Cuba kicks up its heels

Cuba kicks up its heels
By Brendan Sainsbury
Article from: The Australian

RICH, animated, hip-gyrating and soulful, Cuban music has long acted as
a breeding ground for the sounds and rhythms of Latin America.

From the down-at-heel drinking houses of urban Havana to the villages
of Pinardel Rio, everything from son, salsa and charanga to cha-cha-cha
owe at least a part of their existence to the eclectic musical dynamism
that was first ignited here.

While the vast majority of the island's two million annual visitors make
a beeline for the all-inclusive hotel complexes of Varadero, where trite
renditions of Guantanamera are served up by insipid, government-groomed
guitar trios, Cuba's real musical party, complete with libidinous
dancers and trumpet-stabbing salsa bands, is kicking off riotously
elsewhere.

Here's where to enjoy a memorable night out with the locals.

CASA DE LA TROVA, SANTIAGO
In March 1968, hot on the heels of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper and Bob
Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, Cuba's socialist administration opened its
first government-funded Casa de la Trova in the eastern city of Santiago
de Cuba. It was an act, musically speaking, almost as revolutionary as
the Castro coup.

Named for their trovadores (troubadours) and characterised by their
libertarian, anything-goes approach to songwriting and artistic
performance, these impromptu music houses quickly became a national
obsession, spreading in a matter of months to other provincial cities
such as Trinidad, Baracoa and Bayamo.

From an entertainment point of view, the results were groundbreaking.
In a country that invented son, salsa, bolero and mambo, the rapid rise
of the burgeoning trova house scene was like a fuel-injected rocket
blasting its way through an otherwise dark, embargo-strapped economy.
Nearly 40 years after its initial incarnation, Santiago's shrine to the
power of provocative music is still very much alive and kicking,
continuing to draw in big-name performers such as Buena Vista Social
Club luminary Eliades Ochoa.

Warming up on the ground floor in the early evening, the action slowly
migrates upstairs where, come 10pm, everything gets a shade more
caliente (heated) as haranguing hustlers slink out of the shadows and
sultry senoritas wink lewdly at passers-by from the strategically
positioned balconies. Arrive with a good pair of shoes and prepare to be
(quite literally) whisked off your feet.

TROPICANA, HAVANA
A city institution since it opened in 1939, the flamboyant Tropicana was
one of the few bastions of Havana's Las Vegas-style nightlife to survive
the clampdowns of the puritanical Castro revolution. Immortalised in
Graham Greene's 1958 classic Our Man in Havana, this open-air cabaret
show is where the book's protagonist, Jim Wormold, takes his
overindulged daughter Milly to celebrate her 17th birthday amid the
tawdry fleshpots and extravagant dance spectaculars of Cuba's mafia-run
gambling capital.

"Chorus girls paraded 20 feet up among the great palm trees, while pink
and mauve searchlights swept the floor," wrote Greene of the gaudy
proceedings. He may as well have been filing a modern-day entertainment
review, as little has changed since its '50s heyday. The Tropicana still
features a bevy of scantily clad senoritas who climb nightly down from
the palm trees to dance Latin salsa amid colourful flashing lights on
stage. The only difference is that these days the tickets sell for a
slightly less-than-socialistic 60 Cuban convertible pesos ($83).

CENTRO CULTURAL POLO MONTANEZ, VINALES
Known affectionately island-wide as guajiros, a term that translates
roughly as country bumpkin or hick, the residents of Pinar del Rio,
Cuba's westernmost province, have carved out a musical identity that is
as barnstorming as it is bucolic. Overlaying jangling guitars with
traditional 10-line poems known as decimas, the best place to catch
these rustic, country-inspired songsmiths is at the Centro Cultural Polo
Montanez, a kicking nightspot in the small tobacco-growing town of
Vinales. Named in honour of Pinar's guajiro hero turned international
music star, who died in a car crash in October 2002, this comparatively
new addition to Vinales's laid-back traveller scene melds the soulful
essence of Johnny Cash with the thumping punch of Ricky Martin amid the
hills of Cuba's mist-shrouded tobacco country. Potent rum is plentiful
and dancing is de rigueur.

