Cuba dances to a Celtic beat
MAGAN'S WORLD: MANCHáN MAGAN'S tales of a travel addict
THE LATEST Fáilte Ireland video presents Ireland exactly as you'd hope
it would be to the world – as a potent, self-confident place brimming
with beauty and joie de vie. It's revelatory, and ought to be forwarded
to everyone you know abroad – make promoting Irish tourism a viral
campaign (check it out on YouTube).
Tough times may have sparked our government agencies to up their ante.
Cultural Ireland, a tiny seven-person organisation, has captured America
with its Imagine Ireland programme of 400 events, plays, readings and
concerts throughout the US. It is also presenting Irish culture to
China, Australia and Russia, but most interesting of all is Cuba's
CeltFest which it helped establish last year, and which is about to have
its second airing.
It never dawned on me that Cuba might be part-Celtic, that the colonial
settlers would have come from poor areas of Spain such as Galicia and
Asturias on the Celtic northern fringe. They brought with them their
bagpipes and fiddles and over the centuries blended their tunes with the
African, Latino and Caribbean sounds that flow like a river through Cuba.
Music coalesced in Cuba like nowhere else, and yet a pure Celtic strain
remained. It was this that the Westmeath piper, Kilian Kennedy, stumbled
accidentally upon during a holiday in Havana. He was practising his
uilleann pipes in the park one day, when a local piper turned up and
introduced him to "a rich, hidden vein of Celtic music" on the island.
Two years later, they established CeltFest Cuba, bringing Liam Ó
Maonlaí, Niamh Ní Charra, Brendan Begley and his sons together with
Cuban, Scottish and Cape Breton musicians and dancers to play in a range
of back street cafes and crumbling colonial buildings in Havana. It was
a wild success; the locals immediately catching on to the magical
swirling airs of Begley and Ó Maonlaí and joining in to create a
Cuban/Celtic mezclado of pulsating, rhythmic sound.
Each side were like spark and kindling to each other and wherever they
gathered, whether in old Hemingway bars or on street corners, the music
would re-ignite: Irish fiddles and accordion, Spanish gaitas (bagpipes)
with Afro-Caribbean percussion creating irresistible rhythms that set
everyone moving – feet stepping with Cape Breton precision and waists
shimmying with Latino abandon.
The video snippets on celtfestcuba.org capture the atmosphere: the bold
Begley boys coaxing Ó Maonlaí into dancing a jig straight through a
midnight salsa video being shot on a Havana street, or Brendan Begley
singing Slán Le Maigh as a farewell to staff in a bar, hand-in-hand with
his two sons, Bréanainn and Cormac, channelling the millennia-old dúchas
of the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht, with Ó Maonlaí and a group of locals
joining in, much to the bemusement of the bar's locals – it's a tingling
cross-cultural moment.
"I think the big thing is that people were getting lost in the trance of
the Irish music," says Ó Maonlaí. "We were bringing some of that cloud
of our dream time here and, in turn, were getting lost in some of the
music that was here. I was allowed to exercise certain musical muscles
in myself. It was fertile ground."
How, you might ask, does any of this help Irish tourism? Most Cubans are
hardly likely to be able to afford a holiday in Ireland, but the 1.7
million Cuban-Americans could easily, and reminding them that we are all
Celtic brothers is a worthy undertaking which could reap rich cultural
and economic rewards.
After all, Los Cubanos have always been known as the Irish of the
Americas – a gracious, generous, tactile, dance and music-obsessed
people – and their Rip Van Winkle island may have something to teach us
about bucking modern social and political realities, and offering an
alternate vision, one in which arts are a central tenet of society.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/travel/2011/0402/1224293595731.html
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