Introduction
In Cuba, popular music is held in high regard as a paragon of Cuban identity. Genres are as varied as they are well loved; innovation accompanies tradition in the progression and remembrance of a Cuban soundscape. Yet one constellation of interconnected subgenres has, since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, endured something of a complex and convoluted struggle to stake a claim in this Cuban soundscape: rock music. Although a sense of borrowing from external musical sources has long been a trait of numerous Cuban genres and musicians, and the roots and routes of Cuban musical expression show cultural dialogues between often diverse sources, there is still often a call to define the ‘authentically Cuban’ as uniquely isolated, autochthonous, and vehemently made in Cuba. This trait dovetails particularly with the Revolution's pursuit of defining a sense of national identity as a holistic and singular state, crucially defined from ‘within’ and capable of defining everything, and everyone, Cuban. Thus conceptions of Cuban music as traditional and as representing an authentic Cubanness still abound in much discourse on Cuban music.
The processes that have brought rock music, in its various and variegated guises, to Cuba throughout the revolutionary period, and the means of borrowing to speak to a sense of Cuban identity, share many similarities with other Cuban musical expressions.Footnote 1 However, where more contemporary genres such as hip hop have gained limited acceptance as a voice within the Revolution (Baker Reference Baker2011, p. 33), rock music has been consistently considered something of a threat to the authenticity of the Cuban soundscape, and has often been denied legitimacy as part of that soundscape, pushed to a position outside the Revolution.
Despite (or perhaps, as this paper will suggest, because of) this enforced liminality that rock musics have had to endure within Cuba, many Cuban rock musicians and fans have been as obsessively concerned with the project of defining a Cuban identity as any other cultural/artistic practitioners. This obsession with defining a sense of Cubanness is one of the aspects that connect rock to other Cuban cultural practices. This paper takes three songs by the controversial rock band Porno Para Ricardo as separate case studies describing some of the many confrontations, dialogues and competing constructions of Cubanness that are taking place in contemporary Cuban rock music. Although by no means a particularly prominent or influential group, Porno Para Ricardo's work serves to illustrate overtly the problematic place that rock music has had to negotiate in relation to the state. However, they also complicate the picture by levelling certain critiques at aspects of that same rock subculture, notably its members' ability (or perhaps political willingness) to address particularly sensitive aspects of the Cuban condition. Finally, the band return to tradition.Footnote 2 By staking some sort of ownership over both rock and more recognisably Cuban music, they bring into focus just some of the long line of essentialising dichotomies that dot the Cuban landscape, parsing senses of Cuban identity into strictly held binaries of ‘them and us’, ‘inside and outside’, ‘before and after’, ‘authentic and inauthentic.’
Rock in Cuba: An ‘obsession’ with identity
Although a full history of the routes and meanings of rock music in Cuba would require a much longer and more discrete analysis,Footnote 3 it will perhaps suffice here to suggest that rock music has been a consistent visitor to the Cuban soundworld, albeit one that has at various points in history been criminalised, marginalised, subjugated, rallied against, denied and co-opted (Mandulay López Reference Mandulay López and Fornet1997; Rodriguez Quinta Reference Rodriguez Quinta2001; Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo Reference Pacini Hernandez, Garofalo, Pacini Hernandez, Fernández L'Hoeste and Zolov2004; Moore Reference Moore2006). And throughout that tangled and often illicit history – one that dovetails interestingly with the Revolution itself, temporally at least – much of its relocated meaning has come from its use in helping to define and shape a definition of Cuban identity for its listeners.
This part of the paper examines some of the moments where rock music has sought a place as a music reflecting a sense of Cuban identity. As many writers on different aspects of Cuban culture, politics and history have noted, one central thread that can be seen to run through the skein of otherwise fractious discourses is the central concern with defining Cuban identity. As Antoni Kapcia (Reference Kapcia2000, p. 24) writes, ‘one dominant, and overwhelming, feature of Cuban political culture [is] the obsession with identity, which dominates politics and dissidence from late in the colonial period until the present day’. Arturo Arango (Reference Arango and Fornet1997, p. 123) similarly suggests that ‘even for those who … continue to be bitterly opposed to the Revolution, whatever is Cuban remains a near pathological obsession’. This ‘obsession’ with national identity is as apparent in rock music as it is within more overtly Cuban forms of cultural practice.
