By Fabiana del Valle
HAVANA Times – Two teenage women headed up Pinar del Rio’s major road in the direction of the Pista Rita (amphitheater). They were being hardly distinguishable amid the mass of black and grey. One particular of them was making an attempt tricky to cover her newbie look by stretching the borrowed gown that saved climbing up on her thighs, revealing extra than what was permitted.
The calendar year was 1999, and at 6 pm the group named “Zeus” was going to engage in. The streets have been flooded with extended-haired youth with their tattoos and piercings. They sported t-shirts, restricted jeans, studded belts, sneakers or high boots, and sleeveless jackets with multiple patches.
The two ladies had been heading to see their 1st are living live performance. When the hardcore audio started, they ran to choose refuge in the vicinity of the stage, for dread of ending up crushed from the partitions of the amphitheater. The event’s organizer tried out to expel them from there, but the teenager in the borrowed gown stood her floor.
“You just try out and get us down from her, simply because there’s no way I’m likely to sign up for that horde.”
That large lout appeared so necessarily mean! She learned from her close friend that he directed Tendencia, at the time the finest-regarded band in the Pinar del Rio province.
Who could guess that a single year afterwards she’d be showing up in a person of Tendencia’s video clips doing headbanging, and that “Kiko” would be the one particular to organize her very first Artwork Clearly show in the gallery run by the Asociacion Hermanos Saiz (Youth cultural association”. Or that afterwards however, she’d be a privileged witness to the top secret exodus of the band in 2022.
But it was 1999, and she made her official entry as a Cuban rock follower with a borrowed dress and by standing up to a person who frightened her. That stance won her a put in the initially row, right beside the band’s drummer, in which she could take pleasure in the sight of Dionisio’s bare spherical butt when the lead singer for Zeus, with no reticence whatsoever, decreased his pants to the rhythm of “Violento Metrobus.”
Rock audio in Cuba has a historical past of ups and downs, constantly limited and semi-clandestine due to the official disapproval.
In a speech he gave in 1963 on the techniques of Havana University, Fidel Castro evidently expressed his scorn for these manifestations of overseas tendencies, like the songs of Elvis Presley, limited denims, or the blue denims we named pitusas.
“Lots of of all those very good-for-very little youngsters, youngsters of the bourgeoise, are going all over with some trousers that are way far too limited. (laughter) some of them with their little guitars striking Elvis Presley poses, and who have taken their extreme freedoms to the excessive of wanting to go to the general public collecting areas to organize their wimpy shows on their possess.”
In a lot more current a long time, the regime’s frame of mind in direction of rock tunes has softened, not only toward neighborhood and Latin American artists, but also toward some of English origin. RickWakeman, Sepultura,Audioslave, and the Rolling Stones have all supplied big live shows in Havana that drew in lovers from all more than the state.
But currently, a new phenomenon has turn into seen. Many bands have begun emigrating to the United States. It’s not the to start with time that Cuban rock has suffered the scars of financial crisis or emigration – it is just that this time pessimism reigns.
The blows of the 90s shown the genre’s power and the public’s unconditional assistance. The latest scenario includes a new wave of bands that are striving to subsist in a place with scarcities and a environment exactly where rock and weighty metallic tunes have shed ground.
For the instant, in the experience of this panorama, the only detail left is listening to the tunes of all those bands I as soon as savored hearing stay. Recalling tales: that Tendencia live performance wherever I endured my initial fainting attack the journey we took with Medula and la Comision Depuradora the photos with Aldo of Los Aldeanos or my surreptitious journey into the Countrywide Lodge to get shots of the Sepultura band customers.
I’m going to cling on to the memory of every moment lived, and go forward like that to start with time – when in a borrowed dress, and with each other with my mate, I learned the price of Cuban rock songs and the tenderness of its followers.
Read through additional from the diary of Fabiana del Valle listed here on Havana Instances.