This glorious Thor’s day morning while the Big Fug wraps itself outside in its customary cloak of grey bone-chilling dankness, inside the conservatory in Bampton Road a fabulous mood prevails which all self-respecting salseros will understand. Who could possibly be down in the mouth while the divine Celia Cruz beguiles kneecaps and soul with Tumbaloflesicodelicomicoso and Willie Colon follows swiftly in her posthumous rustling skirts with his burning Willie Whopper.

If you want to storm this party treat yourself to the Rough Guide to Boogaloo, which also features other greats from the New York Latino scene of the late 1960s and 1970s-Tito Puente, the Fania Allstars, Ismael Rivera, Charlie Palmieri, Bobby Valentin and Ray Barretto.

Scorching stuff I assure you which may lift the sombre Lenten mood and has certainly got me flexing my two step in preparation for tomorrow’s Salsa night at my daughter’s primary school. Things are looking up, especially as I noted the principal came to work yesterday in her black leather pants. Ay conchita!

From the Boogaloo it’s not too far chronologically to the Cuban son played in the New York barrios of the 1970s and 80s. That intrepid Big Fug musicologist

Honest John who has done T&T so proud with his classic collection of London recorded calypsos London Is the Place for Me and who followed it last year with his soca collection Lif Yuh Leg An Trample also put out a brilliant Son Cubano NYC collection bristling with chocolate flavoured trumpets, tremulous flutes, raging piano montuno riffs, impeccable vocal harmonies, sinuous rhythms and explosive percussion.

This is the kind of visceral music which transports you effortlessly and inevitably all the way back to Cuba. Which is fine by me and where in fact I’ve spent most of the past few weeks. No I didn’t abscond from the Levi household in leafy Forest Hill where a virus which might be the Wacko Jacko (if the English ever bothered to name the latest flu) has laid all low. I merely did some astral tourism courtesy of the melancholic Cuban novel Distant Palaces by Abilio Estevez.

It may be difficult to find a common theme in contemporary novels from the Eastern Caribbean but Cuban prose writing of the last decade seems dominated by a stoic melancholia shot through with desperate and surreal humour, which reflects both the disintegration of Castro’s dream and the infrastructure of his island. Zoe Valdes in Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada, Pedro Juan Gutierrez in Dirty Havana Trilogy and Abilio Estevez all capture the impoverishment and decay which is as much a part of Cuba today as its vibrant culture and irrepressible humour.

Not far from the tourist beaches of Varadero or the floorshow of Havana’s Tropicana Club, ordinary and extraordinary Cubanos are literally living among the ruins.

Those who can flee, marry willing foreigners and fly out while the less fortunate sell themselves or await Castro’s demise, which seems in no hurry.

Don’t get me wrong I’m a devoted Cubanista and Havana is my favourite city on the planet but the fallout from failed political dreams and the wholesale ransoming of a people to these dreams is a reality which stalks the Antilles, especially in the largest islands of Cuba and Hispaniola and which is creating the kind of vacuum Uncle Sam is always ready to fill.

But winging back to the Big Fug where Guyanese-born Trevor Phillips head of the Commission for Racial Equality has had the cojones to suggest that a remedy for the continued educational failure of Afro-Caribbean boys (only 35 per cent of whom managed to gain five GCSE passes last year against the national average of 55 per cent) may be to teach them separately and to employ more black male teachers at higher than normal salaries if necessary.

Of course the politically correct cohorts—whose offspring are well out of it in their private fee paid for institutions—are spluttering in righteous indignation and Blairites and attendant sycophants are muttering that this would be illegal.

But then what is the solution to disaffected, alienated, under-educated black urban youth, whose horizons stretch no further than bling and the local crack turf and when a perceived cut eye in the street can lead to being gunned down for “disrespect” and South London gangs are now joining together in a new super posse called the Moslem Boys, hoping to trade off al Qaeda’s terrorist reputation.

It’s not easy but I suspect the Brit approach of setting up committees which will produce mountain ranges of documentation and feasibility studies, leading precisely nowhere, is probably not the correct one. Never mind eh?