Sean Barlow reports from Afropop Worldwide Seminar in Cuba, March 2003, Final Dispatch

Picking up the story from my last dispatch about our latest Afropop Worldwide seminar in Cuba,

http://www.afropop.org/multi/feature/ID/226

here are some more highlights. On our first Sunday in Havana, we visited an impressive community transformation project at the Solar de la California. And a wonderful local rumba group entertained afterwards, inviting us Afropoppers to join in.

The physical space of the Solar was a four story rectangular apartment complex housing some 125 people with a spacious internal courtyard dominated by a huge shade tree. It had been a run-down slum inhabited by the poorest Habaneros. A local community activist and journalist, Gisela Arandia Covarrubias, told us the story of how the Solar organized themselves to improve the physical structure, add bathrooms for all 36 apartments, improve security and start a computer-training program for the youth. She was very passionate that this way of grassroots organizing to improve people's living conditions and self-esteem was an important counterweight to the mentality of waiting for the state to do things top down.

When I asked Gisela about the Solar youth's attitude towards rumba, she said sure all the young folks can dance rumba but they tend to think of it as what their parents do. More popular with the youth in Cuba today are hip-hop, reggae, salsa, and pop. She also said that they were trying to transcend the limited, simplistic impression of happy black Cubans dancing to rumba and drinking rum. She said, sure rumba is fun but we want to give our young people more options, like being computer literate workers in the information age. What an impressive community. If anyone is interested in supporting their efforts, contact us and we can pass on their contact information.

That night we experienced directly what the Havana youth ARE dancing to when we went to La Cecilia to see Paulito F.G. and his 14-piece salsa band. The mostly Cuban, twenty-something crowd jammed the open-air concrete dance floor and shouted out Paulito's Catchy coro's (refrains). Close to the stage, dominated by a two-story image of a bottle of Havana Club rum, they were not dancing salsa so much as being totally transfixed by Paulito's charisma and the band's big sound. The shimmying, shaking, swaying, leg darting moves and overall sheer energy was contagious. Our Afropoppers, ranging in age from 16 to sixty-something, hit the dance floor. Contemporary salsa and timba is high-energy dance music to be sure, but to really appreciate it, I think you have to be in the middle of a lively dancing Cuban crowd.

I never knew there was a Chinatown in Havana until this visit. Ned Sublette's journalist friend, Rafael Lam, took us to the Barrio Chino. There we were welcomed into the Chinese Cultural Center and heard a presentation on the history of the Chinese community in Cuba. The Chinese were brought to Cuba starting in 1847 as indentured laborers but they were kept in slave-like conditions. Some 142,000 came, about 11% of whom died en route or shortly after arriving. The Chinese mixed with Africans and Spanish, and there are very few "pure Chinese" left in Cuba today. And unlike Chinatowns in San Francisco and New York, Chinese language is generally not spoken at home. But China is one of Cuba's top trading partners, and today in Cuba you find everything from bicycles to toothpaste made in China.

A well-known Cuban-Chinese sax player, Jesús Lam, talked to us about musical connections between Chinese and Cuban culture, including the trademark corneta China (Chinese cornet, a high pitched oboe) sound of the conga comparsas in Santiago de Cuba carnival music. Later, he played for us with a lively quartet in one of the Barrio Chino restaurants where we enjoyed fried rice, which our new friends waxed rhapsodic about. The community leaders at the Chinese Cultural Center invited us to return for tai chi Saturday morning and for acupuncture treatments. Next time you're in Havana, it's good to know where to go for the healing arts from the east.

The Jewish Diaspora is also represented in Havana. We visited a synagogue and spoke to the rabbi. It was an Orthodox congregation, with separate sections for men and women.

