One of my first experiences of the sound of Havana occurred in a moment, as I was walking one evening in Vedado near the beautiful old theatre, Amadeo Roldán. A young man stepped out of his house just as I was passing. He put a trumpet to his lips and began playing, simply and beautifully, as I walked past. It was night, not very late, and the music followed me as I continued walking down calle Calzada toward my apartment.
A random, lone trumpet sounding melodically in the city night sky, it’s almost a clichéd Hollywood image, but it happens from time to time in Havana. If you can’t wait for a random moment, take a walk along avenida Boyeros, near the Omnibus Terminal, not far from Revolution Square. Across the street is a stadium where, owing to the great acoustics provided by the cement awnings, horn players regularly gather to practice. The same thing happens on the Malecón, near the statue of Antonio Maceo, where an underpass (which is always closed) also attracts horn players. Geographers claim that music is how Havana neighbourhoods are transformed from “space to place”— traditional son is the sound of tourist-heavy Old Havana, drums are persistent in predominantly Afro Cuban Centro, and internationally inflected jazz reigns in cosmopolitan Vedado.1 Personally, I hear more of a mixture than a boundary when I walk these streets, but the point is, Havana is a musical city.
The richness of Cuban music has drawn attention and visitors for over a century. “Why is Cuban music so good?” is a question I pose as research to my Canadian students, fully and ironically aware that this formulation skews the results. But that is my point: we can begin the discussion from the premise that Cuban music is “so good.” There are plenty of ways to explore why that is so, but most would agree that syncretism or cultural mixing provides part of the answer. Cuban music mixes historical and geographic influences like nothing else. In Havana one can appreciate not only the immense quality of Cuban music but also its variety. Genres such as salsa, son, bolero, mambo, and jazz are familiar to foreign audiences because of how they have crossed borders. In Havana one can hear the full range of traditional or classical Cuban sounds, as well as genres that might take visitors by surprise: trova (which is comparable to folk), hip hop, rock, reggaetón, metal, and country have all been remixed and reinterpreted in distinctly Cuban ways.
There are dozens of venues in Havana to hear some of the best music of the world. I can still hear Kervin Barreto playing the classic “Viente Años” (Twenty Years) on his trumpet at the La Zorra y el Cuervo, a popular jazz club on La Rampa in Vedado. I have been deliriously happy hearing a range of different music from the undulating 1950s balconies at the Mella Theatre on calle Línea, under the stars at the beautiful outdoor club el Sauce in Playa, as well as at two other popular venues, el Brecht and the Fábrica de Arte Cubano. However, walking the street, day or night, is almost like attending an ambulatory concert — or rather a series of concerts. In Havana “garage bands” are rooftop bands or balcony bands or courtyard bands, audible at various levels all over the neighbourhood. If you live near a park or community centre you don’t need to know the schedule of musical events during the weekend, because a strong breeze and an open window (which all of them mostly are) will deliver the sound right to your apartment. One December evening during the Havana Jazz Festival I decided, after a lot of late nights in a row, I needed a night in. Reluctantly, I stayed home to catch up on some sleep. I should have known better. That night, right from my bed, I listened to one of my favourite ensemble groups, Interactivo, perform outdoors at a cultural centre two blocks from my apartment — the same beautiful set that had done me in when I had heard them play the night before in a club.
All this music-making doesn’t just happen. It is a cliché that Cuban musicians are among the best in the world, but it’s not by magic.2 The Cuban revolution built a tremendous education system in the early years, and music education was no exception. Here they built on a pre-existing tradition of musicianship, handed down from generation to generation. Cuba’s long history as a tourist destination actually nurtured this musicianship, as generations of fathers taught generations of sons (and occasionally daughters) to perform old standbys like “Guantanamera” for generations of tourists. After 1959, the Cuban government expanded and formalized this training, turning golf courses into music schools and opening countless neighbourhood casas de cultura, cultural centres. The new government closed the nightclubs and casinos, and plenty of world-famous musicians such as Celia Cruz left for Miami and New York. But those who stayed saw a different kind of musical culture develop, which emphasizes performance over album sales, and provides sophisticated education even when the most basic elements like proper instruments remain scarce. Even through the Soviet years of grey, ideological rigidity, music remained defiantly Cuban, and both musicians and audiences alike are educated and selective.3 Cuba is one of the few places in the world where, when a child declares their intention to be a musician, parents might actually be pleased.
The emphasis on performance over recording doesn’t make musicians wealthy, but it expands their skill and their repertoire. It also provides them with a bit of ammunition against censorship. Censorship hides in plain sight in Cuba. I know a couple of young, hip art students who work part-time for the Cuban TV station as censors. It is their job to scan foreign TV shows before they are broadcast and bleep political references that the Cuban government doesn’t like. They are given a list of key symbols or words to look for — US flags or critical references to Cuba or communism, for example — then they just edit them out. They are as committed to this as my own students in Canada are to serving coffee or slinging beer; it’s a job, nothing more.
For musicians, censorship is a bit more complex because performing live always allows for a dynamic relationship between artist and audience. The state retaliates by controlling access to the airwaves and concert venues, but, despite that, popular Cuban musicians maintain strong and organic bonds with their audiences. Musician Carlos Varela made gentle fun of his experiences with censorship in song, laconically summing up their efforts in “Memorias”:
“Sometimes they play me on the radio,
Sometimes they don’t.”4
Cubans can take matters — and voices — into their own hands to thwart the censors. Concerts are a delight to be part of in Havana because everyone sings. Joaquín Borges-Triana, one of Cuba’s premier music writers, told me once that in Cuba it’s like the musicians are accompanying the audience rather than the other way around. It seems that everyone knows the lyrics to everything. Concerts are more like conversations, or perhaps choral festivals. But even non-concert venues can give people cause to sing. I once attended a screening of a Spanish-made documentary about Silvio Rodríguez, one of the founding fathers of contemporary Cuban music, revered by several generations since he emerged in the 1960s. One of his signature songs played through the credits, and even as the lights came up I watched hundreds of movie-goers remain in their seats singing happily along with Silvio on the screen.
