CUBA-MUSIC: Beatles Back, but Musical Censors Still Around

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Oct 29 1996 (IPS) - The Beatles, Britain’s musical icons of the 1960’s, have released a new selection of songs recorded in their heyday and revived memories for Cubans – once prevented by censorship from listening to the famous quartet.

The ban lasted for two years, from 1964-1966 but, for some fans, it seemed an eternity as it was not until the mid 1970s that the Beatles’ music could be heard frequently on local radio stations and on T.V.

‘Nocturno’, a ‘Radio Progreso’ romantic hits programme, was the first to send the sounds of the Beatles over the airwaves one night in early October 1966. Cuban “Beatlemaniacs”, however, had to wait five more years to see the first photograph of John, Paul, George and Ringo in a national publication.

The ban on the Beatles, imposed just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, may have been the first in Cuba , but it was not the last.

After the British group was censored, Spaniard Julio Iglesias, Brazilian Roberto Carlos, Puerto Rican Jose Feliciano – and a long list of Cuban musicians who opted for exile abroad – fell foul of the censors. Celia Cruz was never heard again in Cuba.

The exile of saxophone player Paquito de Rivera and trumpet player Arturo Sandoval erased the memory of the jazz group Iraquere; Willi Chirino and Gloria Estefan do not exist on Cuban state radio or TV channels.

“The reasons that are given for their censure are still illogical,” said Jose Miguel Sanchez, a 27-year-old writer, at the first International Colloquium on the work of The Beatles, which took place in Havana late last month.

The banning of the British group, and the “trauma” is caused for an entire generation of Cubans and their descendants, became a hot topic at the conference, which included themes ranging from musical subjects to “The Beatles as a Socio-cultural Phenomenon.”

Still, participants hoped it was a sign of a “new era” that they could speak about The Beatles, with the support of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) – a labor organization whose president is a high-ranking government official.

UNEC authorities must have known that opening a new space for a debate on the influence of The Beatles would turn into an analysis of the subject of censorship in Cuba, delegates said.

One of UNEC’s founders, singer Noel Nicola, together with Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanes, of the New Song Movement in Cuba. Nicola defended the original ban on the Beatles as “logical”in a country which was “blockaded.”

In the 1960s, defence of the Revolution directed by Fidel Castro, meant anything in the English language was considered to be “ideological weapons of the enemy.”

The fact that the Beatles were British, and not American did not matter. According to those who lived through those times, the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 inaugurated a period of repression against anything that seemed to come from the north: rock and roll, tight pants, boots, and long hair.

Guillermo Vilar, director of the television program “A Capella” – which transmits the best of international rock music – analyzed censorship as “the legitimate defense of a country that suffers aggression,” and “although there were excesses, it was not the norm.”

On the other hand, Yolanda Valdes, a “Beatlemaniac” who made a presentation on the history of the first group to play The Beatles’ music in Havana, characterized the ’60’s as a “wave of misfortune for local youth.”

“We must be honest about history. Censorship of the Beatles was also a spiritual repression that we carried inside,” said Valdes. Using the example of Los Pacificos, she led a debate on the marginalization of Cuban musicians who opted for rock and roll music in the 60’s.

Los Pacificos never got to play in a theater. They no longer exist, but they represent a history of Cuban “rockers” who, with few exceptions, never came out emerged from underground.

“The discourse of the Beatles was not contrary to what was being done in Cuba. However, they were censured here and not in Eastern Europe,” said researcher Mas Vidal. “This was a Cuban phenomenon, not one inherent to the socialist system.”

“Peace and love,” “Make love, not war,” and “No war in Vietnam,” the essence of the decade of the 1960s – of “beatle ethic,” and of the “hippies,” disappeared under the mantle of drugs as a means of evasion, sexual freedom and rebellion against the established order.

What is still incomprehensible to many Cubans on why there was an official ban on the Beatles, is the absence of any comparison between Castro’s “bearded ones” who came down from the mountains in 1959 and the songs of the British group.

“If The Beatles were censured, it was not gratuitous; it was in essence a symbol of plemics,” said Carlos Salgado, a philosophy student at the University of Havana, during one of the debates on the censorship.

Other delegates at the seminar spoke of the “correct” and “absurd” measures on the “sectarian road” during the first years of the Castro government, and the “misinterpretation of limits.”

The debate followed the course of the uses and abuses of the principal of “within the Revolution, everything, against the Revolution, nothing,” which has guided cultural policy in Cuba for decades.

“To know what happened is the best way of preventing it from happening again,” said Sanchez, who recalled that those who look for a justification forget that not only rock musicians but other singers like Silvio Rodriguez were also the victims of censorship.

Whatever the future for Cuban music, certainly the past influence of the Beatles appears destined to continue. Since 1990, local musicians have commemorated the death of John Lennon with major jam sessions.

The state TV station broadcast the full six hours of “The Beatles Anthology” this year, and the best of Cuban short stories appeared in a book titled “The Yellow Submarine”- after one of the best-known Beatles’ hits.