{"id":295708,"date":"2024-02-01T15:56:29","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T20:56:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=295708"},"modified":"2024-02-01T15:56:29","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T20:56:29","slug":"the-americans-and-us-parallel-roads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/opinion\/columns\/in-plain-words\/the-americans-and-us-parallel-roads\/","title":{"rendered":"The Americans and us: parallel roads?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my younger days, I was not particularly a rock and roll fan. However, I vividly remember that my friends and I \u201csang\u201d \u201cRock de la C\u00e1rcel\u201d or \u201cTutti Frutti\u201d; \u201cRock Around the Clock\u201d, or \u201cSee you later, Alligator\u201d; \u201cPut your head on my shoulder\u201d or \u201cDiana.\u201d I say \u201cwe sang,\u201d because none of us had the slightest idea what Elvis, Bill Haley and the Comets, or Paul Anka were saying. So we just made up lyrics that sounded like the English words.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the way, the Spanish versions of Enrique Guzm\u00e1n, Manolo Mu\u00f1oz, Luis Bravo, Palito Ortega, or Los Hooligans would soon come to our aid. So \u201cPink Shoe Laces\u201d would become \u201cAgujetas de color de rosa.\u201d The lyrics of the covers sometimes had nothing to do with the originals. But at least we could scream in Mexican, \u201cEl Gordo said to the Cat, this is my chance, no one sees me and I can fight,\u201d without knowing for sure what we were saying.<\/span><\/p>\n

I remember as if it were today Ra\u00fal G\u00f3mez and the Astros, or Dany Puga, the fashionable rockers in 1962, giving a concert at the Belisa cinema, in La Lisa. As I said, I wasn\u2019t particularly into rock and roll, so I missed Los Kents or Los Jets, who would come to liven up the late 1960s. As is known, these bands did not appear, of course, on radio and television, nor were The Beatles, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johny Cash, The Mamas and the Papas, The Rolling Stones. Although we did at the parties with the senior high people on Saturday nights, where we danced twist listening to all of them until dawn.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember that the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) or the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) came to question us about our musical tastes. I do remember that among the dancers was the secretary of the Young Communist League (UJC) Base Committee, and that the parties with that prohibited music were at the house of the president of the UES (Union of Secondary Students) of the senior high.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those who were on the radio and TV were the Mustangs, the Bravos, Juan y Junior, Los Brincos, and a whole host of Spanish, Argentine, and Mexican epigones, who could be heard on programs with very high ratings, such as <\/span>Nocturno<\/span><\/i> (1966).<\/span><\/p>\n

I confess that to me rock in Spanish, whose hits I sang to my daughter when she was little, and which she and I can still share in favorable family circumstances, did not sound the same to me.<\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding the presence of U.S. music in the soundtrack of the 1960s, we know that <\/span>filin<\/span><\/i> is more of a style derived from the great performers of American jazz; and that Los Zafiros and Los Meme, those legendary groups of that time, carried to the surface the genetic code of the fashionable U.S. quartets; the same as the Cuarteto del Rey, which sang spirituals and country songs like \u201cSixteen Tons,\u201d and where a boy who sang like angels named Pablo Milan\u00e9s became known. As well as another beginner from that time, who due to his voice, his style and the poetics of his lyrics remembered Bob Dylan, named Silvio Rodr\u00edguez.<\/span><\/p>\n

To see those quartets live, I recommend an <\/span>Noticiero Icaic\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/a>(#247, March 1, 1965), in which the main national and international political events of the week were interspersed with \u201c<\/span>Sabes bien\u201d and \u201cOtro amanecer<\/span>,\u201d hits from Los Zafiros and Los Meme respectively. The most memorable thing about that Newscast was that it concluded with nothing less than the so-called \u201cRock Beethoven,\u201d performed by The Beatles in the flesh. Putting something nice followed by something not so pleasant, the editor made a parallel montage between the four Beatles and a band of monkeys playing with musical instruments. Years later, a friend from the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) would tell me that he had gone to the premiere theaters seventeen times that week, just to see, listen to, and jiggle in his seat with the live Beatles show that closed the Newscast. He did not remember, by the way, the images of the monkeys, only the golden opportunity to see his idols accompanied by their fans, breaking out with \u201croll over Beethoven \/ and tell Tchaikovsky the news.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Many years later, I discovered that \u201cTutti Frutti\u201d was not by Elvis, but by Little Richard; and that the original lyrics in English (\u201ca-wop-bop-a-loon-bop-a-boom-bam-boom\u201d) were as crazy as the one we invented in our Spanglish (\u201ca-uam-ba- buluba-balam-bamboo\u201d), because what mattered was the sound. And that monkey rock, actually titled <\/span>\u201c<\/span>Roll Over Beethoven<\/b><\/a>,\u201d was not by The Beatles, but by Chuck Berry. For me, that <\/span>Chuck Berry<\/b><\/a> was a late discovery.<\/span><\/p>\n