These days, to the frustration of many, the real music of the people is reggaetón, which is not known for its complexity, musicianship, or lyrics. The driving beats of reggaetón (the “ón” adds force; it could be translated as “reggae max” or “big reggae”) are a mix of electronics and vocals. It’s a mix of Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and Trinidadian sounds, though as it circulates every nation puts their on imprint on it. It is now the ambient sound of just about every Havana neighbourhood, apartment building, store, and taxi (at least the inexpensive ones). Taking a bus to the large concert venues such as Teatro Karlos Marx in Miramar — a mammoth 5,000-seat theatre — can be just as much of a musical event as the concert itself. On the night buses, reggaetón blasts from headphones, cellphones, and portable devices of various kinds. People move as though on a dance floor. My Canadian friend Ruth tells me she saw someone hang a disco ball in a crowded bus as it sped along.
Despite the sometimes-intense sexism of the lyrics (almost inaudible to me, however, in its rapid-fire, slangy street Spanish), I’m not so bothered by reggaetón, even when it’s blasting from the neighbour’s balcony below me, or from a taxi I’m in. Musicians hate reggaetón because of its low level of musicianship, but others complain more about its explicit hypersexuality. Joaquín Borges-Triana questions this moralistic condemnation of reggaetón, noting that such criticisms “reflect a longstanding tradition of denying sexuality and pleasure to women.”5 Geoffrey Baker, an English musicologist, tells a great story about how a visiting Harry Belafonte took Fidel Castro aside in 1999 to convince him that hip hop, as a genre, should not be simply dismissed as “la música del enemigo”— the music of the enemy, as US popular music such as rock had been branded since the 1960s in Cuba.6 For Belafonte, hip hop — like rock and roll before it — was a global, powerful art form, from which Cuban youth should not be excluded. He seems to have had some success convincing Castro of his position. Every generation demonizes a type of music, and blames it for all kinds of social problems.
Of course there are fans of particular musical genres in Cuba. But the general Cuban enthusiasm for music of all styles, genres, and varieties is palpable. “Market segments” among the audience are almost unknown or indistinguishable from each other. I am always shocked by the level of musical awareness, knowledge, and appreciation I see in Havana. I have conversations about the latest hip hop group with colleagues in their seventies. One afternoon in a Havana pool I watched a sixty-something Cuban woman dancing, beer in one hand, grandchild’s hand in another, to the tune of the popular reggaetón hit “Loco sexual.” A concert of almost any sort draws a vast demographic, and the repertoire of the black-clad kids in their twenties who congregate in the evenings on calle G occasionally includes Silvio Rodríguez classics from the 1960s. The whole country is a playlist.
“If you want to learn anything about the history of this country, you have to start listening to Carlos Varela.” This advice, offered by Caridad Cumaná, a Cuban colleague who was helping me make my way through a Havana film archive, proved remarkably true. When I came to Cuba to research political conflicts about child migration in 2004, I also gained a huge appreciation for music as a form of truth-telling and social commentary. Carlos Varela has become one of my most beloved singers, but he’s also my favourite Cuban historian. He’s just one example of something Bruce Springsteen declared years ago: “We learned more from a three minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.”
Good musicians can be great historians because they take us places that only the poets can go. Varela’s music charts the emotional landscape of Havana, as well as the dreams and disillusionments of his generation: those who inherited but did not build the revolution of 1959. He performed one of his signatures, “The Sons of William Tell,” for the first time in 1989 in the venerable Chaplin Theatre in the heart of Havana’s bohemian film world at Twenty-Third and Twelfth Streets. It instantly became a generational anthem, because it imagines how William Tell’s son grew tired of being target practice for his dad. For decades, Cuban audiences have sung along to the chorus — “William Tell, your son grew up, he wants to shoot the arrow himself”— leaving no doubt that this is a piercing commentary on the arrangement of Cuban political power.7 His decision to record a live version of the song underlines its importance as what one Cuban journalist termed “our hymn of independence.” On the recording, the sound of a huge theatre singing along builds to a roar when the son tells William Tell that “it was now his turn to place the apple on his own head.”
Varela sings about the stuff of newspapers and textbooks: immigration conflicts, the US blockade, Cuban state censorship, and post-Soviet world politics. But he does so with the musicianship of a virtuoso and the imagery of a poet. Unlike Varela’s Cuban fans, I don’t hear the specific traumas and dreams of my youth narrated in his music. Rather, I have found evocative lessons in Cuban history.
Do governments that rely on direct political censorship produce better artists? I had been listening to Varela for years before I fully caught the significance of this line, which begins the song “Politics Don’t Fit in a Sugar Bowl”:
“A friend bought a ’59 Chevrolet
He didn’t want to change any parts, and now it doesn’t move.”
One of Cuba’s old American cars, for which the island is famous, stands as a metaphor for what happens when one doesn’t change or update things (cars, revolutions) that were built in 1959. The metaphor hides in plain sight.
Varela’s historical vantage point is the neighbourhood. He’s the historian of those who observe, experience, and feel, but never seem to make historical change. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic cataclysm it unleashed on Cuba are recounted in the rapidly changing imagery and fast pace of “Now That the Maps Are Changing Colour,” which features burning books, falling walls, empty markets, beheadings, and missing money. “Robinson” employs the image of Robinson Crusoe to symbolize Cuba’s place in the post-Soviet world: “alone, on an island, like you and I.” “Checkmate 1916” tells the story of the Cuban Revolution as a footnote to a game of chess in 1916 between Lenin and Tristan Tzara: “Sometimes I have a feeling that I was a game piece, and that chessboard was my city.” That Cubans are bystanders to their own history, whose main protagonists are elsewhere, is a theme repeated in “Robinson” (“in this game of history, we are only playing dominos”) and more recently in “Backdrop”: “we discover only in the end that we’re nothing more than a backdrop.”
