Queen of Salsa Celia Cruz who challenged Fidel Castro honored on U.S. quarter

Next year the "Queen of Salsa" will be honored by the U.S. Mint. The image of the late, great Celia Cruz will be memorialized on the obverse side of a 2024 U.S. quarter, part of the American Women Quarters series that is paying homage to civil and women’s rights leaders like Susan B. Anthony along with scientists who changed the course of America, and in some instances, the world.

Cruz will also be the first Afro Latina to be honored on a U.S. coin, but the government’s decision to give the world famous crossover Latin singer her due comes as no surprise.

Throughout her career, Cruz was awarded several Grammy and Latin Grammys and was the recipient of the 1994 National Medal of Arts, one the nation's highest honors. She also has a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame and another on Miami's famous Calle Ocho.

The Latina superstar singer also has a special New York City school named after her: The Celia Cruz Bronx High School of Music, located at 2780 Reservoir Avenue.

The honor comes two decades after the once living legend passed away at 78 from brain cancer.

According to a report published by NBC’s Noticias Telemundo, “Cruz is remembered by those close to her as a nurturing friend who spent hours answering fan letters by hand, who loved to cook Cuban food once a year when she wasn't touring the world, and who was still humbled and surprised when thousands of fans attended a concert she gave at a festival in Finland, ‘close to the North Pole.’”

The Spanish news outlet interviewed Cruz’s longtime manager for almost 30 years, with Omer Pardillo Cid, who was also the executor of her estate, stylist Tico Torres, and photographer Alexis Rodríguez.

Torres and Rodriguez began working with Cruz in London and went on to style and photograph the famous Latina singer for years, and the three remained friends throughout their lives.

What soon unfolded for Cruz was a lifelong career that would lay down the foundation for Latin crossover artists for decades to come.

“If anyone has to get credit for the real crossover, without speaking the language and without singing in English, it was Celia Cruz,” Pardillo Cid told Telemundo. 

Cruz was an Afro-Cuban, and was proud of her heritage, her former manager said. She was the first Afro-Latina to perform at Carnegie Hall and sing in Spanish on American television.

Pardillo Cid said fans still gush at how proud they are that “30 or 40 years ago Celia Cruz already represented us.” 

At Miami’s "Celia Cruz Forever" exhibit the Tower Theater features a recreation of Cruz's dressing room and a virtual experience of her putting on makeup. To honor Cruz’s faith and love for family, it shows the things she always kept close to her including a photo of her mother and a rosary.

“Celia had that energy that filled a room, that entered you,” Torres, her photo-shoot stylist, told Telemundo. “Celia was energy."

Cruz was also known for her elaborate dresses, 30% of which have been preserved by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, about 40 dresses.

One of those dresses is a silver garment she wore at the Cuba’s famous Tropicana cabaret over 70 years ago before Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban Revolution pushed the island into Marxist-Leninism.

At one time she reportedly had more than 100 dresses and more than 100 wigs to give her audience a new blend of her personality each time she performed.

Some of those wigs were auctioned in 2022 for as much as $3,000.

When she was in a hurry she turned to a particular wig she called María Auxiliadora, (an expression for the Virgin Mary as a helper) because “she always got her out of trouble.” Another orange wig was auctioned in 2022 for $3,000.

Her manager said when she was not on stage she still wore lipstick and false eyelashes. She also had a collection of fans.

“She always walked with a different fan,” Pardillo Cid said.” And she always carried her figures of the Virgin Mary, especially that of the Caridad del Cobre, our Lady of Charity, which is Cuba's patron saint. “

According to the manager turned executor, Cruz took the little figurine from her native island when she was exiled by the communists in the 1960s and vowed to never return until it was free. 

Her oath was realized when the Castro regime refused to allow her reentry to attend the funeral of her mother, Catalina Alfonso. The order was personally handed down by Fidel Castro.

“Just in case I don’t return, / I’ll take your flag / regretting that my liberated eyes didn’t see you,” Cruz says in her song about Cuba, “Just in case I don’t return.” 

To those who knew her and her Cuban fans, Cruz was a true champion of freedom. One of the most common and frequent themes in her life was singing about her exile.

“I thought that at any moment / I was going to return to your soil/but time is passing/and your sun keeps crying," she sang.

Sadly, Cruz did not get to return to a free Cuba throughout her lifetime. At this stage, even if Cuba is liberated from its reigning military dictatorship, her body will not be returned either, Pardillo Cid said.

“Her body would remain where she is, in New York, in the place where she chose to be eternally,” he told Telemundo.

Photographer Alexis Rodríguez, who grew up in Miami’s Little Havana—near the Tower Theater where his mother took him to watch movies—can still go back to see a photograph on display he shot of Cruz three decades ago.

“Here is the exhibition of Celia Forever, in this theater, where I went and was inspired by watching [Federico] Fellini’s films,” Rodríguez said. “Now I am back there, with our photo at the Tower Theater, and we are in the big screen, in the theater where I was going to watch all those movies, how crazy is that?”

Pardillo Cid said that despite finding out about her cancer, she continued having high spirits and showing affection for her friends.

“I think she never expected it,” Pardillo Cid said in his interview. She hugged Pedro and me crying,” adding that she faced the affliction “with incredible courage,” even continuing to record her music.

“We would go to the radiation in the morning at a hospital in New York City and in the afternoon we would return to the studio to record,” he said.

A week before she died, she was planning a photo shoot in Paris.

Her team had hoped to shoot the Afro-Latina singer by the Eiffel Tower but went to a park to avoid an audience. 

But the world renowned singer’s fame drew attention quickly.

“When we started there was no one, not a single person. When we finished we had like 40, 50, waiting to talk to her. It was incredible, very nice,” Rodriguez and Torres told Telemundo.

“She remained Celia until the end. She never let the disease change her,” Rodríguez said.