The Americans and us: parallel roads?
Imagining relations and their perspectives is not limited to diagnosing micropolitics in Washington or Miami, recording the latest polls, or understanding the psychological profile of the next president and his intentions toward Cuba.
Rafael Hernández
In my younger days, I was not particularly a rock and roll fan. However, I vividly remember that my friends and I “sang” “Rock de la Cárcel” or “Tutti Frutti”; “Rock Around the Clock”, or “See you later, Alligator”; “Put your head on my shoulder” or “Diana.” I say “we sang,” 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.
By the way, the Spanish versions of Enrique Guzmán, Manolo Muñoz, Luis Bravo, Palito Ortega, or Los Hooligans would soon come to our aid. So “Pink Shoe Laces” would become “Agujetas de color de rosa.” The lyrics of the covers sometimes had nothing to do with the originals. But at least we could scream in Mexican, “El Gordo said to the Cat, this is my chance, no one sees me and I can fight,” without knowing for sure what we were saying.
I remember as if it were today Raúl Gómez 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’t 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.
I don’t 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.
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 Nocturno (1966).
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.
Regarding the presence of U.S. music in the soundtrack of the 1960s, we know that filin 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 “Sixteen Tons,” and where a boy who sang like angels named Pablo Milanés 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 Rodríguez.
To see those quartets live, I recommend an Noticiero Icaic (#247, March 1, 1965), in which the main national and international political events of the week were interspersed with “Sabes bien” and “Otro amanecer,” 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 “Rock Beethoven,” 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 “roll over Beethoven / and tell Tchaikovsky the news.”
Many years later, I discovered that “Tutti Frutti” was not by Elvis, but by Little Richard; and that the original lyrics in English (“a-wop-bop-a-loon-bop-a-boom-bam-boom”) were as crazy as the one we invented in our Spanglish (“a-uam-ba- buluba-balam-bamboo”), because what mattered was the sound. And that monkey rock, actually titled “Roll Over Beethoven,” was not by The Beatles, but by Chuck Berry. For me, that Chuck Berry was a late discovery.
I imagine that he was well-known, however, by Cuban jazz players, who have always been, let’s 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’t 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 “Pastilla de menta,” popularized a few years earlier by Ray Charles in his original “One Mint Julep.” In that mythical orchestra I saw for the first time Chucho Valdés, Paquito D’Rivera, 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.
If that music has never stopped being part of us, the same has happened with other areas of art and culture.
In those 1960s of our red-hot anti-imperialism, the images of Martí, Fidel, Che, Ho Chi Minh, farmers cutting cane, young soldiers and students painted by Raúl Martínez 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 Peña, Rostgaard, Frémez.
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 “damn circumstance of water everywhere.”
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.
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’s 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.
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 “house of people” (Martí dixit) that is the American nation (or nations).
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.
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 I have commented before.
Regarding the exhibition policy, in the first half of the 1970s, when 7 out of 10 Cubans went to the movies at least once a week, and we saw more diverse films than anyone else, including films by Sidney Lumet, Mike Nichols, Stuart Rosenberg, Roger Corman, Robert Aldrich, Ralph Nelson, Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola, Sydney Pollack, John Huston, Arthur Penn, Alfred Hitchcock, scheduled in all movie theaters in the country.
I mention all this because cultural interflows are not marginal to relations between the two countries. Thinking about these relations, in political terms, only as the fencing between the two governments, is a textbook example of the cultural deficits that affect the understanding of politics among us. This diplocentric vision of relations with the United States, common not only among our cadres, but also among several intellectuals, and which includes, by the way, some who study or advise them on their own, spreads in established media and in social networks.
The cultural and social level of these relations to which I am referring is not reduced to the flow of visitors called people to people. But if we stopped at the groups that arrive under this general license, we would see that they are not only simple citizens but also professionals, company directors, local governments, lawyers from important firms, as well as students, talent seekers, small businesspeople, advertising agents, artists. A group of Americans who have nothing to do with communism, and at the same time very motivated to see with their own eyes the reality of this forbidden island.
Conceiving them as a contingent of tourists attracted by the ineffable beauty of our beaches and sunsets, the son and the mojitos, loaded with dollars and passionate about traveling the boardwalk in a pink convertible Cadillac ignores the main cultural connection that unites us, or that is, sharing a common history. That history, by the way, includes the last sixty years. If for many of them, it was like visiting the Jurassic Park of socialism, for us it is the opportunity for another policy, culturally speaking. Achieving another policy would require that those in charge of serving them as if they were simple visitors or clients could someday be interested in finding out who the hell they are. On the other hand, the social and cultural dynamics of our close encounter involve different agencies. Among these, companies, media, universities, research and development centers, art and entertainment, sports, churches, and other social actors. As an example of their specific weight in relations, for example, during Obama’s short summer, artistic institutions and agencies alone represented 40% of all agreements reached. A good measure of communication and mutual interest, understanding and cooperation, which has not gone through agreements between governments.
Learning from history: five years after Barack Obama’s visit to Cuba
For the most part, the exchanges in all these sectors arose from initiatives on the other side. Our side limited itself to responding, better or worse. If that hopeful interregnum took place at the twilight of the Obama administration, it is unlikely that this reactive pattern has changed.
