TWO
THOSE WHO DREAM WITH THEIR EARS: THE SOUND OF HAVANA
WALKING OUT INTO THE NIGHT MUSIC: RANDOM HORNS AND EVERYDAY REGGAETÓN
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 dis
co 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.
HOW CUBAN MUSIC MADE ME A BETTER HISTORIAN
“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.
INTERACTIVO AND EL BRECHT ON WEDNESDAYS
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.
Cuba beyond the Beach Page 7