In the pre-Revolution Cuba of the mid-1950s, rock music was perhaps as present and popular as in the rest of Latin America. Cuban musicians would incorporate rock and roll, doo-wop, jazz and other genres with the staples of Cuban tradition as constituent atoms in a constantly evolving Cuban soundscape.Footnote 4 However, the early 1960s saw another fervent period of nation definition as the Revolution began to assert itself fully. Fidel Castro's (Reference Castro1961) infamous maxim ‘within the Revolution, everything; against it, nothing’ stands testament to the desire to adopt a definition of Cuban national identity as somehow self-contained, all-encompassing, autochthonous and unwilling to allow permeation from exterior cultural sources. The result was both a rigidification of the cultural tropes of traditional genres, and a denial of sources and influences from without as somehow illegitimate and unnecessary for reflecting Cubanness.Footnote 5 The continuation of Fidel Castro's ‘words to the intellectuals,’ dealing with artists making such music, demarcates similarly strict lines of Cubanness:
What are the rights of revolutionary or non-revolutionary writers and artists? Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, no rights at all. (Castro Reference Castro1961)
And so, as rock music globally was at its most popular and pertinent throughout the 1960s, it was a source strangled, though never entirely absent, within Cuba. Robin Moore (Reference Moore2006, p. 13) writes that ‘the government for many years defined “foreign” primarily as North American or British and kept music from both these countries out of the media’. As many Cubans are keen to point out, this was a period where even owning a Beatles record was a criminal offence;Footnote 6 where rock music was excluded from the narrative of Cubanness; where it was censored and subjugated to a ‘non-position’ outside the Revolution. At the same time, the virtues and complexities of a selective sample of Cuba's wealth of traditional musics (particularly their ‘African’ roots) were extolled as representational of a holistic Cuban identity (Fernandes Reference Fernandes2003), one that has often taken the concept of ‘Africanness’ as an intrinsic (and holistic) aspect of the definition of Cuban identity (Astley Reference Astley2012, p. 11). This emphasis on certain representation of Africa within Cuba has operated as much a ‘formidable ideological weapon against the United States’, in the words of de la Fuente (Reference de la Fuente1998, p. 18), as it has sought an accurate depiction of a contemporary Cuban identity. This trope defining the nation as opposed to that ‘colossus to the north’ (Fernandez Reference Fernandez and Santí1994, p. 111) is emphasised in Fidel Castro's polemical words: ‘We should tell the Yankees that they should not forget … we are an Afro-Latin country … the blood of Africa runs abundantly through our veins’ (Castro 1975, in Pacini Hernandez Reference Pacini Hernandez1998, p. 114).
Yet, as Raul A. Fernandez suggests, this opposition to geographical neighbours through cultural/musical tropes did not stop only at the US:
People of Latin-American origin can be nearly as unfamiliar with Spanish-Caribbean music as US-Anglo audiences. … The clave beat, the rhythmic use of ‘melody’ instruments, and a melodic approach to percussion produce exotic sounds even for many Latin Americans. (Fernandez Reference Fernandez and Santí1994, p. 111)
This assertion makes Cuban music, and thus the identity so inextricably linked to/defined by it, ‘exotic’ and confusing to any and all surrounding cultural practices. Thus the trope of Cuba as an isolated island – culturally and politically – is cemented through the perceived uniqueness of its music, and is still a significant part of the definition of Cubanness.
Although the Revolution may have rejected rock music, its potent lure scarcely diminished, even if the channels of musical dissemination were narrowed. Rock music in the half-decade of governmental omnipotence el quinquenio gris (1971–1976) may have been denied a space on Cuban media; owning, importing and selling foreign records may have been illegal, but the many non-official routes of musical dissemination – smuggled records, static-filled radio signals from Miami or Latin America, third-generation mixtapes, etc. – that ingenious Cubans adopted not only led to a persistent trickle of rock music into the island, akin to ‘smoke seeping under a door’ in Deborah Pacini Hernandez and Reebee Garofalo's evocative words (Reference Pacini Hernandez, Garofalo, Pacini Hernandez, Fernández L'Hoeste and Zolov2004, p. 44), but may also have helped the shaping of a distinctly Cuban significance and a translated Cuban meaning to these otherwise ‘foreign’ imports.
Again, the compromised routes of musical dissemination and the meanings with which they imbued rock music would require a longer and more focussed study, but the ‘fragmentary, intermittent, and highly decontextualised’ (Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo Reference Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo1999, p. 19) nature of rock music in Cuba resulting from these illicit routes of dissemination may have served to increase, rather than diminish, the significance and ability to reflect a particularly Cuban identity for a Cuban audience. Accounts of rockers crowding around radios playing música en inglés,Footnote 7 avoiding police harassment, and speculating on the meanings of English lyrics, evoke a music where little additional information accompanied the music on this illicit and fragmentary passage across the waves and into Cuban ears. And so speculation as to meaning, and lyrical as well as cultural translation, became essential parts of decoding the messages of this imported music. Rock music could be made to fit within a contemporary context, translated to mean something Cuban. And because the same dearth of information that led to the speculation in the first place meant that there was little means of verification – that is, there was no way to be proven wrong in one's interpretation of the texts – rock music was allowed to mean, in a sense, whatever its clandestine audience wanted it to mean. Thus its position as a tool for describing an alternative sense of Cubanness was affirmed.
If the solidification of revolutionary identity in the early 1960s serves as one bookend to the repression of rock music in Cuba, then it is tempting to see the Special Period – that is, the interrelated social and economic crises following the collapse of the Soviet Union – as another. Although, as Robin Moore notes, governmental attitudes to rock music may have begun to soften in the late 1970s as the idea that ‘the support of traditional music to the exclusion of other genres may be as detrimental to the country as the loss of its own folklore’ (Moore Reference Moore2006, p. 13) began to be accepted, post-Special Period Cuba saw a mushrooming in popularity and, crucially, the visibility of a great number of broadly alternative, broadly imported, musical expressions that audiences and musicians did not feel necessarily had to be synthesised with more recognisably Cuban sounds to be ‘Cubanised’ (Moore Reference Moore2006). Heavy metal, hip hop, black metal and punk began to find their place as distinct genres within a Cuban musical narrative.