Not all of Varela’s observations are cloaked in metaphor. “Baby I don’t know what’s going to happen, if the lie dresses up as the truth,” he sings in “Hanging from the Sky”— a song he performed, incidentally, for a million people at a peace concert in Havana’s famous Revolution Square in 2009. Political leaders are sometimes a direct target. In “The Woodcutter without a Forest,” Varela sings: “In the region of His Majesty, everyone repeats what the King says.” In “Backdrop,” he sings directly to the revolution from the perspective of middle age: “I gave you my youth and my heart, and in exchange all you gave me was a world full of stages and silly clowns.”
The duplicity of politicians is matched by all manner of deceptions. In Varela’s Havana, vendors sell newspapers that announce there will not be a cloud in the sky, and then promptly take cover because they know rain is coming. “There are robbers that hide inside your room, and they hide themselves in our books, in the newspapers, and in the television,” he declares in “Everyone Steals.”
A decade after the random comment by my Cuban colleague in the film archives about Varela’s importance, we produced two books, one in Spanish and one in English, about Carlos Varela. It was easy to find people who shared the opinion that Varela’s thirty-year career merited serious reflection, and our book includes essays by Cuban music journalists, US-based musicologists, the former British ambassador to Havana, for whom Varela was a similarly instructive guide to the heart of Havana, and the US singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who also counts himself as a fan.
There’s a funny story by the Cuban-American writer Ana Menéndez, titled “In Cuba I was a German Shepherd.”8 It gently mocks the bravado of the Cuban exile in Miami, through the figure of a small dog that repeatedly declares its pre-immigration glory: “In Cuba I was a German Shepherd.” Sometimes I identify. In Canada I’m a history professor, but in Cuba I write books about rock stars. Celebrity culture is increasing in Cuba, as it becomes an increasingly hip destination for US stars. But the distance between Cuban star and Cuban public is not yet comparable to other parts of the world. I learned that the day I met Carlos Varela in December 2009. I was at Havana’s Hotel Nacional, having a good-bye drink with my Canadian friend Susan Lord, with whom I teach in Cuba, and Caridad, our Cuban colleague. The hotel’s exquisite grounds overlooking the Malecón and the eastern part of the city make it a great place to say either hello or goodbye to Havana, especially in December when it is the headquarters of the film festival and filled with all sorts of remarkably interesting people. For a moment I left my table and when I returned, before I could sit down, Caridad took me by the shoulders and declared: “I have someone for you to meet.” She spun me around and I was face to face with Carlos — who is quite short, and was thus literally face-to-face. His music isn’t the soundtrack of my youth, but nevertheless it had already made a mark on my soul. I had listened to it constantly since I was introduced to it in 2004, and in fact had just spent the afternoon walking the Malecón, saying another goodbye, listening to him through my headphones. As I stood facing him, a wave of emotion surged as though from the Malecón itself. I was speechless and began to cry. He leaned in, hugged me, and said the only words of English I’ve ever heard him speak, “Oh, no woman no cry,” which made me cry even more. I recovered, began to breathe, and we started to talk.
In North America poor Wednesday is hump day — neither the weekend past nor the weekend to be. But in Havana, Wednesday is the best day of the week because that’s when Interactivo plays el Brecht. It’s not for the faint of heart, especially when you have to get up the next day for work or school. The doors open at 11:30 p.m., and the music starts a good while after that. But for those with stamina, it’s the best thing going. A Cuban journalist recently described Interactivo’s regular Wednesday night performance as “better than sex.”9 On a good night, dancers from various Havana troupes and dance schools show up and perform from within the audience, making the distinctions between music, dance, and sex almost irrelevant.
El Brecht is the Bertolt Brecht Cultural Centre, located on busy calle Línea in Vedado. The main floor houses a professional theatre, where a variety of dramatic works are staged. The basement is another story. It’s a crazy bohemian bar, full of rounded wavy corners, mosaic tiled walls, cheap drinks, and impossibly funky habaneros. Almost every night of the week there is someone spectacular here, but Wednesdays are reserved for Interactivo.
Interactivo is usually described as a jazz-fusion ensemble, but even that broad category is limiting. I favour the description of Cuban music producer Darsi Fernández: “They are the sum total of Cuban musical history over the past years.”10 They began in 2000 under the direction of the irrepressibly talented Roberto Carcassés, son of a beloved jazz musician, Bobby Carcassés. The original core featured five musicians. The singers were Francis del Rio, a crazy man from Havana, and Telmary Díaz, a Havana street poet who lived for a time in Toronto. Yusa, an Alamar-born female guitar wonder who now lives in Argentina, and drummer Oliver Valdés made up the rest of the initial group, and Carcassés keeps it all together. At a typical Interactivo performance, there are at least a dozen people on stage. If anyone has seen a sweeter, happier pianist and band leader than Roberto Carcassés, I’d like to know. Their first large public performance was on the streets of the working-class Havana neighbourhood Pogolotti. They were joined by street performers on stilts, who usually entertain tourists in Old Havana, and together they turned the concert into a neighbourhood street party. “It was amazing, like the Pied Piper,” recalls their manager Enrique Carballea.11 Since then Interactivo has produced three discs, filled the famed Karl Marx Theatre several times, and toured the world. They perform all over Havana, too, but they are at their best on Wednesdays at Brecht.
In the patriarchal world of Cuban music, the presence of two bold women among the original five members of Interactivo is revolutionary. That’s part of their genius. “Women aren’t decorations in Interactivo,” Telmary Díaz tells me, noting that almost all the singers play an instrument as well. Interactivo includes the only female conga player I’ve ever seen in Havana. Mary Paz is a sensation: she strides on stage wearing huge red heels the colour of her drums and her lipstick. The other attribute of their success is in the concept: their adaptability to the peculiar situation of Cuba’s musicians. Artists in Cuba have enjoyed, for some time, the tremendous privilege of travel. They come and go with much more ease than do regular Cubans. But the Cold War battleground that characterized Cuban migration patterns meant that even artists could not always count on free movement. The Cuban government prohibited the hip hop group Los Aldeanos from leaving the island for hip hop festivals in 2009, and Carlos Varela was denied a visa to enter the US during the Bush era in 2004, to cite just two high-profile examples on both sides of the divide. Furthermore, the Cuban music world has created a vibrant and savvy audience, but its musicians earn relatively little. Cuban musicians work outside the country for the same reason everyone else does: to earn hard currency. So, Interactivo’s musicians move around the world, but they can always rely on their place in the group because of its intentional openness and fluidity. Roberto Carcassés explains it simply: “If you want to have musicians of this quality in a group, you can’t tie them to your project because you would be obstructing their own development, right? I tried to create a project in which all those personalities could join in a spontaneous way.”12 For artists like Telmary, who, like most of Interactivo’s members, also has a solo career, it is ideal. “In Interactivo, no one is telling me to choose anything. They respect that you have other musical projects.”
