Ben Treuhaft has risked the wrath of US authorities in his quest to bring much needed working, in-tune pianos to Cuba, writes Belinda McKeon
Of all the bars in all the world, he had to walk into that one. Or had to pass through it, at least, on his way out into the streets of Havana. It was Ben Treuhaft's first time in Cuba, in 1993, and he wanted to see as much of the capital city as he could. But something in the hotel bar caught his eye, not to mention his ear. The hotel pianist was "a tall, distinguished black guy", he remembers, "wearing glasses". The tune - no joke - was As Time Goes By. The piano, meanwhile, was as bruised and as battered an instrument as Treuhaft, a piano tuner of three decades' standing, had ever seen. His trip to Havana, already driven by a goal - he had travelled there on a tour with a human rights organisation intent on protesting the US embargo against Cuba - now took on new purpose.
"Afterwards, the pianist was complaining about the piano, about how various parts of it were broken," says Treuhaft. "I said, 'Don't worry, tomorrow morning I will fix all this stuff'. And after I had fixed it, he very shyly asked if I could come to his house, and fix the piano there. And I did, and that started this long friendship." But it turned out to be a friendship with more than just one pianist.
The next afternoon, by the time the job was done, word of Treuhaft's handiwork had already begun to spread. When a country of gifted pianists is also a country of banjaxed pianos, an adept tuner is bound to find himself the focus of some attention. Treuhaft had tuned for the greats in the US - Glenn Gould and Vladimir Horowitz among them - but the Cuban musicians didn't look for credentials; they were grateful for the expertise of any tuner at all. The last tuners trained on the island were graduates of a Russian instructor in the 1970s, and when Treuhaft first visited, the entire population was depending on eight elderly tuners, four of them blind.
A few days after his encounter with the hotel pianist, Treuhaft visited the Cuban Museum of Music. There, he was approached by the director. "I ended up commuting to that museum for the next few years," he laughs. But what started out as a mission to tune and fix as many "pianos in need", as he puts it, as possible (he charged a discretionary fee of $1), soon turned into a much more ambitious mission. Cuban pianos were in terrible shape, as the experience of the Buena Vista Social Club pianist Rubén González had shown - he lost his piano to termites in the 1980s - and the effects of heat, humidity and salty breezes on pianos were just as catastrophic. But pianos were also in painfully scant supply. Havana didn't just need tuners, it needed instruments, full stop. What pianos were at the disposal of musicians were either inferior Russian models - traded for sugar and cigars - or American antiques; because of the blockade, hardly any new instruments had been imported for decades. Out of this marriage of difficulty and demand, Treuhaft's charity brainchild, Send a Piana to Havana, was born. Not only did he round up piano tuners from the US and Europe to travel to Cuba, at their own expense, to get to work on the island's population of shabby pianos, but he began to round up instruments as well.
"People gave us the pianos that were mouldering in their basements," Treuhaft explains. "If they were any good, we took them. We had ways of collecting them." Exactly 237 pianos have been delivered to the island since 1995, donated by schools, communities and individuals all over the US. Because of the trade embargo, the instruments were generally transported to Montreal and shipped from there, though the team occasionally braved the voyage across the Straits of Florida. But the risks involved with shipping from the US were so great - not least among them the desire of disgruntled Cuban- Americans in Florida to sabotage or steal the shipments - that Montreal, though by far the more expensive option, was often the only one.
Treuhaft uses the word "smuggling" for what he and his team do, but he's quick to clarify that this is just a turn of phrase. The project has always been licensed by the US Department of Commerce, he says - even if, sometimes, that department "forgets" that such a licensing agreement exists. "Sometimes they forget that we're doing a humanitarian thing and they attack us for travelling to Cuba without a travel licence," he says. "But every time they do that, it's very good for us. Because they always lose, and we always get a lot of publicity."
TREUHAFT HAS CLEARLY discovered a taste for political activism with the Piana project; then again, it may be in his blood, with a Mitford sister (Jessica, the writer) for a mother and a famous civil rights lawyer (Robert Treuhaft, who gave a start to a young intern called Hillary Rodham in the early 1970s).