The huge influx of tourists to the island in the early 1990s (Perez Reference Perez2006, p. 309), something of a governmental concession to the desperate economic situation, paradoxically helped to both cement the image of the traditional Cuban musical/identity model while simultaneously helping to broaden the picture, and fill in the informational blanks, of imported rock music (Astley Reference Astley2012, p. 33). As traditional Cuban musics began to make a significant global cultural impact again, as they had pre-Revolution, rock musics – particularly as brought by ‘cultural tourists’ visiting universities, etc. – began to permeate the Cuban sense of identity, and the myriad genres began to arrive on the island in much more readily intelligible and less fragmentary forms. As Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo again attest, by the mid-2000s the increased routes of rock dissemination led to a more coherent recognition of subgenre distinctions, and thus the formation of ‘dozens, if not hundreds, of rock groups in Cuba, playing every imaginable subgenre of rock, from grunge to death metal, to punk, each with a devoted fanbase’ (Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo Reference Pacini Hernandez, Garofalo, Pacini Hernandez, Fernández L'Hoeste and Zolov2004, p. 65).
However, these subcultural generic distinctions have often been overlooked by fans and officialdom alike, resulting in the umbrella term ‘friki’ – a hispanicised rendering of the English word ‘freaky’ – as a description of all Cuban rock musicians, fans and subcultures, irrespective of their bespoke and specific musical affiliations. This agglomeration serves to problematise some of the well-rehearsed and well-defined temporal, geographical and sonic lines between rock music's many subgenres that make sense of, and provide a narrative to, rock music in a British and/or American context. Although distinctions between the more nuanced subgenres of rock – thrash metal, black metal, etc., even a term as evocative and fixed as punk – are of some importance within Cuba, they are at least made a little more hazy by the lack of free-flowing and complete musical dissemination within and to the island following the embargo of the 1960s, and are blurred by the incomplete, and often temporally confused, map of British/American bands that makes its way to Cuba, all of which problematises subgenre definitions in this paper and in Cuban rock music discourse in general.
As both Ciro Diaz and Gorki Águila of Porno Para Ricardo note, the musical map of rock music, for many Cubans, is a little sketchy. Gorki suggests that ‘there were people from extreme metal that didn't like punk so much, in spite of the fact that extreme metal came out of punk, but people here don't know anything’ (Águila, interview with author, Reference Águila2010). On remembering his early musical influences, Ciro says:
I listened to anything. Maybe it happened to me as it happened to many people here, because technology came so delayed, there were no tape recorders, not even radios sometimes, and what came through the radio was very filtered music. For example, punk came to Cuba very late. At the end of the 70s, no one listened to it here, so we had it at the end of the 80s, beginning of the 90s. (Díaz, interview with author, Reference Díaz2010)
Furthermore, translating these genres to make Cuban cultural sense led to the incorporation of many musical influences – not always Cuban – into rock genres. In Cuba this has led not to an increasingly fragmented spectrum of hybrid subgenres, but to a blurring of the boundaries between musical categories that make sense of rock music elsewhere. And so the friki identity as a variegated mixture and blurring of many distinct subcultural styles has become, if not always a welcome, then certainly a recognisably Cuban, archetype.
Yet to suggest that rock music has eventually won this revolutionary battle for acceptance as Cuban within Cuba because of its (relative) ease of dissemination and (relatively) intact cultural image would be to gloss over the ongoing struggle for authenticity as a legitimate voice for expressing contemporary Cuban life. Indeed, the very completeness of the paramusical image associated with the music that now makes its way into Cuba has, to many rock musicians (and Porno Para Ricardo would serve as a particularly vehement example of this), diminished its potential to reflect a sense of Cubanness. Where little cultural (or literal) translation of style and meaning need take place in these less-than-fragmentary musics, a growing sense of imitating foreign musical and stylistic tropes has, to many, pervaded the burgeoning rock scene in Cuba. Musics are replayed and replicated intact, without needing to work their codes into a wider, and more Cuban, fabric. As a result, bands such as Porno Para Ricardo argue that some of this obsession with defining a particularly Cuban identity, a running thread throughout rock music's history in Cuba, has waned.Footnote 8
It was into, and as opposed to, this post-millennial world of imitating wholesale images of rock styles that Porno Para Ricardo were formed. From the very outset, the band established not only a clear aesthetic, but a definite sociopolitical stance. Their creative identity embraced an amateurism (in the most positive sense of the word) and was fiercely protective of their musical output, opting to ‘do it themselves’ in almost every capacity. They rallied against the state-run music industry and the concessions they demand their musicians make, as well as the rigidity and conservatism of Cuba's professionally trained traditional musicians and the ‘mimetismo’ they saw as detrimental to the position of the frikis as a radical interpreter of the failings of the Revolution.
From their beginning, the band were shocking and overt in their lyrical output; songs with copious (Cuban) swear words and a fixation on sex filled their first album. However, following Gorki's arrest and incarceration,Footnote 9 with the release of two albums simultaneously, the band demonstrated both a more vehemently political bent to their musical output, and a still greater desire to be seen as a part of the construction of a contemporary Cuban identity.
Despite this engagement with symbols of Cubanness, the band has been forced to operate ‘outside the Revolution’. Prohibited from performing live within Cuba, their music receives no media play, their albums are unavailable to purchase (legally) in Cuba, and although it could be argued that it is precisely this state-sponsored censorship which has given the band their agency, indeed their raison d'être, it has also prevented them from convening like-minded audiences in Cuba, stifling their attempts to disseminate their meanings of Cubanness, even hampering their legitimacy as musicians. Such a liminal position does not mean that the band are not heard within Cuba – they have something of a clandestine fanbase on the island – but they are seldom, if ever, collectively heard, or indeed heard out loud. Secrecy and solitude – an atomised audience – accompanies their music, and so discussions of audience interaction and meaning become a little more problematic. However, despite this silence, the band still make their noise from the margins of Cuban society, and are thus still a radical and relevant part of the narrative of Cuban music making and identity.
