I hadn't eaten pea soup since I left Cuba 12 years ago. Having it for lunch or dinner at least 10 times a week for 22 years pretty much gave me my fill for life.

I also thought I'd had my fill of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, an Afro-Cuban dance and music ensemble from my hometown of Matanzas, after a constant dose of their music Saturday after Saturday for years.

When I left Cuba, I wanted to put my memories of life there behind me. No more totalitarian system, no more pea soup, no more Los Muñequitos.

Then, I heard Los Muñequitos had released a new album and had been touring the United States. I grew curious. So I asked my mother to cook some of her famous pea soup. She looked surprised, but said nothing and set a big bowl of soup on the kitchen table while I placed Los Muñequitos' latest CD, Live in New York, on the stereo.

After the first spoonful burst with flavor in my mouth and the drums on the CD made my shoulders quiver, I realized how stupid I'd been. I'd allowed a totalitarian system to deprive me of some of the things I love, even though I was no longer living under its foot.

Until hearing Live in New York, the persistent memory of Los Muñequitos was that of a perpetuator of a culture that kept holding me and so many others back. Every Saturday night, the group played at El Parque de la Catedral, a collection of broken benches and dying trees next to my hometown's 17th Century cathedral.

El Parque de la Libertad (Freedom Park), the town youths' regular meeting place, was only a block away. And while my friends and I argued who was best, Led Zeppelin or Rush, AC-DC or Quiet Riot, Los Muñequitos' drumming, an unbearable reminder of a suffocating reality, hovered over our discussions.

Cuban music was practically the only choice in national radio. We needed something else. We needed change. And that is where rock came in.

A ray of hope

For those of us who saw our future blocked by a wall of political taboos and nationalistic mediocrity, rock music offered an escape, a small ray of hope for a life in another land. Los Muñequitos, on the other hand, represented the past. Accepting them meant stepping back.

Yet here I was, listening to them from the other side of the Florida Straits. No wall to tear down, no urgency to flee and find a future, only nostalgia for the land left behind.

From the stereo speakers emerged the sound of a group The New York Times called masters of musical complexity.

But, for me, also emerging were images of La Marina, a neighborhood of rugged people where, in 1952, a group of longshoremen formed the band that would be called Los Muñequitos. As the music filled my living room, I was transported back to the line of row houses with doors ajar, doors through which you could see the altars dedicated to Chango or Obatala, the African deities with faces of Catholic saints. I once more was able to walk down El Callejon de Madan with my friend Isauro to have a cruda, Cuba's version of draft beer, at the Yumuri river bank. And by the time Los Muñequitos got to Congo Yambumba, the album's third tune and the groups' most famous one, I already felt myself, beer in hand, trailing a carnival procession down Milanes Street.

Art, not politics

Los Muñequitos recently ended its fourth tour of the United States. The group visited 16 cities in 11 states, but not Miami. Ann Rosenthal, the tour organizer, said Miami wasn't included out of concern for the group's safety.

A shame. I would have loved to see them again, to shake my hips to the sound of their rumba. And they would have loved to come here, too.

``We wanted to go to Miami,'' says Caridad Diez, the group's general producer. ``It's a shame that we couldn't.''

Who knows what would really happen if they did? There were protests when Gonzalo Rubalcaba played heretwo years ago, but an Issac Delgado concert this year went off without incident.

``We came here to do art, not politics,'' Diez says of the U.S. tour. ``Our art is our roots, our traditions, independent from any politics or ideology.''

I want to believe her because no government or ideology should have the rights to my culture. And it took 12 years to realize, but I don't want to relinquish those rights by tagging political labels to art, for a rumba will be a rumba whether sung in Matanzas or in Miami, by Celia Cruz or Los Muñequitos de Matanzas.