Interactivo is known more for their sound than their lyrics. People who try to describe their sound invariably speak of their sense of fun or energy, not their message. They are not as explicitly political or observational as Varela, Frank Delgado, or their generation of trovadores, and neither do they exude the angry energy of hip hop. But this does not mean they are vacuous. Francis del Rio sings a funny song that dismisses the Cold War in one verse. Noting the similarities, rather than the differences, between Cubans on and off the island, he asks a simple question:
“No entiendo nada, no entiendo nada. Estoy en Miami, o estoy en LaHabana?”
“I don’t understand anything, I don’t understand anything.
Am I in Miami or am I in Havana.”13
Advertising Interactivo, Linea and calle G, Vedado, May 2015
Taking a leaf from the intense symbolism of the trovadores, Roberto Carcassés’ “Que no pare el Pare,” repeats a simple idea, “Don’t stop at the stop.”14 As singer Melvis Santa, who collaborated with Carcassés on the song, puts it, “It doesn’t say anything, but it says everything.”15 It’s the perfect contemporary Cuban protest song.
That Roberto Carcassés briefly became an international political sensation in 2013 should not, in retrospect, have been so surprising. In October of that year, Interactivo was performing at the “Anti-Imperialist Tribunal” (a.k.a. the protestodromo) at an event marking the fifteenth anniversary of the arrest of the “Cuban Five.” Los Cinco Heroes, the five heroes, are the Cuban security service agents who were found guilty of espionage in the US, where they had been sent to investigate terrorist activity against Cuba. Their unjust incarceration was a big deal in Cuba; their release in December 2015 as part of Obama’s normalization efforts was seen as a tremendous victory in Cuba. The 2013 concert in their honour was packed, and it was also broadcast live on national TV. Toward the end, just before midnight, as Interactivo was winding up their set with an old standby, “Cubanos por el mundo,” Carcassés improvised some new lyrics. “I want freedom for the Five,” he sang, “and freedom for Maria”— a popular reference to marijuana. In Cuba, where street drugs, including marijuana, are extremely illegal, a public call for legalization is beyond audacious. But he didn’t stop there. He continued, creating new lyrics as he went. He sang about wanting “free access to information, so that I can have my own opinion,” “freedom to choose my president through a direct vote,” and an end to “the blockade and the self-blockade.” Finally, he asked, “I have the papers, what’s going on with my car?” a reference to another irritant, the system of bureaucratic distribution of scarce motor vehicles.
This was a heady list of issues both abstract and concrete; among the most daring things a musician has said on a Cuban stage. It was without metaphor and broadcast nationally. The reaction was swift. Within a couple of days, Carcassés and other band members were called to the Cuban Music Institute, where they were “separated from the music industry,” which meant they could no longer play in state-run facilities, which most facilities are. Popular reaction was also rapid. Social media on and off the island went crazy, mostly in support of Carcassés, but occasionally people questioned the wisdom of using such a significant, symbolic time and place to voice his criticism (which was, of course, his point). Carcassés himself reacted with deep Cuban humour. He released a statement through Facebook that clarified that Maria was a parrot belonging to his upstairs neighbour, who had been punished because she ate some bread that wasn’t intended for her. Hence he demanded her freedom. When he said he wanted free access to information in order to form his own opinions, he was referring to his family, who never listen to him when he tells them it’s going to rain, so all the clothes they leave out on the line get wet. He went on in that vein, revealing again his creative genius. Fortunately, for Carcassés as well as his fans, Cuban music legend Silvio Rodríguez intervened and the story had a surprise happy ending. Rapping Carcassés on the knuckles for his bad timing (“the struggle for the freedom of the Cuban Five is a sacred flag of the Cuban people that ought to be placed well above other issues”), Rodríguez nonetheless proclaimed, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” and criticized Carcassés’ censorship.16 And magically the ban was lifted. Interactivo released their third album less than a year later, Wednesdays remain the best day of the week to go to Brecht, and Cuban music continues to do what Cuban politics does not.
For years, people who know I spend a lot of time in Cuba have been asking me the same question: “What will happen when Fidel dies?” I realized in February 2014 that that is the wrong question, about the wrong death. What happens when Santiago Feliú dies? — that’s the question.
In February 2014, Xenia Reloba and I were working together in Havana to organize a launch for our book on Carlos Varela. It was scheduled for the Feria del Libro, the annual Havana Book Fair. The Feria del Libro is a big deal. It takes place in La Cabaña, the imposing old fortress that graces the Havana bay. Cuban book publishing somehow remains in the MN economy. Books are printed on the cheapest, thinnest paper I have ever seen, the colours are pretty washed out, the pages become unglued from the spine rapidly, but they sell cheaply, for the equivalent of around fifty cents or a dollar. Cubans turn out in droves to the feria to snap up whatever has been published that year: novels, advice literature, cook books: almost everything sells out quickly. I was proud of how much work had been done to produce the Spanish version of our book, particularly by our Cuban publisher Centro Pablo Press, and by Xenia herself. I was looking forward to celebrating with the some of our contributors from the music studies world who were able to join us: Joaquín Borges-Triana in Havana and Robert Nasatir, a US music academic who was coming from Nashville. We would launch it, appropriately enough, with a concert by Varela at the elegant Museo de Bellas Artes, the fine art museum in Old Havana. I arrived in Havana a week before the launch, having brought with me what I was told was the most important item for the evening: paper wrist bracelets, difficult to acquire in Cuba, to serve as tickets and to help control what was expected to be a huge crowd at the door. The theatre at the Bellas Artes seats only 350, and Varela’s fans, everyone knows, can get impatient. To confirm the details of the event, Xenia and I organized a coffee meeting with Carlos and his producer and technical manager, Josué García, whom I believe is the hardest-working man in Cuban show business. Virtually every time there is a musical event of any size, Josué is there, overseeing a maze of cables, sound equipment, and lights — which in Cuba is even harder than it sounds. I bumped into Josué one morning when I stopped by the elegant Hotel Nacional for a quiet coffee by myself. He told me he was there to meet the Minister of Culture from the Dominican Republic who was visiting Havana. “He’s a former musician and a friend,” explained Josué, “but really the reason I need to see him is that he’s brought along a cable connection that I can’t find in Havana.”
