Cuba''s "Rolling Stones of salsa" set for U.S. tour

HAVANA (Reuters) - Grammy-winning Cuban band Los Van Van are celebrating 40 years of salsa revolution with a long-awaited return to the United States next month.

Los Van Van, a cult band credited with reinventing salsa time and again since their debut in 1969, will be the latest group of Cuban artists to benefit from a quiet resumption of cultural exchanges under current U.S. President Barack Obama.

Well-known Cuban musicians are being granted visas to perform at U.S. venues, a sign that Obama''s administration is promoting cultural contacts as part of a strategy of warmer "people to people" ties with the Communist-run island.

Los Van Van''s Key West show prefaces a 70-concert U.S. tour starting in April.

Band leader and bassist Juan Formell hopes the tour will exorcise memories of one of the group''s last U.S. appearances -- a 1999 show in Miami where U.S. anti-riot police had to keep angry Cuban exile protesters from harassing concert-goers.

Miami is the center of the Cuban exile community in the United States.

But Formell, 67, says that hostility against artists from the island has eased.

"I was in Miami recently and nobody treated me poorly. On the contrary, people wanted to have pictures taken with me, they asked for autographs," he said in a recent interview with Reuters.

"Miami has changed a lot ... there is a new, younger generation that thinks differently," said the gray-haired, bespectacled bandleader whom some Cubans call "Saint Juan".

Formell has reshaped the traditional sound of salsa by adding electric guitars, synthesizers and violins to Los Van Van. He went further by mixing son, jazz, afro rhythms and even a bit of The Beatles to create what is called "songo," Cuba''s version of salsa.

"We have had lots of detractors. They said we were not doing Cuban music. But time went on and we managed to win people over," he said.