The singer intones one of his old songs on the stage. The public presses closer, repeats the chorus, is moved to delirium. This week we've enjoyed one of the many festivals of trova music that have begun, this time, in Santa Clara province. With themes ranging from the romantic to the most contentious social issues, the event allows to to hear some happy new releases and other well-known compositions. Musical creation that had its golden age in the seventies, but is now losing ground to more commercial and fast-paced melodic forms. Most young people don't want to hear trova ballads with lyrics that speak of complaint or daily chronicles, they prefer to relax and enjoy themselves, to abandon reality, if only for one night. They go to the clubs to escape what is outside, not to be reminded of it. So those ideological tunes -- alluding to the New Man or the society he will inhabit -- have been thrown into the well of forgetfulness.
Despite the loss of popularity, there are still dozens of cultivators of the trova song tradition in Cuba. They sing for people who prefer to ponder daily life and its absurdities rather than run away to another dimension. There are also many of us who still shudder at the lyrics of Silvio Rodriguez, separated as we are from him by an abyss of political opinions, a ravine of philosophical positions. When it comes time to organize our musical -- or literary -- libraries, we've learned that the best idea is not to do it by party preference... if we don't want to suffer the sad loss of numerous authors.
Beyond the quality of the chords and verses, a good part of the public seeks in trova ballads their ability to evoke past memories: a first love, a close dance, the difficult years, that day of the first kiss, or the concert where we met someone very special. They trigger memories, like Proust's madeleine, but which enter through the ears rather than the palate. When the singer appears with his guitar in hand, he is, in reality, engaging us in an act of remembrance: taking us back to those times when we were so young, when Nueva Trova had not yet been totally faded by the acid of reality.
Yoani's blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.
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VIMEO:DOCUMENTARY on Cuban Singer “Pedro Luis Ferrer- La Revolucion de un Hombre” (2008)
Cuban troubadour Pedro LuĂs Ferrer is well known, and well loved, on the island, but he hasn’t been blessed with the good fortune and official backing enjoyed by the Buena Vista Social Club musicians. Born seven years before Fidel Castro’s march into Havana, Ferrer has matured with the Cuban Revolution, confronting in the process its contradictions and limitations, and his own ambivalence about what it has wrought. Although he has released only three albums in Cuba in 35 years (and three others abroad), his witty, sardonic social commentary so irked the Castro regime that in the late 90s the government banned his music from the state-run media–which in Cuba means all media.
Ostracized by the artistic establishment and many of his musical colleagues, Ferrer took his music underground, playing giving private concerts in friends’ homes, performances that were often recorded by fans and distributed illegally.
http://vimeo.com/675957
PEDRO LUIS FERRER: I was taught from childhood that the worst of the worst lived in Miami. The discourse of the Cuban Revolution always spoke out against racism and social marginalization, and at the same time degraded those citizens who did not share the established political creed as gusanos (worms). By that token, I who grew up in the cradle of the Revolution was ready to strike from the map those depreciable beings who obeyed the postulates of Miami— but the ideology did not want to admit to diversity among the opposition. In reality, people who risked their lives for the Revolution of 1959 sought refuge in Miami, as well as people who believed in socialism.
Visiting Miami was very instructive for me. I went through a long, contradictory, complicated, and painful process to strip myself of the ideology that had made me a mortal enemy of those who thought differently politically. I can now say that I have friends there too, and I lament profoundly having been at one time a carrier of that discriminatory ideology which made many decent and honest people who now live in Miami suffer.
CLICK LINK FOR ENTIRE INTERVIEW!
http://motherjones.com/media/2005/06/underground-man-interview-pedro-luis-ferrer