Not only do Porno Para Ricardo define their soundscape with recourse to aspects of Cuban tradition, they address and incorporate countless and variegated cultural, historical and political signifiers of Cubanness into their repertoire: from reinvented socialist slogans and artwork, to snippets of radio and television jingles; from interpretations of traditional Cuban genres, to studied parodic imitations of official speech making. While the band's criticisms of Fidel Castro and the lingering dogmatism, bureaucracy and persecution of the Revolutionary government are as overt as they are well documented, much less studied are their remembrances of childhood and constant commentary on life in Cuba.
Running through the band's work are a number of paradoxes: a determination to assert their version of rock as a mode of communicating a Cuban identity, yet a criticism of other Cubanised rock genres as somehow inauthentic; an attempt at collectivism through remembrance and cultural references that speak to a distinctly Cuban context, yet a desire to move away from nationalism and the pervading sense of Cuban cultural superiority. In the following three case studies, I will examine some of the often contradictory positions Porno Para Ricardo adopt in relation to the histories of rock music, its place within Cuba and its relationship to Cuban tradition. These complex networks will perhaps demonstrate an example of the precarious, but significant, position rock music has had in shaping and reflecting Cuban identity.
Example 1. ‘Comunista Chivatón’: rock and the state
A running theme in Porno Para Ricardo's work is their consternation with the ‘rock agency’, a union intimately linked to the upper echelons of revolutionary power, part of the Asociación Hermanos Saíz (AHS) that effectively controls mainstream musical production,Footnote 10 acting as a gatekeeper over the legitimate (and legal) use of the term ‘musician’. The song ‘Comunista Chivatón’ (‘Communist Snitch’) sets out one of the band's most specifically pointed criticisms of the AHS.Footnote 11 In bitter, biting, personal words, guitarist Ciro Díaz addressed his target, demonstrating the literal nature of lead singer Gorki Águila's desire to give ‘name and surname’ to the band's antagonists (cf. Placák Reference Placák2006; Cuoma and de Nooij, Reference Cuoma and de Nooij2008), to address their concerns overtly and directly, and not to ‘hide behind metaphor and poetic language’ (Placák Reference Placák2006). Throughout the song, the former head of the AHS, Alpidio Alonso, is made the butt of jokes, has allegations levelled and has copious insults hurled, at him. But his greatest crime appears to be his reluctance to let Porno Para Ricardo play their music:
El singao chivatón Alpidio Alonso no quiere que los Porno toquen mas
Alpidio Alonso dice que no que no que el no está en ná
y cuando le dicen que quieren invitarnos a tocar
Alpidio Alonso no deja que vallamos a quemar
The fucking snitch Alpidio Alonso doesn't want Porno to play any more
Alpidio Alonso says no, no that he's not into anything
and when someone wants to invite us to play
Alpidio Alonso doesn't want us to go and burnFootnote 12
A single (named) antagonist prohibits Porno Para Ricardo from performing, and the band are thus denied an agency within what may constitute officially sanctioned Cuban music. Perhaps this denial is musical, or the band's brash sound is perhaps too ‘un-Cuban’? Ciro's lyrics suggest otherwise. Porno Para Ricardo receive invitations to perform live, only to be thwarted by an institution unwilling to allow them to voice their criticisms. The prohibition, then, on performing live in Cuba is not due to Porno Para Ricardo being un-Cuban but, in the band's eyes, because they are a little too Cuban – a little too eager to express the sociocultural situation surrounding them.
But the band didn't always occupy such a liminal, antagonistic position. On releasing their first album, Rock Para Las Masas … Cárnicas (Rock for the Masses) in 2002, the band performed on youth-oriented music show Cuerda Viva and travelled to several rock gigs around the country.Footnote 13 However, following Gorki's arrest, the band were expelled from the AHS. Expulsion effectively denied the band the ability to call themselves musicians, at least in a truly professional and unhindered capacity. When the band do try and stage flashmob-style gigs (such as the thwarted show the band attempted to play from Gorki's balcony), vigilant CDR (Comités de Defensa de la Revolución, Committee for the Defence of the Revolution) members are on hand to cut the power to the apartment building. These often pernicious attempts to stifle the sound of a band outside the system are crystallised in this verse, and they attempt to illuminate the desire for both a controlled and more narrowly defined (both aesthetically and politically) definition of Cuban music that shapes state interests in managing Cuban music.
However, Porno Para Ricardo's grievance at not being allowed to perform are not necessarily aimed at fostering a reacceptance back into the fold; quite the opposite. After the middle verses of the song, relaying the more personal attacks on Alpidio Alonso, the final verse makes clear Porno Para Ricardo's separation from the state infrastructure and their celebration of their position decidedly ‘outside the Revolution’:
Alpidio Alonso: el jefe al mando de la asociación
el quiere botarnos, y eso es lo mejor que se le ocurrió
no nos hace falta estar en tu mierdera institución
adios imbesil, que sepas que esta banda es la mejor
Alpdio Alonso: the boss in charge of the association
he wants to throw us out, and that's the best he could think of
we don't need to be in your shitty institution
goodbye imbecile, just so you know, this band is the best
The petulance of the statement is perhaps its most powerful weapon, converting a significantly powerful representative of political and cultural hegemony into a ‘shitty institution’, and converting the band's potentially problematic expulsion from the AHS into a positive. Divorced from the institution, Porno Para Ricardo are afforded entirely free rein in their lyrical expressions and thus are able to express entirely and directly their personal identity. Not only do they have no need to be in this institution, not only is nothing lost, but they have gained an ability to express themselves clearly, without recourse to political acquiescence. By distancing themselves from the AHS, the band are able to be more like themselves.
