{"id":255148,"date":"2022-07-10T07:26:51","date_gmt":"2022-07-10T11:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=255148"},"modified":"2022-07-10T07:26:51","modified_gmt":"2022-07-10T11:26:51","slug":"havana-at-your-feet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba\/havana-at-your-feet\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cHavana at your feet\/ I would not know how to love you any other way\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s almost ready. Some color adjustments, the transfer to Digital Signal Processing (DSP) of the material and <\/span>La Habana de Fito<\/span><\/i>, a documentary by Cuban filmmaker Juan Pin Vilar, would be ready to be served to viewers in Cuba and the world. More than one hundred minutes of vibrant testimonies, interviews and archive images put into context the endearing relationship of Fito P\u00e1ez, an essential figure of rock in Spanish, with the city and its intense and contradictory future.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Havana Fito has sung, made friends, loved and has been a participant in the joys and sorrows of the common citizen, the one to whom he attributes a generosity and a capacity to rejoice that is disappointment-proof.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"During
During the filming of the main interview. Havana 2022.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The film\u2019s mainstay comprises several interviews with the Argentinian singer-songwriter, in Havana and Buenos Aires. He narrates how the threads of a reciprocal love between him and the capital of Cuba, a place where he has several generations of followers, were intertwined. Contributing to the story, and in what way, are the testimonies of Pablo Milan\u00e9s, Cecilia Roth, Carlos Alfonso, Ele Vald\u00e9s, Luis Alberto Garc\u00eda and Wendy Guerra, among others; sometimes as exceptional witnesses \u2014 Cecilia was his partner on part of that tour \u2014 and others as mere spectators, young people who felt that Fito\u2019s songs spoke directly to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Juan
Juan Pin and actor Luis Alberto Garc\u00eda, one of the interviewees. Cathedral Squar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fito\u2019s first \u2014 fleeting \u2014 contact with Havana occurred in April 1987, when he came to participate in the 6th Varadero Popular Music Festival. This edition of the event is remembered for the meeting of luminaries such as Mar\u00eda Bethania, Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Irakere, Harry Belafonte, Van Van, Silvio and Elena Burque, among others. But, above all, it is memorable for the debut of a very thin and gangly boy who sang, with his whole body, pieces of wild pain. On that occasion, we Cubans collided live with a rock in Spanish that was not epigonal or mimetic, but rather came charged with the recognition and assumption of being Latin American. Fito won the public\u2019s heart and the public won Fito\u2019s heart, which had been broken after a huge family tragedy.<\/span><\/p>\n

The artist has spoken about the latter on several occasions, and in the documentary, once again, he expresses it. His trip to Cuba, at the invitation of Pablo Milan\u00e9s, literally saved his life. A year earlier, an aunt and his grandmother had been murdered in the city of Rosario. Pablo, as he himself tells it, saw in the Argentinian\u2019s euphoria, in his bright eyes, the mark of pain and offered him the only remedy within his reach: to sing, to remake himself, to perform the prodigy of turning his music into the expression of many. Without that opportunity for contact with the Cuban people, Fito acknowledges, he would not be the same.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"During
During the filming of the main interview. Havana 2022.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Juan Pin Vilar set out to create a work that was not nostalgic. But he didn\u2019t quite achieve it. You can\u2019t ask Cuban Fito fans not to be assaulted again and again by the sweet sentiment. Impossible for those who were present at his concert in the Plaza de la Revoluci\u00f3n in December 1993 (100,000 people, <\/span>according\u00a0 to the Spanish newspaper <\/b>El Pa\u00eds<\/i><\/b><\/a>), not to shudder at the images. Well, it\u2019s not just a matter of reviewing a moment, but of remembering who we were then, when we fell in love and sang \u201cCable a tierra,\u201d \u201c11 y 6,\u201d \u201cAmbar violeta,\u201d \u201cGiros\u201d…. The same thing happens with those who were present in October 2014 (Leo Brouwer Music Festival) and in June 2016 (closing concert for the 30th anniversary of the <\/span>Giros<\/span><\/i> record) at the Karl Marx, where the singer from Rosario set fire to the nights.<\/span><\/p>\n