CUBA-US: Baseball and Music – Bridge(s) Over Troubled Waters

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Mar 29 1999 (IPS) - A baseball game and an unusual concert demonstrated in a single day how close Cuba and the United States can be in both body and spirit when culture wins out over political differences.

“We are changing the times!” exclaimed U.S. rapper Michael Franti around midnight Sunday, after three hours of music and songs composed by singers and songwriters from the two countries during last week’s “Music Bridge- Puente Musical” workshop.

“Things will not be the same after this. In baseball you can lose a game, but in music we all win,” Franti told the nearly 5,000 people packed into the Carlos Marx (Karl Marx) theatre in Havana.

The concert, broadcast nationwide by Cuba’s state-run TV, followed a lively game between the Baltimore Orioles and a Cuban national team that ended after three and a half hours with a victory for the U.S. team.

Time seemed to grind to a halt on Sunday afternoon in Cuba. The streets were empty, and the only sounds breaking the silence were the shouts of TV-viewers from inside their homes.

Sunday’s was the first baseball game between a U.S. Major League team and a Cuban team since a professional team from the Caribbean island nation defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates five-to- three in March 1953.

As expected due to his well-known love of baseball, even President Fidel Castro attended the game. He greeted the members of the U.S. team on the field, and received them later in the seat of the Council of State.

“If they hadn’t made admission dependent on invitations, it would have been sheer madness,” said a disgruntled fan, who understood however the government’s decision to limit access to the Latin American Stadium in Havana, designed to hold 50,000 spectators.

Major League commissioner Bug Selig described the game as “simply a spectacular event,” adding that he was looking forward to the return match, slated for May 3 in Baltimore’s Candem Yard.

“I always felt really good when I played against the Cubans. I’m a baseball player, and I don’t like to give games political connotations,” Oriole catcher Charles Johnson told a news conference prior to Sunday’s match.

The 44 U.S. and 48 Cuban musicians who took part in last week’s “Music Bridge- Puente Musical” creative workshop also tried – successfully, to a large extent – to achieve something similar, free of political implications.

That aim was made even more clear by the title of the final concert, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”, taken from the Paul Simon song that opened the show.

Drawn together by U.S. songwriter Alan Roy Scott, the musicians from Cuba, the United States and several European nations participated in an unusual raffle on Monday, Mar 22 to decide who they would be working with for the rest of the week.

Fate brought together one of Cuba’s leading concert pianists and composers, Jose Maria Vitier, Cuban singer-songwriter Gerardo Alfonso and rapper Franti.

U.S. singer-songwriter Joan Osborne sang – and danced in the best Cuban style – “Sola Contigo” (Alone With You) to the local “son” rhythm, in which jazz merged with “son”, blues fused with Cuba’s traditional “troubadour” music, and rock became bilingual.

The guests in the Carlos Marx theatre heard 24 songs which in different words repeated over and over again the same message: “there are no differences between you and me”, “I’ll be back”, “this bus will never stop,” and “the distances are breaking down.”

“I’m not scared to say down with the blockade!” although I was asked to try not to politicise the evening, said Franti in the only direct reference to the four-decades old confrontation between the United States and Cuba.

Although the flow of Cuban artistes performing in the United States and vice versa has been expanding, Sunday’s concert was the first of its kind since a Cuba-United States cultural mission came to Havana on Mar 27, 1979.