Either way, he seems to relish the thorniness of his relationship with the American government. When, in 1996, the Department of the Treasury ignored the licence granted to Piana shipments by the Department of Commerce (which had specified that the pianos could be exported as long as they were not used for torture or human rights abuse), Treuhaft, in turn, ignored its threats of some $1.3 million in fines and a 10-year jail term. He continued to make trips to Cuba - at one stage, on a Halloween trip, dressed as an upright piano - and, following negotiations by his lawyer, communications from Treasury ceased. But trouble reappeared in 2003, when the Bush administration took away the organisation's licence to trade, and a year later banned the future shipment of any pianos to Cuba (they were deemed "not consistent with US foreign policy towards Cuba"). Only medicinal supplies could be exported there, the government ruled.
Cue a long letter from Treuhaft's lawyer to the government, arguing that music was "food and medicine to the soul", and detailing the spiritual and humanitarian comfort afforded by pianos and other instruments to the Cuban people. By the time the letter had been sent, Treuhaft had shipped another few dozen "medicinal" pianos to Havana. This year, the licence to ship pianos was finally renewed.
Not that Treuhaft will be writing any thank-you notes to the Department of Commerce. In the last two years, the focus of the project has shifted away from the shipment of pianos - with 237 instruments delivered, he says, the island is groaning under the weight - and towards a longer-term initiative: the development of the school of tuning and instrument repair, founded by Armando Gomez Pino, an associate of Treuhaft's, in 2002. Gomez Pino worked as head janitor in a Havana school and noticed that many of the pianos and supplies that arrived from the US were being distributed to corrupt or incompetent officials and ending up either sold or stolen.
"So he struggled, for about a year, to wrest control of the arriving pianos away from them and into the school system. And once he did that, he became very ambitious and decided to start up a school of piano tuning, which we supported. And he has now convinced the Cuban school system to give an official degree in piano restoration."
There was one potential drawback to Gomez Pino's plan: he knew nothing about piano tuning. But a year at a Canadian tuning school, and frequent consultations with the "brigades" of tuners recruited from around the world by Treuhaft and sent annually to Havana, helped him to overcome that obstacle. (Another obstacle has been more persistent, however: the 212F stamp on his passport, which classifies Gomez Pino as a threat to US national security because of his nationality, and bans him, like other Cuban musicians and tuners, from entering the US.) What Treuhaft wants to do next is to move Gomez Pino, his tuners and his pupils, beyond their present, "small, putrid and humid" premises and to build a "big, beautiful school". Young Cubans are "desperate to learn" how to tune and repair pianos, he says. But having battled with the US government to get these young enthusiasts the instruments, the tools and the teachers they need to master their art, Treuhaft is now locked in battle with the Cuban government. "They won't give us the big building that we need; won't rent it to us, sell it to us or give it to us, so that we can make a proper thing to fit Armando's ambitions. They're too busy with other things, it seems."
GALWAY-BASED TUNER Ciaran Ryan made the trip to Havana in May as part of this year's tuning brigade, and he sees the involvement of tuners and other volunteers from countries other than the US as vital to the expansion and strengthening of the school. "We're not waving flags, singing Vive la Révolution or anything like that, but with the embargo being cranked up under every successive administration, any visit to Cuba is a poke in the eye to American foreign policy," he says. "Because the American tuners can't stay there for more than a few days without basically risking their business, a few of us non-Americans are going to go out there for longer and concentrate on training. The Americans come down on short trips and tune as many pianos as they can, but we're going to stay with those training as tuners, teach them how to rebuild pianos, restring them, fit new hammers, replace the workings. It's a 'teach a man how to fish and you feed him for life' mentality." Eventually, Ryan hopes to see Cuban students come to Ireland for short apprenticeships with tuners here.
"I had no idea that the conditions out there were so bad," he says. "But still the kids are queuing up outside to do their practice, and they manage to make amazing music out of it. These are pianos that, in the academy, would be considered unplayable completely. Irreparable. 'Dump it.' Teachers would be walking out. But there they just work so hard at their music; they are so interested, so well-informed. And I have something that I can give these people that's going to make a difference, going to help. I think that's why so many people over here are interested as well. It's something practical."
• A concert in aid of Pianas for Havana takes place in Vicar Street, Dublin, tomorrow at 8pm (tickets from Vicar Street or Ticketmaster: 0818-719390). A second concert will be held in the Black Box, Galway on Wednesday at 8pm (bookings on 091-569777). Barry Douglas, Joanna MacGregor, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and the Vladimir Karell/Conor Guilfoyle Quartet will perform