Ry Cooder is the biggest rip off artist in the world. He took a group of nobodies--not "lost legends" as he profiled them in his famous movie and subsequent CDs, and pawned them off as if they where forgotten greats. To aggravate matters, their CDs were full of old songs belonging to real greats. A good analogy would be if I took an old garage band from the 1960's that never recorded an LP, made a movie on them where I claimed that they were lost legends, and had them record a CD with Beatles, Rolling Stones and Doors songs. Of course, since Americans and Europeans aren't that familiar with Cuban music, they swallowed the lie, line, hook and sinker and actually believed that they were listening to forgotten greats.