Fidel Castro, Rock Star

Fidel Castro, Rock Star / 14ymedio, Nestor Diaz De Villegas
Posted on March 27, 2016

14ymedio, Nestor Diaz De Villegas, Los Angeles, 27 March 2016 — Crouched
down in the last row of a sweet potato farm deep in the Cuban
countryside, a student of first year of high school listening to Dóbliu
(W). It was the end of 1973 and the foreign radio station was
broadcasting the Hit Parade. It was the velvet voice of Casey Kasem in
the potato field. It was the School in the Countryside in the Cuba of
Their Satanic Majesties, the Castro Brothers.

The boy fiddled with the antenna wire. Stations as far away as
Barquisimeto, Fort Lauderdale and Little Rock (Beaker Street, KAAY,
Underground Rock) came out of the old portable radio. What he had
captured was "The Lives of Others" and the student was a spy. If he was
caught listening to what came from the other side of the wall, he would
be expelled from high school.

There is no sledgehammer that will ever tear down the wall separating
Cuba from the rest of the world. It is the Wailing Wall and the Berlin
Wall all rolled into one, but without stones, reinforcing rods or
cement. The ocean is a sea of tears and a natural barrier: the "cursed
circumstances," whose limit is everywhere and whose center, blah blah
blah… We will have to invent a water music, an aquatic music, a tearful
Mass and a Paulina's Bidet that commemorates and curses this
metaphysical isolation. A task for the hydraulic engineers of the next
century.

Out there, beyond the yams, something big seemed to be going on. The
Soviet receptor collected coded messages and the young spy could only
decipher a few phrases: There's a new sensation / A fabulous creation /
A danceable solution / A teenage revolution…

The Beatles had been left behind, they belonged to the older
cousins. His was psychedelic rock. His idols were Robert Plant and Jimmy
Page, Led Zeppelin, and Brian Ferry and Brian Eno of Roxy Music: Tired
of the tango / Fed Up With fandango!

He went mad for Led Zeppelin four years earlier, Leandro Soto took him
to his house in Punta Gorda to listen clandestinely to a 45 his brother,
the merchant marine, had brought home: A Whole Lotta Love on side A; and
the punchy Communication Breakdown on side B.

The "Revolution" was, for him, only 33 "revolutions per minute," and the
one from '59 remained in remote antiquity.

Once, a Jamaican diplomat gave him a pack of Dunhills with two
cigarettes left, and a recent copy of the magazine Circus, where he
collided for the first time with Bowie. A student from Amsterdam,
passing through Havana, let him choose between Eric Clapton's Goodbye
Cream, and the first Pink Floyd record he heard in his life, Ummagumma,
a music that upset him and that he didn't understand.

He kept the Cream. He danced to The Sunshine of Your Love with a skinny
mulata woman in the room of an apartment on Aguacate street, designed
for a family of five, where forty dancers could fit, piled on top of
each other.

He lived as a hippie in the room of Eliades y Colchón, on Lamparilla
Street. He went out hustling in the doorways and came home with the
Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street under his arm. He learned to speak
broken Portuguese with Cypriot sailors. His coreligionists were
initiated into the mysteries of rock: Beningno, Digna's son, Pedro el
Fabuloso, Alejandro el Pelú, Tony el Alemán, Silverio, Cocacola and el Foca.

One night in the darkness of La Zorra and Cuervo he saw the Plastic
Flowers. They kicked him out of an apartment where some unknown girl was
celebrating her quinceañera for having sneaked in. Inside Los Kents were
playing.

In Manuel Antonio Ureña's living room he listened to the last album by
King Crimson – brought by Manuel Antonio's uncle in a diplomatic pouch –
drank black tea and asked permission to use the bathroom. That day they
had cut the water off and he was kicked out of this party, too, and they
humiliated him laughing at him from the balcony, while he slouched down
B Street.

At the end of the year, in the home of Raul Chaveco on the Prado – that
house that in 1971 was more important for Cuban culture than its
neighbor on Trocadero Street – he was able to see Las Almas Vertiginosas
live.

At the corner of San Lazaro and Genios he discussed endlessly with
Julito Buendia, bassist of Nueva Generación, about the relative
importance of Slade. In the wee hours of a morning, accompanied by
Pedrito Campos and Carlos el Gago, he was assaulted by a delinquint who
sought to grab his portable cassette player, while listening for
the thousandth time the long version of Iron Butterfly's Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida.

And yet, Fidel Castro was, even then, the real rock star. His satanic
scenario was the ruins of Cuba, Havana converted into Dresden that
served as background to his one-man Apocalypse. The culture that created
the music we listened to on a remote Villa Clara sweet potato farm
originated in Cuba, like the idea of the revolutionary that underlay the
iconoclastic impetus of rock'n'roll.

Today we know that the beards and the long manes of the rebels gave rise
to the hipsters. But, our hero in Flogar* camouflage and Dorticos*
glasses ended up gobbling up his own epigones! Like the chameleon David
Bowie, Fidel Castro changed, mutated, shed the extraterrestrial olive
green outfit he had worn down from the mountains and assumed the heavy
metal disguise of the Great Dictator.

Bowie has said that Hitler was the first rick star. In successive
transmutations, Fidel Castro would become Prosecutor, Torturer, Poet,
Father of History and World Doctor. He would then become Believer,
Despot, Sportsman and Convalescent Judas. He still exists, through the
mediation of his doubles: his inverted star hovers in the false
transvestitism of Mariela*, in the brutalism of Raul, in the radioactive
beards of the Devil's seeds.

We can divine them also in Armando Roblán* and in Armando Pérez Roura*,
in the black flags of ISIS, in The Clash's album Sandinista!, in Woody
Allen's Bananas, in the havoc of the penultimate Michael Jackson, and
even in the caprices of "The Most Interesting Man in the World." ("His
beard is registered on his organ donation card.")

And perhaps we should admit, finally, that we enjoyed rock'n'roll in the
ideal conditions of terror and persecution in which this revolutionary
music should be listened to. Perhaps only we, among all the rockers of
the world, really understood it. The Rolling Stones song that discovers
Satans in every moment of horror in universal history is a secret ode to
Fidel Castro. If we understand it like that, who knows if at some point
we will come to feel sympathy for the Devil.

__________

Editor 's note: This text was originally published on the blog of Néstor
Díaz de Villegas and has been reproduced here with the permission of the
author.

*Translator's notes:

Flogar was a Department Store in Havana.

Osvaldo Dorticos Torrado was nominally president of Cuba (Fidel was
prime minister) from 1959 to 1976. His glasses had thick black rims of
the kind popular again today.

Mariela Castro is Raul Castro's daughter and has taken on the cause of
LGBT rights (which in her version are separate from all other human rights).

Armando Roblán was a Cuban comedian famous for imitating Fidel, on both
shores.

Armando Pérez Roura has been called, "The most celebrated voice of
Miami's hard-line Cuban exile community."

Source: Fidel Castro, Rock Star / 14ymedio, Nestor Diaz De Villegas |
Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/fidel-castro-rock-star-14ymedio-nestor-diaz-de-villegas/