TWO NIGHTS OF ENTERTAINMENT
Friday, Cuban Carlos Verera rocked the Karl Marx theater in Miramar. The show was full of people of all ages, but dominated by teenagers. The boys wore music shirts, Iron Maiden, John Mayer, and a couple David Beckhams. The girls were dressed in a more Urban Outfitters style, with funky hairstyles, often dyed, and that looked like something out of an alternative history. I’ll give the Cubans four stars for style.
Verera lays it out when he sings. He tells about the bad as well as the good and has been thrown in jail for it twice. This is where we have an advantage over Communism—we tend not to throw our musicians or artists in jail. Once we start to do that, we will lose our advantage.
Verera wears only black and sings about the downtrodden. Sound familiar? He certainly isn’t an MTV pretty musician. He is not skinny and he is not tall, and you would recognize him in the crowd if I told you to look for the gnome.
The concert opened on black and white videos of fascist soldiers marching while the band played a pumping, repetitive beat. Verera walked to stage, blessed the crowd by making a cross, then joined them. His voice is strong, but falters when he tries to bend out Dylan-esque syllables. The key is his words, which have a very folk, poetic quality and the audience knew them all. The girl behind us shouted every word to a couple slow songs, somewhat ruining the experience.
Searching for this cowboy hat his been practically impossible, yet the image behind Verera was prophetic. Hopefully….
Perhaps the most comical experience of the trip came when a lunatic spectator rushed the stage. He was a big guy with Carrot-top hair. On stage he turned to the audience and danced. Security ran to tackle him, and he fell out like a ragdoll, so they had to drag him by his hands and feet off the stage. A few seconds after the incident, the rear projection screens behind Verera showed silhouettes of security running after the loco backstage, then a quick scuffle. Hilarious.
It was nice, as Jack said, to listen to some non Salsa or Son or Reaggaton music for once.
We continued this the second night at the National Ballet.
We attended the ballet for free because our Cuban friend has ballet connections, but Cubans normally pay 15 Cuban pesos, and tourists pay 15 convertibles. This is a difference of about $14.40. Getting tickets isn’t easy, through, as there is no ticket booth, and people have to deal with a strange guy who works in the book store. Luckily we didn’t have to figure anything out that time.
The theater is world class, with four or five levels above the floor. The red chairs were almost full with smartly dressed Cubans and half-ass dressed tourists. We saw three different shows. A single dancer, two dances, and a finale of seven dancers, doing a bawdy, cliffnotes, interpretation of Carmen. In a country where everyone can dance, it goes without saying that Cuban ballet is good. They danced to speakers and modern music, except for Carmen. The second chapter was interesting, with the two men interpreting a dance about a businessman struggling to carry his briefcase—the other dancer—to work, then struggling at work, then struggling to leave. By the end, his briefcase bests him, and he becomes the briefcase.
The ballet audience was more informal than one you might see in Houston or Chicago, but many of the girls did have fancy shoes, dresses, and accessories. I still can’t figure out how the Cubans are able to dress like they do. They dress far better than people in Central America, and far far better than the Chinese, who profess the same governmental system yet have a far better economy than the Cubans. Yet, in a crowd, the Cuban will stand out.