The pianist and composer Arturo O'Farrill knows better than almost anyone that more than 50 years of a trade embargo between the U.S. and Cuba hasn't fully prevented the exchange of jazz between the two countries. He's known it since he first visited Cuba in 2002.
"The first thing that I encountered was great 'gulags' of young jazz musicians who worked really hard to master this craft that we thought was our own," O'Farrill says.
Not that he's happy about the blockade.