I imagine that he was well-known, however, by Cuban jazz players, who have always been, let\u2019s say, on top of the ball with U.S. music. Thanks to his peculiar electric guitar and the literary imagination of his lyrics, which earned him recognition as the father of rock by John Lennon and Dylan himself, Berry sounded to me like those indistinct memories that one doesn\u2019t know where they come from. I think they were from the jazz-rock and rhythmic blues of the Cuban Modern Music Orchestra (1967), which was all the rage with \u201cPastilla de menta,\u201d popularized a few years earlier by Ray Charles in his original \u201cOne Mint Julep.\u201d In that mythical orchestra I saw for the first time Chucho Vald\u00e9s, Paquito D\u2019Rivera, the guajiro Mirabal, Leonardo Acosta, Arturo Sandoval, Cachaito, and other recognized jazz players, like later Irakere, who filled the great theaters of Havana with that very American music. Also Cubanized, of course. Like everything else.<\/span><\/p>\n

If that music has never stopped being part of us, the same has happened with other areas of art and culture.<\/span><\/p>\n

In those 1960s of our red-hot anti-imperialism, the images of Mart\u00ed, Fidel, Che, Ho Chi Minh, farmers cutting cane, young soldiers and students painted by Ra\u00fal Mart\u00ednez invaded public art on billboards and murals, with the aesthetics of primary colors distinctive of pop art, which at that same time Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol were cultivating in the United States. The golden age of Cuban posters, a good part of them had the imprint of that pop, avant-garde art (truly) put in function of political denunciation, critic of advertising and mass culture, with an ironic and irreverent tone, in the distinctive works of Humberto Pe\u00f1a, Rostgaard, Fr\u00e9mez.<\/span><\/p>\n

Watching some of them work in their workshops full of cuttings from magazines and newspapers from all over the world, slides, catalogs from the great museums, photo contacts, collages, lithography stones, was like going up to a lookout point from where you could see beyond the world and particularly the United States. None of the \u201cdamn circumstance of water everywhere.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The living presence of U.S.-origin culture among us includes so many dimensions that I do not have space to address them here in an equally detailed and exemplary manner.<\/span><\/p>\n

If someone thinks that rock and jazz; the visual arts; the art deco buildings of Old Havana, Centro Habana, El Vedado; the so-called modern dance or Cuban school of ballet, the repertoires of the country\u2019s main theater groups, are part of the tastes of an elite, I want to recall that baseball, evangelical churches, the odd-fellows lodges, spiritualism, the taste for movies and television series are legacies of that exchange, and continue to be a living communicating vessel between the two cultures.<\/span><\/p>\n

Recognizing it this way does not make these demonstrations any less Cuban. From Fernando Ortiz, what we call Cuban is almost never equivalent to native, as if it were a plant or a species that was already on the island when the Spanish arrived. If we are what Darcy Ribeiro called a new people, it is because we carry genes from other parts, also from there. The same, by the way, as that \u201chouse of people\u201d (Mart\u00ed dixit) that is the American nation (or nations).<\/span><\/p>\n

In case anyone thinks that familiarity with things American is not an active and organic ingredient of our much-mentioned cultural identity, but rather an atavism of our capitalist past, from which we have been getting rid of, thank God; if they believe that they are remnants that the cultural policy of the Revolution has sought to eradicate, I want to comment that the history of this policy is not so simple.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although sometimes the allergy to everything that comes from the North has been able to cross into the national interest, as in that censorship of rock in the media, applied in a partial and contradictory way in the 1960s, or during the so-called Gray Five Years (1971-75). A fair examination of these stages reveals that it was never complete or penetrated much into popular culture, then or in later episodes, until today, as <\/span>I have commented before<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pulsing with censorship and other cultural keys of politics<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n