But our meeting was not to be. That morning I got an unexpected phone call from Susan, still in Canada. “Santiago Feliú died,” she told me, “it’s all over Facebook.” At fifty-one, Santiago Feliú was the youngest and I think most beloved of the four Cuban men who defined the musical generation of “Nueva Trova”— new folk — in the 1980s. Some call the four key players, Carlos Varela, Frank Delgado, Gerardo Alfonso, and Santiago Feliú, “our Beatles.” They were second-generation Cuban musical hippies, frustrated by the emptiness of the promises and revolutionary platitudes their parents’ generation continued to mouth. Joaquín Borges-Triana famously christened them the “generation of moles” (generación de topos) for their ability to live and create underground. Most of them were products of the cultural cauldron that was (and remains) “el ISA,” the Instituto Superior del Arte, a beautiful avant-garde art school that graces the grounds of the former Havana Country Club. Decades later, these four trovadores had gone their own ways musically, but like all masculine anti-authority figures, they retain a certain youthfulness, even in middle-age. They remain iconic musical reference points for their own and subsequent generations. The death of any of them was unthinkable. Feliú’s death registered like a bomb in Havana, in part because of his age, and in part because of his particularly tragic circumstances: his young partner, with whom he was reportedly head over heels in love, was eight months pregnant at the time of his death. Yet his continued youthfulness was also reflected in his life. “Un hippie del communismo” was the subtitle of a book about Feliú, a communist hippie who continued to sing tributes to Mexico’s Zapatistas and other Latin American movements for social change, even as he criticized his own ossifying revolution. He had a stutter. He maintained a head of flowing long hair. His friends wrote and sang and spoke about him like many do about their sweet, forever young little brothers.
I’ve never seen a city mourn a counter-cultural musical hero as Havana mourned Santiago. That afternoon, instead of planning a concert and book launch, I walked with my University of Havana history colleague Julio César González Pagés to a large Vedado funeral home to pay respects. By the time we got there the family had departed to Havana’s beautiful Cristobel Colon Cemetery. The rituals of mourning happen quickly in Cuba. I spent most of the day with Julio and some of his students. None of them knew Santiago personally; all of them were extremely shaken. Julio, who was a peer, tells us all about the importance of Feliú and his music to his generation, reminiscing about every performance he saw over the years. Later that afternoon, a huge crowd assembled on the grounds of the Cuban Music Institute, a sprawling mansion in central Vedado. And for hours, until well into the night, Cuban musical royalty of all ages and from all genres mourned in the way musicians mourn: they sang together. There was a more formal memorial concert organized a week later at the Fábrica de Arte Cubano (FAC), a new club and cultural centre. It was a spectacular and moving array of musicianship. But the spontaneous outpouring of grief and creativity I saw at the musical institute that afternoon gave me new insights into how habaneros maintain such strong connections with each other and the crucial role musicians play in sustaining these bonds.
Santiago Feliú in concert. Photo by Ivan Soca Pascual
The people at what was essentially a public wake at the music institute, as well as the audience a week later at the FAC, along with thousands of people throughout the city, weren’t mourning a rock star or a celebrity. They were mourning a talented musician who had given them enjoyment and perhaps heightened or evoked some of the emotional events of their lives through his music. In a country where the economic and social distance between rock star and audience is slight, of course some performers enjoy more fame and adoration than others. But that doesn’t make them rich, and it doesn’t remove them from their world. The currency of Cuban musicians, filmmakers, and other artists is travel, not money. Travel can convert to money of course, and most musicians only start to make money when they tour outside the country. I explain it to my students like this: I’ve never been to Bob Dylan’s house, but I’ve been to Carlos Varela’s house. So if Varela is the Bob Dylan of Cuba, I’m certain that he lives more like me, a middle-class Canadian university professor, than he does Bob Dylan.
So when a tragic, sudden, and untimely death like Feliú’s occurs, people mourn him as one would any other beloved, talented person whose death was premature, whether they knew him personally or not. As a poet and musician, he resonated in the culture in a profound way simply because musicians touch people. Without the cynicism and distance that is almost automatically generated when musicians earn impossible amounts of money and/or heaps of fame, the sheen of celebrity culture isn’t a barrier in Cuba, physically or emotionally.
To my surprise, there was no talk at all that the book launch and concert, scheduled for six days after Feliú’s death, would be postponed. When Xenia and I regrouped and continued working on details of the concert, we went to the theatre at the Bellas Artes to deliver a deposit for the rental (which, incidentally, cost just over the equivalent of $100 to rent for an evening, one of the finest concert venues in the city). One of the museum’s security guards was hovering around as we were discussing the event with the theatre manager, and he really wanted to talk about Feliú’s recent death. As it turns out they were neighbours, they lived in the same building, and the young security guard was very sad for his widow and unborn child. Perhaps Feliú is an especially acute example of this lack of social distance between musical superstar and regular security guard. The “hippie communist” reportedly had even less money than others of his generation and abilities, and his friends began working to raise funds for his wife and baby, trying to secure royalties for the many recordings of his songs.
