In 1996, music legend Ry Cooder went to Cuba to search for buried treasure. He found gold. Looking for lost songs and forgotten singers, Cooder discovered an exotic land of passion, sensuality and music.

Singer/songwrtier Raul Malo explores Havana's streets and cultural scene, each segment a segue to musical performances with Cuban musicians Eliades Ochoa (of Buena Vista Social Club), indie-pop Sweet Lizzy Project, Ivette Cepeda, jazz pianist Roberto Foseca, a string quartet from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), and American latino-country-rock band the Mavericks.

Among the nearly 90,000 Cubans who settled in New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s were numerous musicians and entertainers, black and white, who did more than fill dance halls with the rhythms of the rumba, mambo, and cha cha cha. In her history of music and race in midcentury America, Christina D. Abreu argues that these musicians, through their work in music festivals, nightclubs, social clubs, and television and film productions, played...