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 no
t.
MOURNING SANTIAGO
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 distan
ce 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.
Cuba beyond the Beach Page 8