Back to the African Diaspora, the main focus of our seminar in Cuba. All throughout our visit, a family of Yoruba orishas kept visiting us. First there was the hang at the Cabaret Las Vegas, a small dimly lit club with a blow-your-ears-out sound system. A middle-aged hometown crowd gathers every Saturday to enjoy rumba by the impressive group Yoruba Andabo. They open their performance with a danced drama of the orishas, or santos, which you could loosely call "deities" in the Yoruba polytheistic pantheon. First came Eleguá smoking a cigar. He's known as a trickster and the opener of the way. Then came Ogún, the god of iron and war. The procession of orishas continued: Ochún, the orisha embodying beauty and love; Yemayá dressed in a blue swirling skirt like the waves of the sea she represents; Changó, the handsome orisha brimming with male energy, eyes bulging and tongue flickering; and finally Babaluayé, orisha of sickness who crawled out limbs shaking in palsy. Changó raised Babaluayé on his shoulders and helped him regain his strength. One by one, audience members came out to do a ritual embrace of their favorite orisha The musical accompaniment to this dance was a trio playing the sacred double-headed bata drums and a chorus of singers.

The next place we saw the orishas was in the town of Matanzas, about a two-hour drive east of Havana. They used to call this provincial capital the "Athens of Cuba" back in the 19th century when sugar was king, slaves worked 20-hour days in the canefields and mills, and money flowed into theaters and opera houses. And that's why we're here. Los Muñequitos put on a special show for us, dancing the orishas and then showing off the best rumba we experienced in Cuba, including the virtuosic columbia, where the male dancers show off their moves, using props like a bottle of rum, machetes and a chair. This event was also a warm homecoming for Ned who has produced several Los Muñequitos albums and opened the way for them in America. (You can hear Afropop Worldwide's recording of Los Muñequitos on the Qbadisc CD "Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Live in New York" recorded at their electrifying New York City concert in November 1992.)

The following day, the orishas followed us, or we followed the orishas, to the provincial town of Jovellanos about an hour further east of Matanzas where the Grupo Ojundegara performed in an open-air compound. Only these were not the orishas, they were the foddun - recognizably the same beings, but with the Dahomeyan name. Four generations of the Baró family maintain the tradition of Dahomey culture from West Africa (modern day Benin). The 60-something patriarch played a wooden drum painted blue, red and white. His 80- something mother, whose father was born in Africa, sang. His daughter and totally charming six year-old grand daughter danced. Brothers and cousins and the extended family filled out the dance corps and the musical ensemble of drums, bell and vocals. They call the orishas they danced different names here but they were still recognizable characters. This is the third time I've visited this family with an Afropop group, and I see intriguing new movements and hear new things each time. In my speech the the group afterwards, I thanked the Baró family for keeping Africa alive in Cuba. They smiled and bid us farewell.

Later that day we drove past sugar fields and a decrepit sugar mill to the smaller town of Perico, way off the beaten path. The housing stock was pretty run down. And no Starbucks!! A fruitless search for coffee at the local stalls got us directed to a private home known to sell coffee. A light rain changed the original plan for an outdoor performance of the local Gangá group. So instead we crammed into Piyuya's small, dark living room. Three drummers and a metal hoe player played and about a half dozen women danced the orisha characters. Again, there were different names for the same beings the Yoruba call orishas, but we recognized their telltale colors and personas.

The final visitation by the orishas was the most bizarre. Our last Friday in Havana we went to the world famous Tropicana club founded in 1939. Some 200 dancers and musicians entertain in a lush open air space for a nearly 100% foreign crowd at $85 a head. This was some of the most over-the-top entertainment I've ever experienced. Think Las Vegas meets Radio City Rockettes. Scantily clad dancers wearing chandeliers on their heads dance in a huge three-tiered outdoor garden amphitheater…singers appear perched high up in tree house platforms…a 30 piece orchestra performs…and, yes, eventually the orishas were evoked. There used to be multiple competing cabaret spectacles in Havana before the Revolution. And now only the Tropicana keeps the tradition alive. We walked out past the fountain decorated with naked dancing marble nymphettes. I loved the Tropicana--part of the endlessly fascinating story of Havana.

