The Echo of a Broken Voice
HAVANA TIMES – At 12 years old, I discovered the musical genre that would accompany me my whole life. Bands like Aerosmith, Soundgarden, Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, and The Police opened the door to a universe that seemed distant for a preadolescent girl from the countryside.
Finding those cassettes in my cousin’s room was a real adventure, a hidden treasure between four walls. He also had Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, but I wasn’t ready for them yet. They were names that sounded too big, excessively heavy for my unaccustomed ears that were only just daring to challenge the silence of routine.
As I grew, I explored other sounds and subgenres. Rock became a refuge. Each riff, each lyric, was shaping me, teaching me to feel differently.
Three years ago, when I met my husband, I discovered the voice of Ozzy Osbourne. How could I have overlooked those Black Sabbath tapes? I’m ashamed of the time I lost, although perhaps that was the moment it was meant to happen. While I was growing, Ozzy was also growing in his own way, through excess, mistakes, triumphs, ruins, and rebirths.
His voice was a broken brush painting across the canvas of heavy metal. He didn’t have the excellence of a conservatory-trained performer. His range was limited, his vibrato shaky, his tone nasal and harsh—all the ingredients in one to break the rules. Because in that imperfection lay his magic: every crack was a confession, every note an open wound.
He sang like someone emerging from an abyss with scars that need no explanation. Some say he wasn’t a good singer—yet that was the point. Ozzy was an alchemist with the ability to transform his fractures into emotional gold, the prince of darkness and of the lost.
When the news of his death came, I cried. And days later, in Havana, at the Submarino Amarillo, while Lilian Ojeda and her band Pyra paid tribute, I cried again. My husband insisted we go—“whatever it costs,” he said. He was right, it was worth the sacrifice, because that night was etched in my memory as one of the most intense of my life. Lilian sang Mama, I’m Coming Home and, just like at Ozzy’s last concert, everyone had to cry.
Beside me I saw men dressed in black, with beards and long hair, sobbing under the bar’s dim light. The girl in the corner, her tablemates, my friends, my husband—we all became part of a collective ritual in that moment.
Even in the singer’s voice, carrying the weight and the privilege of bringing us close to Ozzy one last time, you could feel the same vulnerability that connected us. That song, with its broken whisper, stopped being just a ballad and became a shared confession among strangers.
What unites us fans, beyond the music itself, is the emotion it conveys. Ozzy wasn’t loved in spite of his flaws, but because of them—it’s in his chaos that we found a mirror of our own humanity.
When money and opportunity allow, we’ll return to the Submarino Amarillo to listen to Pyra. It doesn’t matter if they don’t play Ozzy’s songs that time—with their talent and dedication, they earned my respect. That night reminded me that music doesn’t die with bodies; the voice of a broken man can keep traveling, multiplying in thousands of throats and memories.
In the end, Ozzy hasn’t left. He returns every time someone presses “Play” and dares to feel.