As it turned out, the concert and book launch provided another opportunity for the “generation of moles” to mourn and appreciate their friend. To everyone’s surprise (including the organizers), Varela invited the remaining “moles,” Frank Delgado and Gerardo Alfonso, to join him and his band for a few songs that night. This happens rarely, and the absence of Santiago was palpable. Of course the Cuban audience was ecstatic when the three remaining “Beatles” reminisced and sang together — including one of Santiago’s signature songs, a love song “Para Barbara” (For Barbara). But for the little crowd of North Americans in the audience, it was almost unbelievable. We knew what a privilege it was, as visitors, to share what was a moment with national and generational significance. Trying to relate it to my students later, I fell back on familiar tropes of Western celebrity culture. “It was like the Beatles, or almost all the Beatles, reunited before our very eyes,” I tried to explain, but that didn’t get at it. Some things just can’t be translated.
It is instructive to think back on this moment, after the December 17, 2014, US/Cuban thaw, which occurred less than a year after Feliú’s death. I have heard more than one Cuban, usually older ones, tell me with confidence that impending US mass tourism to Cuba won’t really change the country because “Cuban culture is strong.” I grimace when I hear that because it seems like a pat party line, and certainly a superficial understanding of the US cultural-industrial juggernaut. But when I recall how the mood of Havana changed discernibly as people digested the news of the death of one of its ‘‘hippie communist’’ musicians, I think I can see what they are getting at.
Susan Thomas, a US music scholar who writes smart, insightful things about contemporary Cuban music, once titled an article she published about women in Havana’s contemporary trova scene, “Did Nobody Pass the Girls the Guitar?” It’s a question I think about a lot, as I try to understand the often unfamiliar codes and realities of masculinity and femininity in Cuba. Nowhere is this more complicated than in the music world.
Thomas’s work details the sexism and homophobia of some contemporary Cuban male musicians she interviewed in the early 2000s, who either claimed not to notice that there were far fewer women than men among their peers, or who made an easy assumption that all Cuban female musicians of their genre, trova, were lesbians.17 It is a bit reminiscent of the way men in the sports world speak of female athletes. Paradoxically, Cuba has a long history of famous, powerful female singers, diva soloists like Celia Cruz or Omara Portuanda (famous to North Americans for her work with the Buena Vista Social Club). So it would be incorrect to say that Cuban women are absent in the music world; the issue is rather how their presence is treated or understood, as well as the genres within which they work.
As we’ve seen, Interactivo is one of the few contemporary groups in which women move from the chorus to the congas or the guitars. Interactivo’s Telmary Díaz and trova’s Rochy Ameneiro are two examples of genre-busting women in Havana’s music world who have moved from the chorus into the front lines, with music that has a great deal to say about their world.
Telmary — who uses only her first name professionally — began as what she calls a ‘‘street poet’’ — rapping rapidly over the music a DJ friend was playing from the stage. “I started just speaking free-style about our realities, our difficulties,” she told my students when she came to speak to us recently in Havana. She didn’t have musical training; rather she studied literature and languages. Her expansive Spanish and English literary skills helped her poetic imagination. She soon became involved in Havana’s emerging hip hop scene in the 1990s. Havana was, for a while, a magnet for international, particularly US, hip hop artists, largely because it was imagined by some to be a more pure or authentic version of the early Bronx days of the genre. There are now at least a dozen dissertations, books, and documentary films about Cuban hip hop, most of them produced by Americans. Telmary laughs about the early days of Cuban hip hop and its relationship to US culture. “We’d all go to hip hop festivals in Alamar (just outside Havana) and the Cubans would be rapping about diamonds and cars. And then we’d all get on the same bus home to Havana where we lived with our parents and grandparents.”
Clearly being a woman in a man’s genre gives Telmary the keen eye of the outsider and she puts this to great use in her work. One of her most famous songs, from her award-winning first CD, A Diario, produced in 2007, is called “Que Equivoca’o,” a word play on “que equivocado” or “how wrong.” It is an angry, yet sweet, girlfriend’s lament about her lazy, beer-drinking, domino-playing boyfriend. “How wrong you are about life, my love, how wrong,” she repeats.18 The video, cartoon-like, both sweetens and darkens the message: Telmary, with the snap of her fingers, turns her man’s baseball bat into a broom, shrinks him to the size of one of the dominoes he’s playing with his friends, and, finally, turns him into a frog. When she kisses him, he turns into an attentive boyfriend. All of this is punctuated by rapid-fire rap sequences that sound, as one reviewer termed it, like a saxophone or a “high octave post-bop Coltrane-influenced trombonist.”19 It is perhaps the single most creatively feminist moment I’ve seen in Cuban culture.
As well as Interactivo, Telmary worked in Havana with an early hip hop collective, Free Hole Negro, an Anglicized word play on the popular Cuban dish frijoles negros, black beans. “It was a joke on lots of levels,” she explains, “because here we all were in Havana, which is sometimes like being stuck in a big hole.” She decided to move to Canada, where she lived for a while in Toronto, working with Canadian musician and producer Billy Bryans of the Parachute Club, and saxophonist Jane Bunnett. She was a popular fixture in Toronto’s Latin music scene for a while. She toured Canada and other parts of the world. She liked Toronto a lot, especially what she saw as its openness and diversity. But she hated the cold and, after her daughter was born in 2012, she decided to return to Havana, at least for a while. She missed Cuba’s warmth but also the closeness of family and friends, particularly with a young child. When she explained this move to my Canadian students in Havana, they were amazed. Most of them were just digesting Global South poverty up close for the first time. Even the comparatively mild version they were seeing in Vedado was shocking; they could barely imagine someone exchanging Toronto for the rigours of life in Cuba, if there was a choice. “But really,” she continued, “I came back to Cuba because I missed Brecht on Wednesdays.” She smiled, but I think she wasn’t completely joking.
