POP/ROCK - May 30, 1989

Salsa singer Celia Cruz was awarded an honorary doctor of music degree Monday from Yale University during the school’s 288th commencement exercises. “Your unique style has forged in this, your adopted country, a new form of Caribbean music and made salsa an international rhythm in which you have once again proclaimed an unbowed affirmation of life,” said Yale President Benno C. Schmidt Jr. Cruz, now a resident of New York, began singing on radio in her native Cuba in the late 1940s. She went into voluntary exile in 1960, after the Communist takeover, eventually settling in the United States.