(A report straight from Cuba brought to you by a traveling NYC Afro-Cuban musician.)
Cuba.? What can I say. It’s not working. It’s just barely surviving, to be precise. Is this the Cubans’ fault? Not entirely. Caught in the warp and woof tickets of Euro-American imperialism for 500 years, the Cubans endure. But not by much.
I have seen these faces before…in the stark, failed Russia of post-Gorbachev/Yeltsin, in cocaine mob-ruled Bogota, in contemporary, politically faux Islamicized Cairo and Morocco. Mouths set thin and straight the people trudge slowly through their lives, their myths almost gone, lost without a well-functioning set of dreams to support their hopes, lost without some overarching set of ideas to give them reason to live past sheer survival.
There are flashes here of the old, optimistic Cuba. The Cuba of José Marti, of the young, burning Fidel, of Benny Moré and the great street-corner rhumba bands. You can hear it in the music even when it is hidden by layers of desperate necessity, even as they try to please the tourists with lame, New Jersey wedding band tunes. The magic of clavé lurks behind every note but it is covered in layers of pure desperation.
That amazing display of energy that Ciubans call La Revolución ? The wonderful faces of that revolution? The shining, hopeful student warrior faces of the `50s and `60s? The ones that jump out of photo after photo taken during the time?
Gone, replaced by an almost Eastern European dourness after 50 years of U.S. trade embargo, gone after the Russians bureaucratized the system beyond all repair. It survives only in the old and the young. The old ones remember. A big smile breaks out when they realize that you are honoring and continuing their musical traditions. Sudden, strongly expressed friendship. And the young do not yet understand. The happiness cutoff point appears to be around 15 years of age, when they hit the wall of U.S.-enforced poverty and inefficiency that keeps this country rocked back on its heels, every day spent simply searching for a little balance. It is almost incomprehensible that such a revolution actually took place here only a little over 50 years ago.
Read on for more
Where else does it survive?
In the African religion devotees. Call it Santeria, call it Syncretismo, call if what you will. The music of the gods keeps their spirits awake. They have lived through every fucked-up system humankind has invented. They bend, they adapt, they survive. And then they go on about their secret ways.
And in the artists. The musicians, the painters, the writers and the thinkers.
Everyone else?
Clomp clomp clomp.
A snapshot of the problem?
Sure.
We played a small concert/teaching clinic for maybe 200 high school-aged music students in Havana one afternoon. They were very enthusiastic about our 18 piece New York City Afro-Cuban band, as well they should be. It’s a great band playing the music of the Cuban-American composer Chico O’Farrill, a man who emigrated to NYC in the late `30s and became the Duke Ellington of that style of music. Some of them play very well themselves, especially the drummers and one extraordinarily gifted bassist. As we were mingling with the students after the concert, several brass players came up to us with their instrument cases and…language barriers slowing things down some…eventually managed to make us aware of one particular problem that they were having. Their schools had instruments, but no mouthpieces on which to play them. This is like having an automobile with no engine, except a perfectly good engine for these musical vehicles can be had all over the world for as little as $50. And…due to the US trade embargo…it is very difficult to ship some to them even for free. Almost every professional brass player that I know in the U.S. owns 10 or 20 or 30 mouthpieces that he is never going to use…good ones that simply do not fit his approach to the instrument, mouthpieces that he has either outgrown or showed initial promise but didn’t quite pan out. (It’s a brass thing…don’t try to understand. Like baseball bats, golf clubs or tennis racquets for pro athletes.) We took addresses and will certainly try to send some usable mouthpieces down, but still…as above, so below.
And as below, so above as well.
Sugar.
Cuba thrived during the `40s and `50s, selling sugarcane-derived sugar all over the world. There were at one time over 400 Cuban sugar refineries in operation. Were the workers getting fair compensation for their labor? No, of course not. But at the very least the Cuban socioeconomic engine had some monetary fuel on which to run and develop. It was that fuel that produced the people who made their revolution happen.
But then the US embargo went into effect in 1960, slowly strangling the economic life of this country. They survived selling sugar to the USSR bloc at artificially inflated prices, but when the USSR went down? End of story and the beginning of real trouble.
27 refineries remain. Why so few? Almost no replacement parts are available due to the embargo, and it is much more complicated to jerry-build parts for a factory than it is to keep `50s automobiles running as so many Cubans do with great skill, plus the outdated factories require so much fuel to operate that the resultant sugar is priced out of the market by fuel costs alone.
UH oh!!!
So the revolution’s rays of hope have retreated over the subsequent post-revolutionary generations into the plodding, patient, waiting pace that one sees in the streets almost everywhere here. A people ground down by the long-range corporate tactic of slow starvation.