Porno Para Ricardo are deliberately positioning themselves outside this institutional framework, ridiculing the need for a ‘rock agency’ as inauthentic and unnecessary. But this tirade can be viewed as something of a rallying cry to other musicians. As Gorki's explanation of the ethos behind the band's recently refurbished home recording studio suggests, this desire to remove alternative music from the constraints of the state is of paramount importance:
This studio that we're building is a result of being very conscious of the price that we have to pay for confronting the government and the institutions in this country. To make a recording studio means a lot to us, because it gives us massive autonomy when creating our music. It works for other artists that can come to record in this studio, to give them that opportunity and also to a great extent to demonstrate to them that if we could do it, they can also do it – which means it is possible to have a life outside of the institutions. It is possible to continue creation without the institutions, but people don't think so. Of course they would have to pay a price like us, they have to take the risk and they have to stop being afraid. They must stop being afraid. (Águila, interview with the author, Reference Águila2010)
Gorki's words assert the hypocrisy of trying to incorporate rock music into a revolutionary system that has overtly and systematically prohibited and subjugated the genre in all its forms since its inception. Rock and the Revolution are seen as incompatible by Gorki, and in this incompatibility, the latter is made incapable of representing a sense of Cuban musical identity by enforcing cultural and political constraints upon musicians. Elsewhere, Gorki has spoken of the dearth of radical collective action and rock music within Cuba, and the usurpation of such potential agency by the state:
The only thing we have in Cuba is a wrongly named ‘rock movement’ which is even directed by a governmental agency called ‘Rock Agency’ that answers to the government. It is a total aberration of what rock is. When did rock ever have to be institutionalised? (MLC 2008)
Gorki's words criticise the co-option of a potentially radical musical form by the state, but also those musicians, as will be examined in the following analysis, that adhere to the state's perceptions of Cubanness in order to make their music from the (relative) sanctity of being within the Revolution.
Example 2. ‘Black Metal’: rock and rock subcultures
Despite their clear and overt opposition to the hegemony of the Revolution, the simplistic binary of rock versus the state – the former an always-already authentic expression of discontent at the inauthenticity of the latter in expressing a contemporary Cuban identity – is severely problematised by the band's apparent contempt for many aspects of friki subculture. In the song ‘Black Metal’,Footnote 14 the sense of subcultural rock rebellion is portrayed as an impotent fantasy by Porno Para Ricardo, unwilling to meet state repression head-on and to speak candidly about contemporary Cuban concerns. This criticism does not necessarily present Porn Para Ricardo as the only band capable of authentic representation, nor do they suggest that all rock music is necessarily inauthentic. Rather, the concern here is with openness and compromise, with self-censorship and metaphor, words and actions.
The song introduces the listener to a boundlessly optimistic, if slightly confused protagonist, voiced again by Ciro. The character is one of a less-than-flattering stereotypical friki, as perceived by Porno Para Ricardo: naive, exuberant, eager to claim a ‘badness’ but unable (or unwilling) to act upon it, and concerned with keeping up to date with the trends and vogues of his adopted subculture. The opening verse of ‘Black Metal’ instantly leaves the listener in no doubt as to the authenticity and legitimacy of this friki protagonist. Over saccharine chords, the friki, in sincere spoken words, tells us of his inexorable rise to ‘frikidom’:
Cuando era un niño era un vampiro
Después cuando crecí descubrí que también era un hombre lobo
Por eso ahora que soy friki lo que me gusta es el …
When I was a boy, I was a vampire
Afterwards, when I grew up, I discovered that I was also a werewolf
Because of that, now I am a friki, and what I like is …
The lines that inform us of this friki's hybrid vampiric/lycanthropic upbringing are delivered in an almost nonchalant manner. A brief stumbling over the words (deliberately performed by Ciro) ‘hombre lobo’ give the feeling of this imaginative storyteller intent on impressing an audience, invoking his own spurious, augmented past as a way of authenticating his contemporary identity. These two discovered identities from youth are cited as the justification for his contemporary, real-world friki persona. The fantasy characters of badness in youth are made progenitors to the fantasy dissidence of the friki; all are adopted personas that do not accurately represent the ‘real’, nor live up to their promised potency.
The image of the superficially rebellious friki is further enhanced by the second verse. Here the protagonist walks us round the epicentre of ‘cool’: Parque G, a park in Havana where many young rockers congregate. The character here is self-consciously performing his friki identity, but to the listener he imparts an almost child-like excitement, giggling and barely able to contain his excitement at the opportunity to ‘frikiar’ – a verb form of the noun ‘friki’:
el otro día por la noche me fuí par la G a frikiar
y saben lo que descubrí (ja ja)
descubrí que hay un piquete nuevo de black metal
enseguida corrí donde Toni para que me lo quemara
y así ser el primero en tenerlo
y así ser el mas friki de todos los frikis
The other night I went to G to frikiar
And guess what I discovered (ha ha)
I discovered a new black metal band
So I ran to Toni so he could burn me a copy
So I could be the first one to have it
So I could be the most friki of all the frikis
The discovery of a new black metal band, and the opportunity to become the first person to own a copy of their CD, is here not a musical choice, but almost a fashion accessory. The friki uses the new CD as an emblem of his ‘frikiness’; his opportunity to be ‘the most friki’. Many of the criticisms Porno Para Ricardo have of this subculture are apparent here: simply visiting the park as an authenticator of identity – a place from which little real musical activity is possible; the use of music as a fashion accessory; a contentment with style over lyrical content. The specific music on the CD, the name of the band even, are irrelevant in the friki's pursuit of the new; they are simply generic: simply ‘black metal’.
