CubaPLUS Magazine

The Latin Music Institute (ILM) celebrates its 104th anniversary this Friday, working hard with the same energy that saw it born in defense, at all costs, of Latin music to contribute to its dissemination and development in the region and the world.

Regarding this celebration, CubaPLUS interviewed Daniel Martín, president of the ILM for seven years, who spoke extensively about the work carried out by the institution he leads. Notwithstanding the work developed by the ILM during its existence in favor of our music, Martin considered, there is still much to do as part of the resistance to the process of cultural colonization by cultural monopolies that is soft, but constant.

There are countries where we have been able to achieve better, deeper results, with an impact on education and on the appreciation of national and regional cultural values, but we do not always find the support of donors or allied local institutions that understand the problem, and do little or nothing to combat it concretely, he continued.

The Latin Music Institute was founded on February 21, 1921, as a healing thread that united, through culture, the wounds of a country that emerged from a decade of civil war, under the guidance of the then Mexican president, Álvaro Obregón, who, seeing his career as a musician frustrated by losing his right arm in 1915, promoted the development of the home, par excellence, of Latin musicians.

As radio appeared in 1922, sound film in 1930, and phonograms, Mexican culture expanded, and it connected with others, such as Cuban culture, from which it took genres such as bolero, son, and trova, among others, to take them to greater levels of exposure and popularity.

Mention should be made of Conjunto Matamoros and Rosita Fornés, two examples of the first careers that the ILM managed to facilitate. When answering a question about the meaning of being elected president of such a prestigious institution within Latin American culture, he said: “It has been an opportunity, since 2018, to publicly serve a broad interconnected community; not only of Latin artists, but of non-Latin audiences and artists who are attracted to our musical genres.”

Being an artist, as well as a multilingual businessman, Martin has expanded his executive capacity in a stage that has already lasted seven years with concrete results such as the increase of academic and cultural exchanges in Europe, the United States and the Caribbean, the creation of a children's department where he contributed to the character TITO REACCIONA and the network of Musical Reference Cities of Ibero-America, led by Santiago de Cuba.

Regarding TITO REACCIONA, Martin explained how the idea of the character came to him. When he arrived at ILM, there was no children's spokesperson. At home I had my son, whom his mother called TITO, and he watched many youtubers, I thought that this should be the way the character communicated. My son told me if TITO is a youtuber, then TITO REACCIONA; and that's where the name came from. At first, in 2018, he talked about music, then he grew up and talked about everything that occupies the lives of children.