Telmary in concert, December 2015
Rochy — who also uses only her first name on stage — comes from a different genre than Telmary’s powerful staccato hip hop, but she too is a force of nature. She was trained as an architect and worked in that profession until she decided to make the leap into her true passion: singing. She sings in the trova tradition, has recorded three discs, and works with a wide variety of Cuban musicians. Lately, however, she’s made a name for herself as one of the voices of an impressive anti-violence campaign she spearheaded along with University of Havana historian (and another force of nature) Julio César González Pagés. Along with a number of Julio’s young University of Havana students — many of them athletes who now study the pernicious effects of their culture’s stereotypes of masculinity — Rochy now tours Cuba, speaking and singing about violence against women and girls. The campaign, called “Todas Contracorriente” (Everyone Against the Current — note the feminine form of “everyone”), has toured all over the island, seventeen cities in total. In a small country like Cuba, that’s pretty much all of them. They visited schools and community centres, using music to open public discussions about violence in general and the sexist violence of popular music in particular. As Rochy explains it, “Our idea is to raise awareness through music. Through music you can do many things to improve society, because currently some artistic creations incite violence, even unintentionally. Through music our children are getting a lot of incitement to violence and I really want musicians to consider this problem, and also I want Cuban women to gain self-esteem.”20
She has her work cut out for herself. Crime statistics — particularly for intimate crimes, such as wife abuse — are impossible to find in Cuba (and are underreported everywhere). Better health, education, and employment statistics certainly contribute to a strong sense of independence among Cuban women, which is why, perhaps, there is a common perception that violence rates are lower in Cuba than elsewhere in the region. But, anecdotally, everyone has stories. Rochy is one of a few artists trying to draw public attention to the issue. A few years earlier, for the first time on Cuban TV, a telenovela, Bajo el mismo sol (Under the Same Sun), featured a story line about an abused wife.21 Another brave feminist artist, filmmaker Marilyn Solaya, produced a powerful feature film, Vestido de Novia (His Wedding Dress), about the hard lives of transgendered Cubans, which includes a number of powerful scenes of masculine sexual brutality.
Rochy Amaneiro and Julio César González Pagés, publicity photo for “Yo Digo No” (“I Say No”) anti-violence campaign
But for Rochy, as a musician, the misogyny of music and music videos is the main target. One year, Rochy and Julio brought along a number of recent reggaetón videos to show our students in Havana. I don’t think a reggaetón video has been made without at least one scantily clad female adornment to the smartly (and fully) dressed male hero, but those images — which of course we see every day in North American videos too — were nothing compared to the imagery of violence in others. The most explicit was a song, titled “Se Calentó” (Heated), by a reggaetón duo, El Calde. The video was like a compendium of urban gang culture imagery: groups of young, muscular black men posing on the street, brandishing bats and sticks, with the occasional shot of a machete (sheathed and unsheathed), and even two shots of someone holding a pistol (wearing an iconic Tupac-style kerchief). The few females in the video were posed butt to the camera, and it all ended in a massive street fight between rival gangs. The lyrics sing a tribute to the fierce men of Luyano, the Havana neighbourhood depicted in the video.
“The party on the street party is already hot,
It’s heated
And I’m heading out armed
If you are brave
Get yourself to Luyano.”
If this wasn’t Cuba there would be little remarkable in either the lyrics or the imagery. But it is Cuba — where there is no gun culture (some guns, but no gun culture) and scant gang culture, and where men can be crazy macho but don’t generally take their fashion or other visual cues from Hollywood versions of inner-city US gangs. This is a country that constantly prides itself on the relative safety of daily life, for both citizens and visitors. It’s not that crime or violence doesn’t exist, but it is still not a prominent part of the visual landscape or the daily life of Havana. Alarm systems, razor wire, armed guards, chained dogs, gated communities: are all far less visible on the streets of Havana than they are in other major cities in the world, First or Third. There aren’t streets one doesn’t dare walk down (at least during the day), taxi routes one is warned to avoid, or parks you would be crazy to walk through. Once, Susan and Jordi and I arrived in Havana not from Canada, but from Guatemala, one of the most violent countries in the Western hemisphere. The transition to Cuba after six weeks of Guatemala made for a remarkable comparison. In the taxi ride back to our apartment from the Havana airport, Susan observed quietly, “The only danger we face in this taxi is that the driver might try to overcharge us.”
So, it is easy to see why this video was so shocking, and why singers like Rochy place music and music videos at the heart of a campaign for what she calls diverse “culture of peace” in contemporary music.22 “Se Calentó” got no exposure on Cuban TV. But this means little in a country where videos, TV shows, and films circulate rapidly from flash drive to flash drive. Rochy and Julio’s group initiated a campaign to enlist high-profile musicians to declare, “yo digo no a la violencia contra mujeres y niñas”— “I say no to violence against women and girls.” Various musicians have participated, and they got a boost when the island’s most popular reggaetón group, Gente de Zona, said from the stage at a concert attended by 60,000 habaneros, “yo digo no a la chabacanería!” (“I say no to vulgarity.”)
A song in Telmary’s repertoire is called “Music is My Weapon.” “Music is my weapon,” goes the chorus, “but also my defense.” It has become a bit of a signature for Telmary, but it applies just as well to Rochy, as she crosses the island singing to school kids: Both of them, in their manner, changing the world.
A club and cultural complex known as the Fábrica de Arte Cubano (FAC), the Cuban Art Factory, opened its doors in December 2013, and since then it has appeared on just about every visiting journalist’s Top Ten list. The New York Times included it on its list of “Fifty-Two Places to Go in 2015” and FAC director X Alfonso’s handsome face has graced virtually every magazine in or story about Cuba since the place opened. The centre is housed in an old cooking oil factory near the Rio Almendares that separates Vedado from Miramar, at the corner of Eleventh and Twenty-sixth streets. A combined art gallery, performance space, dance club, theatre, and art market, it is frequented by hip Havana art students, alongside their poorer cousins from Centro Havana or Alamar, visiting foreigners, and more than a few people older than twenty-five. It is presided over by a son of Afro-Cuban musical royalty. In all, it’s a pretty sweet package. Every time I go I am struck with the same thought: if this were anywhere else in the world it would cost at least ten times more than the $2 cover charge, and pretension would be the overwhelming vibe.