What are the causes of this imbalance? The first is that our policy towards the United States, in general, has led the black pieces, with chess masters who have known how to play that Sicilian defense very well, by the way. The second is that, instead of playing, most of our institutions tend to become defensive about any action on the U.S. side, more than any other country. Anything that comes from there, no matter if it is far from its government, triggers a complicated protocol. The third — right now the worst: the idea that as long as the United States does not emit clear and distinct signals of change, it is best to stay still; as if it were unrealistic to generate initiatives on this side while the sun of normalization does not shine at around noon.
The attitude of waiting, lighting candles for the least bad candidate, seems to ignore that the interflow between institutions and people on both sides contributes decisively to activating trends that affect the reconfiguration of the political context, both there and here and, consequently, encourage the rapprochement.
I have the memory of a discussion in a very select group of specialists in the United States in the early 1990s when a colleague with vast experience argued that “we should only fight when the correlation of forces favors us.” The change of this mentality towards a proactive attitude implies a less narrow or purely reflexive social, cultural and political vision. So imagining relations and their perspectives is not limited to diagnosing micropolitics in Washington or Miami, recording the latest polls, or the psychological profile of the next president and his secret intentions towards Cuba. A comprehensive and broader vision could contribute to a different understanding of the circumstances between the two sides, and to facilitate actions outside of diplomacy between governments, apparently frozen.
Paradoxically, the common codes between the respective cultures and societies, born from history and geographical proximity, give Americans and Cubans a comparative advantage in understanding each other, much greater, let’s say, than those existing with Vietnam, South Africa, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and others that U.S. politics gets along well with. These same affinities should enable us to identify interlocutors and manage associations.
It is impractical to set goals a priori or unilaterally, without having come into contact, and to prepare to work to clear up the ignorance prevailing here and there about the other. There is a cultural problem there, not simply an ideological or political one. As a Chinese strategy professor once told me: “Two-thirds of the way is for them (the Americans) to understand us. We are the ones in charge of explaining it to them.” Not to convince them of our ideas, to get them to share them, naturally. Just that they understand us. Isn’t that what culture means?
Regarding the legitimate and reasonable concern for national security, we must recognize the different conditions under which these relations operate today and, in particular, the close communication that binds us. In the era of artificial intelligence, social media, and circular migration, control over everything that flies requires other methods. And maybe it’s not about trying to control everything. It is not effective, it produces obstacles that limit us in what we want to achieve.
Protecting national culture is not about using a condom, because neither ideology nor culture allows for condoms — assuming it made any sense to use them to avoid certain perceived threats.
I often tell my students that the main eventual challenge in our relations with the United States (and with the world) would be if one night, unexpectedly, the blockade were lifted and true normalization was imposed. Because we’ve never had to deal with that scenario.
After the initial rejoicing over the raising of the U.S. flag in the until then Interests Section and the visit of President Obama, the effects of an eventual American tsunami worried some at the top and also many at the bottom. In 2016, more than a million visitors from the North invaded the streets of Havana and other cities. Suddenly, we had a kind of anticipatory flash of what was to come when the blockade was lifted.
As Sun Tzu recommended, the first thing to protect national interest is to walk with our eyes wide open about what we have around us, near us, and in our own people. Some worry, not without reason, about the impregnation of cultural globalization among us, with its alienating elements, characterized as manipulations foreign to the most authentic values of our identity. Although I share the concern to a certain extent, we must not forget, at the same time, that self and other people are not as delineated as they used to be, just as they are not delineated outside and inside.
Before I mentioned a list of American filmmakers who made movies that we were able to see in movie theaters during the Gray Five Year Period. Recently, thanks to a researcher friend, I was able to review the catalog of films shown on our TV channels between 2020 and 2022.
In that last year alone, 3,308 films were released, of which 1,842 were from the United States; that is, 55.68% of all the movies that viewers saw. The analysis of this programming, surely explainable with copyright arguments, etc., would entail an examination taking into account genres, authors, dates and quality of the films. In any case, during those three years, we Cubans saw, on state TV alone, 5,628 American films. Although there has been progress in terms of balance, since in 2021 the cinema of that country had reached 70%, and in 2020, 77% of all programming.
Of course, this very high concentration of U.S. movies, compared to the 1960s, is not a Cuban peculiarity; and at the same time, it would be desirable to have audiovisual diversity, especially on state TV, that balances the personalized consumption offered by countless services that sell all types of series and audiovisual products under license, and other suppliers, such as El paquete (The Package), Mochila (The Backpack), etc. While some researchers are encouraged to carry out this study, and others could do the same with music, access to Internet websites, etc., it is obvious that if the U.S. tsunami has not occurred, that tide that reaches our ankles is already part of the Cuban reality of today.
The echoes of the most prestigious and oldest jazz event in Cuba are still alive, where musicians from several countries met again, the presence of a greater number of musicians from the United States than in Trump’s gray quadrennium could illustrate what I was pointing out about parallel currents that do not cease between both sides. Giving them the attention they deserve, to facilitate and expand them as bridges of understanding and collaboration is the most imminent challenge. To do so, we do not have to wait for “the correlation of forces to favor us” or for the god of harmony to enter through a window in his Batmobile.
Instead of wasting away on futile predictions, pessimistic or optimistic, we should pay attention to that aphorism of the philosopher Chuck Berry: “You never can tell.”
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