Two years later I found what I had been looking for in the most unlikely of places: Madrid's Afro-pop nightclub Surist a n. There I happened upon a newly formed Cuban rock-trova band called Habana Abierta. The band offered a bizarre mix of retro Eighties rock, folk, and rap, mixed with traditional Cuban son and hyperactive timba.
The group's nine members bounded around onstage, each taking turns on the mike while his buddies sang back-up vocals and traded stints on the drums, electric guitars, and horns. Curious to learn more about them, I sought an interview, which took place a few days later over a pizza on the dusty living room floor of member Vanito Caballero's apartment, a few blocks away from my own pad. I had no idea who the guys were, really, and so I had the nerve to ask them for guitar lessons.
Caballero generously agreed, and his bandmate Alejandro Guti e rrez called a few chilly days later to see if I could use a hand-me-down blanket. In retrospect I should have been fumbling for autographs, not trying to mooch free lessons. The members of Habana Abierta were as they had tried gently to explain legendary in Cuba as solo artists, pioneers of that country's rock movement.
In the years since our initial meeting, the group has become one of the most influential forces in Cuban music, both within the country and in exile. While Habana Abierta's international airplay has been patchy, its members have traveled the world in support of the group's albums Habana Abierta (1997), 24 Horas (1999), and Boomerang (2006). Three years ago they offered local fans two wild shows at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, and this week they make a triumphant return to South Florida at the Miami-Dade Auditorium.
The shows come at a moment when Habana Abierta is on the brink of international stardom. Member Kelvis Ochoa won Spain's prestigious Goya award for the soundtrack to the 2006 feature film Havana Blues. And the entire band stars as itself in the soon-to-be broadcast Mega TV documentary Habana Abierta: Boomerang, the brainchild of Grammy Award-winning film and music producer Nat Chediak (Calle 54).
The film tells a story already familiar to many Miamians, how the band members (then teenage and twentysomething solo artists) played an instrumental role in the musical revolution that helped Cuban youth segue from the Socialist-influenced folklore of Nueva Trova into a power-packed rockason (rock and son). The musicians would gather to perform for each other at a private home referred to by its street names in Havana's Vedado neighborhood: Thirteenth and Eighth. This new musical form swept the island at the height of Cuba's economic crisis in the late Eighties and early Nineties, and flew in the face of the subtle metaphorical critiques offered by Nueva Trova predecessors like Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milan e s, who hid complaints about the government in lyrics that doubled as bitter love songs.
"We had this conviction to use the guitar and the voice to touch the harsh reality that Cuba was living at that time," recalled Guti e rrez in a phone interview last month. By the early Nineties, the music and its message seemed unstoppable. Argentinean rock blasting its anger over the Dirty War was now filtering in, and a more radical attitude pushed its way onto Cuban radio and television.
On the streets, rockers voiced the population's rage over the broken dreams of a Communist utopia. Hundreds of Cubans launched their rafts right off Havana's Malec n Boulevard. Musicians also began looking overseas for the artistic freedom and economic rewards their homeland couldn't offer.
In 1994 Guti e rrez joined Caballero's band Lucha Almada ("Soul Struggle") and recorded an album on Cuba's Bis Music label. The disc won them a promotional tour of Ecuador, where they ultimately defected. The duo eventually relocated to Madrid, where they joined forces with half a dozen other veterans of the Cuban rockason movement to form a supergroup they called, hopefully, Habana Abierta.
The next decade would be marked by the inevitable artistic struggles. Even though the group signed to BMG, it had to fight an industry more interested in Operaci n Triunfo, the Spanish version of American Idol. The members of the collective, now signed with EMI, have branched back out into solo projects but remain tight as a band.
In 2003 they were allowed to return to Cuba and performed for 10,000 people in Havana's La Tropical concert hall. "We accepted an invitation from the Institute of Cuban Music on the condition that they couldn't touch even a comma in the lyrics of our songs," Caballero recalled, in an e-mail. "That reaffirmed for us that everything we'd done until that point hadn't been in vain.
" Despite having left Cuba, the members of Habana Abierta still feel an inexorable pull back to Havana. Hence the name of their most recent album, and the accompanying film documentary: Boomerang.
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