“MUSIC IS MY WEAPON” TELMARY DÍAZ AND ROCHY AMENEIRO, TWO POWERFUL WOMEN OF SOUND
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.
FÁBRICA DE ARTE CUBANO
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.
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