LA TUMBA FRANCESA, GUANTANAMO
Eastern Cuba is closer to the former French colony of Haiti than to
Havana, and the Gaelic influence is clearly evident in the region's
distinctive culture and music. Forced to flee west after Toussaint
L'Ouverture's bloody slave rebellion in 1791, several thousand French
planters arrived in Cuba in the early 19th century and founded the city
of Guantanamo. They brought with them the refinements and music of
Napoleonic France. Elements of French Romanzas can still be traced in
Cuban trova, while the changui and guaracha musical forms,
characteristic of the Guantanamo region, are the latter-day descendants
of the contredanse and various elements borrowed from French theatre. To
gain an insight into these intriguing Gaelic offshoots, grab a pew at La
Tumba Francesa, a classic spit and sawdust music house in understated
Guantanamo, a city whose name, by a cruel trick of fate, has become a
byword for confrontation and controversy.

CASA DE LA TROVA VICTORINO RODRIGUEZ, BARACOA
Tucked away in the island's precipitous east, Baracoa is Cuba's
Shangri-La, an isolated and culturally distinct colonial settlement
where mysterious flat-topped mountains flicker imperceptibly in the
ethereal Atlantic sunsets.

Buzzing like a kicked beehive among the dark tumbledown houses of the
diminutive town centre lies Cuba's smallest, zaniest, wildest and most
authentic Casa de la Trova. It's a scruffy drinking den replete with
dusty '50s artefacts and psychedelic Che Guevara murals that rocks
nightly to the voodoo-like rhythms of changui-son. Mint-laced mojitos
are served in old jam jars, a maverick master of ceremonies introduces
new acts with a banshee-like scream, and the unprinted house rules
conform to that age-old trova assertion that if you can sing or play an
instrument, show us what you can do. BYO bongos and see what happens.

PLAZA LA VIGIA, MATANZAS
Rumba was first concocted in the dock areas of Havana and Matanzas
during the 1890s when former slaves, exposed to imported foreign
influences, began to knock out rhythmic patterns on old packing cases in
imitation of various African religious rites. Vocals were added, dances
emerged, and before long the music had grown into a collective form of
social expression for all Afro-Cubans.

Rumba music has developed into three basic forms: guaguanco, an overtly
sexual dance; yambu, a slow dance for couples; and columbia, a fast,
aggressive, male dance often involving fire torches and machetes. Raw,
expressive and exciting to watch, performers shake a leg every weekend
at outdoor music extravaganzas in Matanzas, an easy-to-reach port city
30km west of Varadero, Cuba's ritziest resort.

The best time to catch the action is on Sunday afternoons in the Plaza
la Vigia, opposite the once opulent Sauto theatre. Arrive early and be
prepared for plenty of spontaneity.

FIESTA DE LA CUBANIA, BAYAMO
The capital of Granma province and birthplace of such eminent Cuban
troubadours as Carlos Puebla and Pablo Milanes, Bayamo was the entry
point for the first mechanical organs imported from France in the 1870s.
By 1900 there were more than 100 hand-operated pipe organs in Bayamo,
and in the ensuing 30 years the locally renowned Borbolla family built
about a dozen more full-sized machines in a factory it had set up in the
neighbouring town of Manzanillo. Eschewing modern trends, the tradition
lives on in regular weekend street parties held under the yellow-tinted
streetlights of Calle Jose Antonio Saco in the city's refreshingly
hassle-free centre.

Shoehorned among the scattered colonial buildings, cheap food stalls
sell spit-roasted pork and chess players trade pawns over flimsy
streetside tables. Families sit with their noisy neighbours to catch up
on the latest gossip to the rather surreal strains of Bayamo's archaic
mechanical organs, which these days are accompanied by a more syncopated
rumba beat. Dancing, fuelled by cheap beer and a barely palatable local
oyster drink called ostiones, is an integral part of the festivities.

CLUB MEJUNJE, SANTA CLARA
Known to a generation of budding revolutionaries as Che City, thanks to
its grandiose mausoleum and Che Guevara monuments, Santa Clara is a
medium-sized provincial settlement in Cuba's geographic centre. This is
where Latin America's most venerated guerrillero has been elevated into
a socialist deity.

But stick around a few days longer in this gritty and oft-overlooked
Caribbean colossus and you'll bump into a hip and happening music scene.
Operations centre for the in-crowd is the vibrant Club Mejunje, a feisty
bar and performance space set among the ruins of a derelict building in
the city centre. Headlining busy weekly music programs are trova shows,
children's theatre, disco nights, bolero concerts and, in a country
where gay rights have always been something of a political hot potato,
the odd improbable drag show.

http://www.news.com.au/travel/story/0,23483,21097534-27977,00.html