If y’can’t beat `em, choke `em down slow and steady `til they’re too weak, too tired to fight anymore.
Like dat.
It works, too. The only so-called “hope” that can be seen now is in the eyes of the various hustler types hoping to make a buck off of the European (and increasingly, American…more on that later) tourists.
And…in the eyes of the children plus the musicians and those who are being moved by them. Perhaps it is the same in large sporting events but I never got to see any. However, in every upscale Havana square we visited…each one graced during most of each day by at least one fine tipico musical group…in the many seemingly random streetcorner/little club rhumba performances and in a small town where we performed a sort of park concert, the sullen faces of the people opened up into expressions of real joy as the music burned its way into their hearts and bodies. Which I suppose is why I am a serious musician rather than a lawyer, a politician or some other kind of dedicated thief.
It has been said that music hath charms to tame the savage breast, but the truth of the matter is that music …real music played in real time with serious artistic intent…hath charms that reach the souls of all sentient beings no matter what the state of their emotions or their living conditions.
Bet on it.
Even the local dogs enjoyed the concert during the village concert. In fact, a case could be made that the street dogs are the only ones still enjoying the freedoms for which the revolution fought.
Rhythmically, melodically and harmonically it is very sophisticated music played by the best of the best in NYC. And everybody was grooving to it.
Why?
Because the Cubans have not yet been totally brainwashed into the corpulent, passive acceptance of fast-food cultural equivalents as have been U.S. audiences. That’s why.
One thing to be said for Cuba and third world countries in general…they have all been so economically challenged that their state hypnomedia are laughably primitive, thus the people maintain at least some semblance of sensitivity to the real thing when it comes their way.
Back to the recently increasing American cultural and tourist presence in Cuba. On first examination the explanation would seem quite simple to those who believe the American hypno-news. Barack Obama is a liberal president, so things are opening up in this regard.
But NOOOOOooooo, O clomp-clomp-clomping news addicts!!!
Barack Obama is just as much a functionary of the corporate system as were Ronald McDonald Reagan and George W. Butch. He’s just the latest front man in the ongoing US good cop/bad cop scam. It’s not about “nice” in the Great Game, folks. As my Mae West sig puts it, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”
It’s about who wins and who loses.
Bet on that as well.
Follow the money to find the truth of the matter. (Read this link. Don’t be lazy. Dig into the truth even if it hurts as much as digging into a cavity. Feel the pain if that’s what’s necessary and then…wake the fuck up!!!)
It’s all about the money.
Money and power.
That pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? It exists, but “The End Of The Rainbow” is now a gated community somewhere near the CIA’s Langley, VA headquarters, and that cute li’l ol’ leprechaun? He is its heavily armed gatekeeper.
Bet on it.
The US starfish has been pulling at the Cuban oyster for 50 years. The oyster is finally giving it up. Watch.
La Perla is now almost within reach, and the starfish will eat the remnants of the oyster and pawn the pearl off to the highest bidders.
What will happen here in Cuba?
My own bet?
Within less than 5 years the Disneyfication of Havana will begin. Once Fidel is gone…and he is mortal, no matter how many CIA assassination attempts he may have survived…once he is gone the Cuban people are poised and ready to whore themselves out to the highest bidder, and the major bidder will without any doubt be the United States. I am sorry to have say that, but there it is. Several generations of Cubans have scuffled through hard times with great will and fortitude, but I can see the future in the unhappy faces on every street corner and country road in the Havana area and probably elsewhere across the island as well. They are tired of the endless scuffle and they have had enough. They possess some great resources, particularly their resort/seacoast possibilities. The shoreline of Havana alone would be worth many times more than the entire oceanfront of Miami.
Somewhere, little Meyer Lansky is smiling and saying “I tol’ ya!!!”
Yup.
The money will come a’knockin’ very soon. When it does, the Cubans are eventually going to open the door and although they will make some serious profit on the action, they will get fucked in the end, just as has every other culture that has surrendered to the blandishments of the U.S. except perhaps Japan.
Only a vast political and cultural sea change in America would spare them from this fate, and I do not see that happening in the foreseeable future.
So…adiós a mis hermanos cubanos y hola Miss American Pie. I’ll try to give what I can to the surviving musicians…the young ones are still burning, just as they have always been burning in every human culture… and maybe something will come out of it the way jazz survived the fall of the well-functioning working class black culture from which it sprang.
Cuba?
La Revoluçion?
What goes around comes around.
And around and around and around again.
That’s why they call them “revolutions.”
So it goes.
But clavé?
Clavé will live forever.
Straight from the heart of Africa to the hearts of millions here in Cuba and in the rest of the Western Hemisphere as well.
You can bet on that, too.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