Porno Para Ricardo present this subculture as a performance of authenticity, a posture of rebellion, without the action to back it up, an assertion which is given a clear voice in the concluding chorus of the song:
black metal, black metaaaaal
oh cuanta maldad
black metal, black metaaaaal
empuñamos la espada del mal
black metal, black metaaaaal
somos los príncipes de metal
black metal, black metaaaaal
no puedo llegar tarde a mi casa porque entonces me regaña mi mamá.
Black metal black metal
Oh, how much badness
Black metal black metal
We grasp the sword of badness
Black metal black metal
We are the princes of metal
Black metal black metal
I can't arrive home too late, otherwise my mum will tell me off
After the howled allegiance to the genre of black metal, after the insisted assertion of ‘badness’, even after the return to a fantasy realm where the ‘sword of badness’ is grasped, the friki, in abashed tones, reveals a fear of parental reprimand. The juxtaposition of bravado in general, boastful terms, and a timorousness in the face of authority (even familial authority) becomes a telling allegory for how Porno Para Ricardo perceive much of this subculture. There is an anger at the duplicity of claiming a rebelliousness – if not outright dissidence – yet adherence to state-run organisation regulation, and engaging in a type of self-censorship as outlined by Vincenzo Perna:
[bandleader Giraldo Piloto suggests] that, in Cuba, singing a ‘problematic song’ in public, in theory, is not forbidden. What happens, rather, is that the media, by banning specific songs and marginalizing certain artists on the airwaves, pressurize musicians into self-censorship … Institutions … prefer to operate indirectly, by pressurizing musicians into self-censorship, manipulating the media in order to affect artists' public exposure and economic rating, controlling the artists' access to state-managed clubs and facilities, and restricting their freedom of movement through the issuing of visas and travel permits. (Perna Reference Perna2005, p. 91–2)
Perna's list of pressurising measures aimed at a type of self-censorship (or, more accurately, pre-censorship) reads almost as a rap sheet of actions taken against Porno Para Ricardo. But this type of self-censorship – the allusion to ‘not returning home too late’ – as Catherine Moses writes, is not exclusive to Cuban musicians; it is something that has pervaded the Cuban social sphere:
The Castro regime effectively uses blackmail to create fear and keep people from acting against the regime. If there is something that the State can take from an individual – a professional opportunity, a child's position in a good school, permission to leave the country, a dollar earning job – it has power over that person. It is to that power that Cubans succumb. (Moses Reference Moses2000, pp. 18–19)
Again, I return to Gorki's words that, although a price must be paid, there is an option outside of this self-censoring regime – a position that the band suggest, by its very nature, rock music should inhabit. A position where one must stop being afraid. It is this very fear of reprimand that cows the friki in ‘Black Metal’ and is the source of inauthenticity for Porno Para Ricardo.
In the wild stylistic fluctuations between the saccharine sections (talking about black metal) and the cacophonous burst of unexpected noise (performing black metal), there seems to be more than just a critique of the political activity of rock musicians in Cuba. Alongside the concern that rock musics are used in lieu of more overt political commentary, Porno Para Ricardo level the critique that these musics are often left unmediated – untranslated, even – into a Cuban context. Gorki describes the problem as one of ‘mimetismo’ (‘mimicry’) in many musicians; an assumption that the codes and identities filtering into Cuba from the US are authentic enough to act as aesthetic models for Cuban musicians:
… many people don't think beyond, and get stuck with, what is already made; that is the institution and the rules of how to make rock. Here there is a lot of ‘mimetismo’ [mimicry] a lot of copying of the fashion, of MTV or of what they see, therefore because your mind doesn't see beyond that horizon, you expect institutions to give you everything, because it is a totalitarian regime. The government controls everything, and it likes to think that you have to do everything with it. (Águila Reference Águila2010)
Acquiescence to governmental institutions – the self-censorship both Perna and Moses note as debilitating aspects of Cuban culture and society – is linked to the wholesale co-option of foreign musical codes and styles. In their unaltered, appropriated and emulated forms, these genres of rock music offer ‘no communication’ (ibid.) either to Cubans, between Cubans, or about contemporary Cuba, its culture, or identity. And so this black metal section, dropped into the middle of unrelated surroundings, serves as an example of what Porno Para Ricardo see as unrepresentative rock. Nothing can be gleaned from the vocals; they are made an impenetrable howl amid tonal clusters.
This is what Gorki means by the criticism of lack of communication: these musics are not ‘translated’ into a Cuban dialect. The division, then, is not necessarily made along generic lines, but rather between music made in Cuba but mimicking elsewhere, and Cuban music – a term that Porno Para Ricardo considers their work to exemplify. And what makes Porno Para Ricardo's music Cuban is their insisted ownership of Cuban cultural symbols.
Example 3. ‘Mucho Corazón’: rock and tradition
The above examples from the band's work present a kind of ‘identity in relief’, a series of negatives – hegemonic institutions and acquiescing elements of friki subculture – against which the band are defined. However, it is not all that Porno Para Ricardo perform, and in a sense the more shocking musical sounds in their oeuvre come from their sincere renditions of more traditional sonic images of Cuban identity.
