When it comes to Cuban music, most Americans are playing catch-up: a 45-year embargo will do that to you. But as the success of the Buena Vista Social Club collective proves, there's a sizable audience in the United States eager to find out what they've been missing.

Los Zafiros: Music from the Edge of Time seeks to fill in one of those gaps by documenting a group who represented the modern sound of a new Cuba in the heady decade after the 1959 revolution. Los Zafiros (The Sapphires) fused Latin and Caribbean music with American doo-wop vocal harmonies, and although they were referred to as the Cuban Platters, they were not imitators.

What they created in the early 1960s was an inimitable and intoxicating sound that proved political barriers can't stop cultural cross-pollination. So it's telling that director Lorenzo DeStefano opens Los Zafiros not in Cuba, but in Miami's Little Havana, where a radio station is conducting a nostalgic battle of the bands.

At first, the call-in votes are evenly divided, but the fervor callers have for Los Zafiros is apparent, and they quickly pull ahead. It doesn't matter that they disbanded nearly 30 years ago, the affection is immediate and intense. In Cuba, as well as in the exile community, they remain vibrantly alive.

DeStefano fills his documentary with plenty of fan reminiscences and vintage performance footage, but the heart of the film is the reunion of the two surviving members of Los Zafiros in Havana. Singer Miguel Cancio leaves Miami and heads back to Cuba to see guitarist and arranger Manuel Galbán, and although there's a sense of hesitancy, the two quickly fall into a familiar rapport as they tour the Cayo Hueso neighborhood where the band was formed.

Cancio and Galbán were the oldest members of Los Zafiros, and were most in the background, but it quickly becomes apparent the they were the ones who anchored the vocal flights of Lenocio "Kike" Morua, Ignacio Elejaide, and Eduardo Elio "El Chino" Hernandez.

Although band members dressed in matching suits, and employed Motown style group choreography, there wasn't a sense of homogeny. Kike, Ignacio and El Chino each took the lead on songs tailored to their vocal strengths and individual tastes, which broadened their repertoire and their fan base.

The singers also took the lead in hard drinking and bad behavior, and the communal harmonies that made them such a vibrant musical force eroded. They split up after a tumultuous decade. But to see Cancio and Galbán perform together again, and visit the graves of their bandmates (bearing both flowers and rum), it's clear that the bond between them remains intact.

Even though this reunion serves as the main focus of the documentary, Music at the Edge of Time works best when it captures the deep affection Cubans feel for Los Zafiros, whose music is both specific — a soundtrack to a certain place and time — and eternal. That love extends to a successful tribute band, Los Nuevos Zafiros, and to the the 1997 fictional film Zafiros, Locura Azul (Blue Madness), produced by Hugo Cancio (Miguel's son), which won the People's Choice Award at the Havana International Film Festival.

Nostalgia is always a powerful force in films about Cuba, whose political isolation makes it seem to American eyes that time has stood still. And indeed, an exile like Miguel Cancio does walk around like a ghost touring his old haunts. But Manuel Galbán, who continues to perform regularly with Buena Vista Social Club mainstays like singer Ibrahim Ferrer and bassist Orlando "Cachaíto" López, displays the attitude captured in Wim Wenders' 1998 documentary; he lives very much in the present, without regrets.

While the film doesn't openly discuss race, it's clear from several of Cancio's comments that the fact that Los Zafiros were black and came from one of Havana's poorer neighborhoods made their success all the more surprising and their fans all the more passionate. Here were outsiders who had risen to become Cuba's face to the world, and to represent new possibilities to the island's residents.

Director Lorenzo DeStefano packs a lot of information into a brief 79 minutes, yet he carefully skirts politics, and in Cuba, that's always the elephant in the room. Los Zafiros seemed to enjoy an artistic freedom denied to a host of Cuban musicians who went into exile. How were they affected by the Communist government? Did their success ever make them targets, or did it immunize them to the influence?

Los Zafiros: Music at the Edge of Time doesn't answer those key questions, but as a portrait of multi-faceted musicians, who mined the world around them and forged a new sound, it sparkles.

© 2007, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.