In fact, foreign journalists love it so much they have a hard time convincing themselves that they are still in “Castro’s Cuba” when they visit the place. As a visitor from Punchdrunk, a US lifestyle magazine, enthused, “This is one of the first venues to realize a vision of Cuba that isn’t focused on tourism or reliving the country’s romanticized heyday of the 1950s, the last time that Cuba had a vibrant nightlife culture.”23 Of course, it is the epitome of egocentric (and lazy) US journalism to imagine that between the glory days of 1950s American gangsters and Obama’s thawing announcement of December 17, 2014, Havana simply went to sleep (awaiting the kiss from her Prince Charming). But how long, we are left to wonder, will it be until the FAC fulfills this New York journalist’s nightmare: “If the Fábrica de Arte Cubano existed in Brooklyn, it would be filled with angular haircuts atop skulls filled with cocaine. In other words: utterly insufferable.”24
With even the tiniest awareness of what happened culturally in Cuba in that fifty-year interregnum between American hostility and renewed diplomacy, the FAC looks a little bit less like an amazing anomaly that fell out of the sky just in time to greet the return of US tourists, and more like the product of a great deal of hard work on the part of the Havana music world. I sometimes describe X Alfonso, the Fábrica’s charismatic leader, to my students as: “the Jay-Z of Cuba, but without the zillions of dollars.” Like Jay-Z, Alfonso combines entrepreneurial ambition and a musician’s creative soul. Both have succeeded despite formidable odds, miracles actually, in very different contexts. X is the son of Carlos Alfonso and Ele Valdés, a creative duo who have performed for decades as Síntesis, a Cuban institution and an Afro-Cuban vocal group combining the traditional, the contemporary, and the spiritual. Both X and his sister Eme grew up in and around the group and both continued on to solo careers. X is a multi-talented powerhouse. He studied classical piano, graduating from the national art school in 1990. He produces films and videos, writes award-winning film scores, and has recorded three discs on his own. His songs are filled with sharp, observant social commentary. His high-energy music calls out to young Cubans of his generation in something of the same way (though with a different sound) that Nueva Trova made the Special Period survivable to the 1990s generation. He sings of the beauty of Afro-Cuban spirituality, the hypocrisy of a society that ignores social problems (“they have snatched out our eyes”), and the power now possessed by his own generation of Cubans. Many of his songs use the chorus as a kind of chant of generational hope and power, in the same way that Síntesis uses Yoruba and other Afro-Cuban incantations. “Mi Abuelo Dice” (My Grandfather Says), recorded with Interactivo in 2014, is an ironic lament about the blindness of the revolutionary generation to the realities of Cuban youth today:
“My grandfather says that in his time, there was nothing to do unless you had money
My grandfather says that in his time, girls stayed up all night selling their bodies
My grandfather says that in his time, police beat you up for no reason.”25
Each statement is punctuated by a long, ironic “umm, hmm.” In one song, the revered achievements of the 1959 revolution are turned into the out-of-touch babblings of an old man, who has no clue that the same social problems exist today.
This is all to say that X Alfonso has at least a certain amount of cred as a public figure who challenges, rather than bends to, party lines. The origins of the FAC have less to do with trying to imitate the club culture of New York or Berlin, and more to do with finding a space for the creative cauldron that Havana produces. The original Fábrica began in 2010, and was located in the Pabexbo building, a cavernous warehouse space that houses things like international art and craft shows and the international cigar exposition. Occasionally, the Fábrica would rent it for a combined concert, film screening, and art show, using the huge space to display the artistic riches produced by students at ISA, the art school located nearby. The original, occasional Fábrica became a staple of the cultural scene for a couple of years, despite its out-of-the-way location. When I went there one year with some Cuban friends and a group of my Canadian students, we learned just how thoroughly Cuban the place was: the minimal admission fee was in MN only. Several students hadn’t yet changed their CUC for MN and the club wouldn’t take cue at the door. This was the only place in Havana I’ve seen refuse CUC. Alfonso and a large team of artists and designers searched for several years for something more permanent and finally were allowed to do the considerable work to renovate the dilapidated but beautiful Cocinero building.
Now the Fábrica is a regular part of our course curriculum and Havana’s cultural life. The year it opened, X and his team of curators and designers spoke to our students when we visited. They told us about the tremendous work it took to convert the place into what it is, and also underlined, passionately, that they saw the Fábrica as an artistic meeting place or hub, much more than a nightclub. People stream through to see a host of ever-changing exhibitions of photography, painting, and design, or attend poetry readings or book launches. The cavernous dance club, run by the ever-present Josué García, hosts a dazzling array of contemporary Cuban musicians, as well as the occasional foreign visitors such as New York’s The Roots. There is also a smaller stage for more intimate concerts, christened the Santiago Feliú room. Santiago himself was scheduled to perform in the place around the time of his death.
The rock stars and the professors: Carlos Varela, X Alfonso, the author, and Susan Lord, a Queen’s University student, visit to the Fábrica, 2014. Photo by Nicholas Smith
So despite appearances, the Fábrica de Arte Cubano is not Havana’s late entry into the generic hip urban club scene. In fact, it is not a private club at all; it is housed under the Ministry of Culture, like many theatre and music venues in Havana. Freddy Monasterio Barsó, a Cuban studying in Canada, is doing doctoral research on the Fábrica and other semi-independent musical productions and venues that are popping up in today’s Havana. As Monasterio Barsó sees it, the blunt censorship of previous eras is giving way to a host of quasi-independent performance spaces, including bricks and mortar buildings like the Fábrica, and more ephemeral but regular music festivals that feature a huge array of musical styles and mix Cuban with other international musicians. This is a new level of state-sanctioned cosmopolitanism, and no one knows how far it is going to go. As the chant-like chorus of one of X Alfonso’s signature songs, “Revoluxcion,” goes, “Don’t stop the train, don’t stop the train.”26