One particularly arresting example comes as the opening track of their 2009 album El Disco Rojo Desteñido (The Faded Red Disc), the standard ‘Mucho Corazón’ (‘A Lot of Heart’),Footnote 15 a faithfully recreated rendition of a bolero.Footnote 16 Through ‘covering’ not only the song, but by playing with the notion of covering an identity – that of the authentic Cuban musician – Porno Para Ricardo relate the significance of this more established sound of Cubanness to themselves as Cubans. In attempting to redefine their perception of Cuban identity, they do not need to shun these more traditional soundscapes; rather, they must be augmented, recontextualised and renovated, perhaps even translated in much the same way as imported rock music genres.
This sincere bolero, within an antagonistic rock context, asserts that even those vehemently outside the Revolution – those that the state might define as ‘non-Cuban’ in some sense – may yet locate themselves within such musics. Indeed, Porno Para Ricardo make themselves custodians of this traditional music – this image of Cuban identity – and by so doing, seek to blur the divisions between the seemingly non-transversible dichotomies of Cubanness: ‘rock vs. tradition’, ‘Cuban vs. non-Cuban music’. As Gorki himself notes, wrestling with these two musical identities is both confusing and necessary in defining his Cubanness:
I love bolero and Cuban music in general just as much as I like rock and roll – well I like rock and roll a bit more, but I like Cuban music just as much. … In fact, in the latest album, we've recorded a bolero … to give people what they're not expecting. … Of course this is a bolero that somehow sets up the band's position … contextualising that bolero within a rock album, and even more so with the characteristics of our band, has a special meaning. (Águila, interview with author, Reference Águila2010)
Porno Para Ricardo's bolero makes little interpretative change to the soundscape. Two acoustic guitars, perfectly tuned, intertwine and complement each other, paying close attention to the implied bolero rhythm, strengthened and reasserted as the track continues by the emergence of that most ubiquitous of Cuban markers, the clave.Footnote 17 There is a slight fluidity, a tentative uncertainness to the rhythm, a struggle and deep concentration with the material, a desire to recreate, to construct something with precision. Porno Para Ricardo's usual soundworld is completely absent; the band are made to inhabit a soundscape at once strikingly familiar (within the context of Cuban music) and yet surprisingly alien (within the anticipated soundscape of a punk album). Most surprising of all is Gorki's voice. Usually strained, gravelly in its acerbity, and wilfully distorted and imprecise, here it is presented as that of an alarmingly good bolerista (bolero singer) – the powerfully rich mid-range tenor, the measured tremolo accents at the end of each line, the never-ostentatious-but-patently-felt emotional connection to the words being sung.
It is precisely this fidelity to the original that provides the shock. This is not the kind of cover version described by Deena Weinstein (Reference Weinstein, Herman, Sloop and Swiss1998, p. 144), one that ‘through parody … attacked the conventions of authenticity in rock as pompous, pretentious and (laughably) lame’. The authenticity of bolero as Cuban, and Cuban identity as traditional and autochthonous is not presented as ‘laughably lame’; the bolero voice is never ruptured by the return of a rock soundworldFootnote 18; it remains faithful. In his work on cover versions, Dai Griffiths (Reference Griffiths, Hesmondhalgh and Negus2002, p. 52) discusses the ‘distance’ between original and cover, suggesting the inclusion of ‘the terms “rendition” and “transformation”, rendition being a straightforwardly faithful version of the original … [and] transformation being a more determined claim on the original’. However, Porno Para Ricardo's bolero cover sits somewhat uncomfortably between these two distances. Musically speaking, it is a faithful rendition of the bolero soundworld (or as faithful as four rock musicians without professional musical training can get), but the context – the surrounding tracks, the artwork and prior knowledge and expectations the listener may have of Porno Para Ricardo – puts a significant distance between the established identity of the musician associated with the original and its new custodians.
What Porno Para Ricardo's bolero seems to be doing is problematising the issue of the paramusical identity – the image of the bolero performer as Cuban – by faithfully claiming the music as theirs. Where ‘Comunista Chivatón’ may have criticised those who try to manage the sound of Cuban music, and ‘Black Metal’ may criticise those who adopt something ‘other’, this cover version questions the identity of those deemed authentic enough to perform Cubanness and, by doing so, the band augments the conceptual space of what a Cuban musician may look and sound like.
As Antoni Kapcia (Reference Kapcia2005, p. 198) has noted, the centrality of (certain) musics as emblems of Cuban identity and the struggle for professionalism associated with the Revolution has led to a body of professional, classically educated popular musicians with a thorough knowledge of traditional genres. This has in some senses created an associated reverence to ‘the greats’ and a canon of self-evidently authentic Cuban songs and genres. Thus, in order to assert an authentic Cubanness in one's practice, one must become a custodian of these self-evidently Cuban musical texts. Robin Moore notes both the importance, and the potential problems, of placing such a high value on Cuban traditional music:
… the ‘rescue of cultural roots’ has been a fundamental component of Cuban cultural policy since 1959 (Hart Dávalos Reference Hart Dávalos1988, p. 23). Prevailing views contend, with some justification, that prior governments did little to support traditional music and that a barrage of products from abroad threatened to compromise, even destroy, much Cuban heritage. The danger of nationalist policies, as in the case of those related to class based art, is that taken to extremes they can result in oppressive prohibitions. (Moore Reference Moore2006, pp. 12–13)
The iteration of these ingrained sounds of authentic Cuban music, and the associations with a national identity to which they allude, are reinforced as the conception of what constitutes a Cuban musician is solidified. In a sense, these traditional songs become one part of the national ‘garden culture’ that Ernest Gellner (Reference Gellner1988, p. 7) mentions; a narrative of national identity which, in Tim Edensor's words, is:
presumably surveyed, tended and codified by specialist experts. Thus a mass education system binds the state and culture together, canons are devised, museums are established, official histories are written … so that specific bodies of knowledge, values and norms are ingested by all educated citizens. (Edensor Reference Edensor2002, p. 3)
However, when it is Porno Para Ricardo offering the rendition, a band not only removed from revolutionary rhetoric, but also, as noted above, effectively prohibited from being Cuban musicians, the tacit construction of Cuban identity is brought to the fore. Assumed traits of Cuban musicianship, aspects of autochthonous Cuban expression, are suddenly made shocking and overt. The performance becomes something of a transformative cover version, in Griffiths' terms, not just of the song, but of this constructed notion of Cuban identity – a critique of the narrow aesthetic parameters of the identity of the musicians ‘able’ to perform this material.