Once back in Havana, the two teenagers in our group plus four adults, including me, went back to the Cabaret Las Vegas for their weekly hip-hop night. An hour late is still too early in Cuba. Anyway, we waited for the performance with the crowd of mostly 20-something guys decked out in hip-hop gear, watching music videos of American idols such as Mary J. Blige and Snoop Dogg. It took me a few minutes to realize that the music they were playing did not synch with the music blasting from the sound system. Maybe it was because everyone in the room was bobbing to the beat and had their eyes glued to the screen. Eventually, a pair of hip-hop artists came out to rap to a track. I could not understand the words but I heard the words "Cuba" and "revolution". A second act followed, this time a young guy with a passionate delivery rapping to a slow, powerful beat. And then the deejay music came back on. The action on the dance floor got thicker as we waited for the next live hip-hoppers. But not to be. Turns out the first pair had rapped something that made the Cabaret's management uncomfortable and they called off the event. Mmmmmm….So much for freedom to speak your mind in the hip-hop space.

And so much for the freedom to travel to Cuba for people-to-people cultural and educational exchanges. While we were in Cuba this time, we got an Associated Press report that the Treasury Dept. had issued tightened restrictions on educational exchange programs between Cuba and the U.S. They claim that U.S. organizations licensed to grant qualified groups permission to travel to Cuba for educational yet non-academic programs were abusing the privilege; people were coming down for vacation on the pretense of an educational trip. I can't judge that except to say that in our case, ask any Afropopper who has participated in our seminars, and they'll tell you ours is an intense 24/7 educational seminar!! What I think is really going on is that the current U.S. administration wants to isolate Cuba as much as possible. They want to control the image of Cuba, the better to demonize it, and with people going there to see it for themselves they can't do that. And in the process deprive Cuba of much needed dollars. And that the positive press Cuba was getting from Americans who had actually visited the island and made contact with real live Cuban people was bugging the U.S. authorities.

It seems that when things get hot on the U.S. side of the tempestuous U.S.-Cuba relationship, there can be a corresponding tightening up on the Cuban side. Some 70 dissidents were recently rounded up in Cuba, accused of working with U.S. interest section officers in Havana to overthrow the government. They now face trial. There also was recently a big crackdown in Cuba against private businesses, such as baking bread, running illegal taxis and so on. Homes were raided to see if people had luxury goods they could never have bought with their state salaries. Locals I spoke with laughed and said, "Yeah, they do the crack down for two weeks, things disappear, and by the third week, the private bread sellers are back." Such is the ongoing dance between the state's fluctuating attitude to allowing small windows for private business and the people's understandable desire to supplement their modest salaries (averaging $10 per month) with money-making ventures. Another heavier and more widely popular crackdown going on in Cuba now is against drugs--mainly cocaine and marijuana.

One other consequence of the new restrictions from the U.S. side will be increased difficulty for Cuban groups trying to get visas to perform in the U.S. Cary Diez, who manages Los Muñequitos, told me they are reacting to this by looking to Europe for opportunities. She and her team are also building a web site to help them get the word out about Los Muñequitos. Cary, you may recall, is the friend of Ned and now me who earned a Grammy for her production, "La Rumba Soy Yo". Cary welcomes Afropop groups into her extended family's home on our first night in town for a delicious home cooked meal and a musical performance and dancing. Cary and her web team asked me to drop by my last morning to critique the draft version of their web site. I enjoyed returning her hospitality with basic tips on web site construction and community building through the web. If anyone would like to contribute any resources or talents to this project, please contact us at info@afropop.org with what you'd like to offer and we'll pass the word to Cary and her team in Havana.

I'd like to say "muchas gracias" to our wonderful group of Afropoppers, to our veritable fount of nonstop information "El Vaquero" Ned Sublette, to our excellent Havana guide and friend Jesús Garcia, and to our partner organization for these Afropop Worldwide seminars, the Cuban Research and Analysis Group (CRAG) led by Louis Head.

If you would like to receive information about future Afropop visits to Africa and Latin America, please send an e-mail to: info@afropop.org and put "Afropop trips" as the subject. In the works are Mali for late December 2003/early January 2004 and Madagascar for late March 2004.

Safe travels… Photographs and text by Sean Barlow

Thanks to Ned Sublette for his editorial advice on this report.

































































Contributed by: Sean Barlow