Cubanocast

What's the connection between "Istanbul (not Constantinople)" and Caribbean music?

Edmundo Ros was a British-raised son of a Venezuelan mother and Scottish father. He was a great popularizer of Latin music in the English-speaking world and performed many Cuban songs.

Singles

One who likes history can see some parallels between Cuba and Turkey. Cuba too went through a fundamental transformation of their society, as implied in the song. The Muslim Turks captured Constantinople, the last sliver of the formerly great Byzantine empire in 1453. Fidel Castro and the Communists (That they were Communists surprised many Cubans.) captured Havana in 1959. Fidel Castro didn't change the capital's name, but he did subdivide the Cuban provinces and, like the Turks, changed his nation's religion- in a manner of speaking.

Castro used Cuba as the staging point of Communist evangelizing. The Turks encroached upon the Holy Roman Empire. Like the Turks at Vienna and afterwards, Cuban international goals were frustrated and Cuba suffered a decline, although it took the Turks 400 years to be the "sick man of Europe" while it only took Castro twenty to make Cuba one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere.

The Turks eventually overthrew the Sultan. Let's see what happens in Cuba.

Mostly, however: It's just a fun song. The Four Lads were the song's first performers and you're probably most familiar with the version by They Might be Giants.

Istanbul

The Amazon youtube video and mp3 download of the nerdy and greatly inferior They Might be Giants version is below. I bet you didn't know that they changed their name from, Nobody Can Say With any Certainty That They Are, In Fact, Superhumanly Large.

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)