As Gabriel Solis (Reference Solis2010, p. 300) writes, ‘the importance of [the] authenticating function of cover versions cannot be stressed too much. It may be counter-intuitive to think that covering someone else's work could be a way to establish personal authenticity, but it is nonetheless true’. In Porno Para Ricardo's case, authenticity certainly plays a central role and, somewhat paradoxically, presents a critique of the assumed identity of the musician authentic enough – or perhaps Cuban enough – to act as custodian of this traditional symbol of Cuban identity, and seeks to claim such custodianship – such authenticity – for the band themselves as Cuban, as capable of finding something of themselves in bolero.
Gorki has alluded to this ability to find themselves reflected in bolero when discussing the opening lyrics; words that ‘set up the band's position’:
Dicen que no es vida, esta que yo vivo
They say it is not life, this that I live.
The abstract ‘they’ of the original becomes a more pointedly politicised ‘they’ in Porno Para Ricardo's experience: existing within (or outside) a sociopolitical system that seeks to deny them any platform for disseminating their music; outside a rock subculture that values musical professionalism, often at the cost, in the band's view, of political relevance. The ‘life’ being denied is their identity as Cuban and as musicians. The recontextualised meanings that the band give to this bolero, converting it from a lament of individual lost love to a social commentary on inclusion and exclusion from the Revolution, demonstrates one of the central aspects of cover versions. As Solis suggests:
… texts, rather than simply being consumed, are ‘played’ and ‘played with’ (Barthes Reference Barthes1977, p. 62). This … point is singularly important because it encapsulates a politics – texts are objects of art that invite, in fact that require, agency on the part of the readers. (Solis Reference Solis2010, p. 307)
In Porno Para Ricardo's bolero cover, there are, then, at least two levels to this playing: the band's relationship with the original and their agency in transforming its meanings, and that of the listener in reassessing the relevance of the original in defining a contemporary Cubanness.Footnote 19 Indeed, the band uses the idea of the Cuban musician as a text to play and play with, at once problematising it for being too narrow, and yet claiming and integrating it into their punk sensibility.
And it is this adoption (and adaption) of bolero that is fundamental, because it doesn't attempt to sneer more established conceptions of Cuban identity into obsolescence, to place rock music as the authentic representation of Cubanness. Rather it attempts to create a relationship between these two aspects of Cubanness:
As musicians cover songs from outside their own style and genre, they effectively lay down increasingly broad links between themselves and others. Through this process individual musicians come to be connected to denser and denser networks where reference connects them to referenced music and musician, but also to others who reference similar music and so on. (Solis Reference Solis2010, p. 300)
This faithful bolero cover serves to assert the connections between all of the musical styles that speak to some aspect of a contemporary Cuban experience,Footnote 20 to create a more robust definition of Cuban identity. Rather than pitting two oppositional and mutually exclusive binaries against one another – the ‘rock vs. tradition’ or ‘Cuban vs. foreign’ models so familiar in much discourse on Cuba and Cuban music – the band melds the two together and recognises that one may find elements of oneself in different places and texts.
Conclusion
Throughout the continued revolutionary project in Cuba, rock music has permeated the island, and served to shape and reflect aspects of Cuban identities. And it is precisely these strangled and tangled routes of cultural dissemination that have given it meaning to different generational audiences. The decontextualised and fragmented information that has often accompanied rock music's passage to Cuba – and the dubious legality of obtaining, and non-official means of disseminating it – have helped to inscribe a significance and particularly Cuban understanding of the texts. Although rock music in its many subcultural forms may be a more forceful presence in contemporary Cuba, and its place much less restricted, prohibited and censored now than in the nascent days of the Revolution (Moore Reference Moore2006, p. 13), there still exist a number of significant practical restrictions – inability to purchase foreign music, lack of access to the internet – that affect the consumption of foreign rock in Cuba. Also, and perhaps in part because of these de facto restrictions on rock music, what is considered Cuban music (and thus part of Cuban identity) is still often narrowly defined, and defined to exclude more radical voices such as Porno Para Ricardo's.
As I have endeavoured to show, the contestations and negotiations between national and global culture, between tradition, innovation and imitation, between contrasting definitions of an authentic Cuban soundscape and the parameters of a Cuban identity are as evident in contemporary Cuban music as they are complex. Yet despite the renewed conflict over who has the right to define the term ‘Cuban’ (as well as the term ‘musician’), what is apparent is that the obsession with reflecting, constructing and disseminating a definition of national identity is still at the heart of this cultural practice. And this fact alone perhaps authenticates, if such authentication were necessary, the practice of rock music in Cuba as a Cuban practice – one capable of expressing a sense of Cubanness for its makers and its audiences.
