{"id":200317,"date":"2019-06-08T16:49:56","date_gmt":"2019-06-08T20:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=200317"},"modified":"2019-06-08T16:49:56","modified_gmt":"2019-06-08T20:49:56","slug":"rock-n-roll-with-timba-is-awesome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/culture\/music-culture\/rock-n-roll-with-timba-is-awesome\/","title":{"rendered":"“Rock \u2019n\u2019 roll with timba is awesome”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Habana Abierta was an explosion in the Cuban underground scene. The members of this creative group recorded, after settling in Spain in the 1990s, the album 24 Horas<\/em> (1999), which was all the rage in Cuba’s alternative circuit in pirated copies that went from hand to hand as if they treasured many young Cubans\u2019 personal and shared memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

The album transcended its purely musical fate to become a generational document. It restated the insular reality, endowed it with new symbols and showed the underside of its social dynamics to bring to the surface the multiplicity of anxieties, wants and spiritual needs of thousands of young people, who immediately identified themselves with songs that spoke of that country\u2019s street poetry that generally did not have a foothold in the established discourses.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Habana Abierta phenomenon was growing at the speed of a cruise ship on the island. It did it until it finally became the soundtrack and the booming voice of a generation, as had happened before with albums like Como los peces<\/em>, by Carlos Varela, or Santiago Feli\u00fa’s Futuro inmediato<\/em>, just to mention two discs fairly close in time to the expansion of this band of irreverent globetrotters that was Habana Abierta.<\/span><\/p>\n

The band was formed by a select group of singer-songwriters most of whom came from Havana’s 13th and 8th gathering with a formation especially in Havana\u2019s bohemian trova movement and in rock and roll.<\/span><\/p>\n

24 horas<\/em>, preceded by the records Habana oculta<\/em> (1994) \u2015recorded with the collaboration of singer-songwriters Gema and Pavel\u2015 and Habana abierta (1997), was only the tip of the iceberg of the discography of this creative laboratory that composed songs full of the spirit of the street, of nostalgia for what they left behind, and of existential labyrinths whose exit never seemed too close.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyone who lived the 2000s in Cuba, knows that there was no party or jam session where hymns like “La natilla,” ” La vida es un divino guion” and “Hace calor en La Habana” were not heard.<\/span><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/habana.abierta\/posts\/2226945324009536:0<\/p>\n

More than any other group of that time, distance was not a straitjacket for Habana Abierta to exert a great influence on its Cuban followers.<\/span><\/p>\n

The proposal of its members was a vigorous update of Cuban music and it came to open a new cycle in the insular sphere of sound that has lasted until today through dozens of groups and artists that perhaps, without knowing it, have drunk from the influence of the group.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2003 there was an event that for years many had been waiting for: the miracle happened (there is no other way to say it for reasons that don\u2019t need to be enumerated now) that Habana Abierta would get on a Cuban stage thanks to the risky and opportune intervention of intellectuals and cultural officials of the time. The Sal\u00f3n Rosado of the Tropical was filled to capacity.<\/span><\/p>\n