Juanes concert supporters show changing paradigm
BY JORDAN LEVIN
jlevin@MiamiHerald.com
Levin covers the arts for The Miami Herald.
Enrique Santos, popular radio personality on 98.3 FM, is no fan of Fidel
Castro. Once, to exile Miami's amusement, he punked the Cuban president,
calling him on the air and pretending to be Hugo Chávez.
But Santos thinks that Colombian singer Juanes has a right to perform in
Havana today.
And he objects to being vilified for expressing that view.
``Many in this community have said I'm not a good Cuban,'' he says.
``Just because I think differently than you . . . Why am I considered a
bad Cuban?''
Santos had Juanes on his show in August, during which he called for
``respect for Juanes, freedom for Cuba.''
Reaction on the radio show was divided. But Santos said he's been
inundated with negative comments on his Facebook page. One person wrote
``Miami made you, Miami will bring you down.''
To Santos, that anger is counter-productive. ``When something like this
happens the exile community reacts the same way it always has,'' Santos
says. ``There's millions of Cubans in that island who are subject to
that tyranny for so many years. If we have an opportunity to talk to
them, why shouldn't we?''
The Juanes Peace Without Borders concert has brought out the
frustrations of a growing segment of Cuban Miami, many of them young,
who are weary of the notion that equates any outreach toward the Cuban
people with support for the Castro regime.
To them, this hardline approach has contributed to a 50-year stalemate.
``We continue the embargo, we ban our artists from performing and
exhibiting there. It's like keeping the blinders on the community about
Cuba,'' says artist Damien Rojo, 46, who came to Miami from Cuba with
his parents in 1971. Rojo avoids discussing Cuba or the Juanes concert
with them, because he says it always leads to fights.
``Unfortunately the thing that gets the buzz here [in Miami] are the
people who are against,'' the Juanes concert, or changes in the
relationship towards Cuba, says Juan Carlos Zaldivar, 42, an artist and
filmmaker whose documentary 90 Miles looked at the attitudes of
different generations of Cuban-Americans towards the island.
``The people who support the concert don't get as much airplay -- the
only airplay they get is that they're going against the grain. What
bothers me is the way it's framed. It's sexier to talk about the
controversy than about change. . . . The way the dialogue is framed
there's no room for discussion. That's why it never gets beyond
confrontation.''
Juanes has said repeatedly that he hopes the concert, which includes 15
artists from six countries and takes place from 2 to 6 p.m. Sunday in
Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion, will not only be a moving musical
experience for the over half million people expected to attend, but
might help change attitudes and ease the tense standoff tensions between
exiles and the Cuban government.
``We have to be positive about the future,'' he told The Miami Herald in
August. ``We have to change our minds, but not just the Cuban people.
No, we all have to change our minds.''
Some commentators on exile television and radio have attacked Juanes as
a communist, or as a pop musician clueless about issues and problems in
Cuba, whose efforts would be used as propaganda for the Cuban government.
A poll on TV station America TeVé asked whether the Colombian singer was
ignorant, a dreamer, or an accomplice of the Cuban government. Paparazzi
stalked his Key Biscayne home, and he received a death threat on his
Twitter feed that prompted police to patrol his house.
Hugo Landa, director of Cubanet.org, a website that publishes stories by
independent journalists on the island (including articles both
supporting and criticizing the concert), believes that while the
discussion has been emotional and divided, it has been fair. ``Everyone
has had the opportunity to express what he or she feels,'' Landa says.
``If you want to go with the flow and not be disagreeable, that's your
personality. But the fact that a large amount of people disagree with
you doesn't mean you are threatened.''
But others say that criticism of those who propose a different approach
to Cuba still reaches such a high emotional and political pitch that it
puts anyone favoring a different stance on the defensive, and forces the
discussion away from the issue of Cuba and onto the legitimacy of the
person advocating change.
``There are a lot of people in the community who are younger or who
immigrated more recently who are really frustrated, and think we need to
find a new paradigm to look at the Cuba issue,'' says Manning Salazar,
who produced several Miami concerts by Cuban groups in the late '90s,
during a period of unprecedented cultural exchange between the island
and the United States.
``People who don't see Juanes' concert as an overtly political event in
the way they see it here, as something that will prop up the Cuban
regime -- we don't see it that way, but we're forced to address it that
way because of the very vocal and powerful people here who do.''
Yet there are signs that the Cuban paradigm has changed. Older exile
leaders like Carlos Saladrigas, co-founder of the Cuba Study Group, and
younger ones like Miguel Arguelles, who graduated from Harvard with the
support of the Cuban-American community, have supported the concert --
as has the group Raices de Esperanza, an organization of young
Cuban-Americans who favor dialogue. A small demonstration by the group
Vigilia Mambisa, in which they destroyed Juanes cd's and T-shirts,
broadcast on TV and widely cited in stories on exile reaction to the
concert, was rejected three to one as an embarrassment in a poll of
Cuban Americans.
Even Francisco ``Pepe'' Hernandez, the 73-year-old co-founder and
president of the Cuban American National Foundation, a Bay of Pigs
veteran who once worked for a military overthrow of the Cuban government
and lobbied the U.S. government to maintain and stiffen the embargo, now
advocates limited dealings with the island. He favors the Juanes concert.
``For 50 years we have measured everything on whether it helps or hurts
the Castro regime,'' Hernandez said. ``I think that we have to start
thinking about whether it helps or hurts the Cuban people. Yes, I know
the Cuban regime is gonna use [the concert] to get propaganda out of it.
But I think the Cuban people are going to enjoy it a lot more.''
``If we want to build a future for Cuba we have to stop hating and
looking in the rear view mirror, and look forward,'' Hernandez says. ``I
think there are a lot of people, even in my generation, that are
realizing this now. Whether it's because of frustration or because of
age or because they realize their time is short, the reality is even
these people are changing.''
Whatever people's opinions on the show, interest in South Florida is
high. Both America TeVé and Channel 23, the South Florida Univision
affiliate, will broadcast the concert live, as will a number of
websites, including univision.com.
Hernandez plans to watch in his office. He thinks most of Cuban Miami
will be watching with him. ``To some extent we all here in Miami are
going to be united with the people in Cuba,'' he says. ``Isn't that
great? That's what we want, the ability to communicate with our people
there.''
Juanes concert supporters show changing paradigm - Issues & Ideas -
MiamiHerald.com (20 September 2009)
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/issues_ideas/v-fullstory/story/1241194.html
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