Photos: Luis Eduardo
To call Cuba the Island of Music is a cliché I will not use. Every Sunday before noon a typical Mexican appears in the street where I live. Week after week. With English punctuality. This is rather odd, because I do not live in Mexico but in Centro Habana, the most populated municipality of the Cuban capital, and inhabited not precisely by men with hats and short coats. The typical Mexican carries an accordion and is accompanied by a small individual on whose head the wide brim and conical top hat looks even bigger. If the neighbors ask them to sing, the typical Mexican grabs the instrument and his puny colleague clears his throat. Then they sing a duet of ballads and Mexican folk songs until the listeners get bored and begin to break up, not without making a “donation” to the artists to ensure their return the following Sunday.
Walking down the Malecón from La Rampa to Avenida del Puerto one may find duets, trios and even groups of larger format with a repertoire that includes from guarachas and traditional sones to Ricardo Arjona’s most recent composition, including – how could they miss them? – the beat-ballads of the so-called “prodigious decade”. They are the popular soperos, musicians who “make soup” (a term that is not in the least offensive) and who operate like a sort of live jukebox, willing to oblige the preferences of their public, which quite often only requests silence.
Los Mambises were at the Cathedral Square for so long that I no longer recall it, until the most recent regulation concerning private labor included them in one of its sections. Now one can see them in the intersection of Obispo and Mercaderes streets, where they continue playing – with their usual naïf style – the music from the Cuban east provinces, which is not frequently heard on the majority of our radio stations. In the new location they take every chance to request “contributions”, as may be easily understood.
Surrounding the Arms Square, next to the emblematic Templete is an irreverent fauna of street musicians equipped with the most surprising assortment of percussion artifacts (but also guitars and violins), among which stand out plastic maracas and donkey or horse jaws instead of gourds.
Anyone might wonder why so much music. That is, in a city full of small carts and ambulant vendors, of small shops for the sale of almost everything, of improvised cafeterias in apartment windows, what moves these men to insist on their precarious singing? The lack of a more lucrative activity? The freedom of spirit that leads many to reject closed places and fixed working hours? The legitimate calling of art? The need to earn one’s life doing the only thing you know?
In Havana there is no subway. If we had a subway in Havana, there would not be a saxophone player standing at its entrance playing a melodic jazz. Much less a romantic violinist recreating Paganini. At the doors of Havana’s subway we would find a couple of sopero musicians proposing their heterodox repertoire to the passers-by, played with guitar and tres, clave and bongo. It might as well be a guaracha sung by Compay Segundo or a Formula V pop song from the 1960’s. Perhaps it has to do with the national “melting pot” mentioned by don Fernando Ortiz.
But while we await the construction of the subway, any corner of Old Havana may be an adequate site to enjoy Cuban or universal songs in the voices and guitars of these errant artists. To call Cuba the Island of Music is a cliché I will not use. Suffice it for now the sincere wish that these itinerant musicians do not disappear from our streets and squares.
