined a trio called Los Tropicubas. She married one of the band members and had a son by him. According to LaMusica.com, she was asked to leave the band because she lacked discipline, though many think the cause was her outrageous act. She was incredible, a dynamo, irradiating an incredibly aggressive sexual energy. She'd strip down to her undergarments; fling herself around the stage; let everything hang out. Under Castro, Cuba was becoming increasingly puritanical, and La Lupe evoked the decadent days before the revolution. It was asking for trouble.
Solo now, and appearing on tv, she in 1960 cut her first album, Con el Diablo en el Cuerpo?well-named "with the devil in the body"?and her career began to rise. But as her stage act got wilder, Cuban authorities started to frown on her. By 1963 she had fled Cuba with her son, and she wound up in New York City.
In New York she hooked up with another recent Cuban emigre, Mongo Santamaria. Santamaria was a legendary Afro-Cuban percussionist, and leader of his Mongo Santamaria Orchestra. Together, they cut an album called Mongo Introduces La Lupe for Tico Records. More success: Tico Records paired her with one of its hottest acts, Tito Puente, and the duo's 1965 album, Tito Puente Swings, The Exciting Lupe Sings sold more than 500,000 copies. New York's Latin Press named her salsa singer of the year in both 1965 and 1966. Tito and La Lupe stayed together for three more top-selling records.
Meanwhile, the singer was adding to her reputation as an intense performer, entering trance states onstage, ripping at her clothes while she chanted, performing under the influence?or so she claimed?of her Santerian saints. Pablo Picasso reportedly saw a La Lupe show and declared the singer a genius; her wanton performances, which jacked female sexuality up to the point where it threatened to exceed societal control, made her an icon among gay Latino men. To this day it's La Lupe whom Latino transvestites try to look like.