The Freedom at Cuba’s Yellow Submarine
By Michel Hernandez (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Distance is a trap. The lapse of time that separates us from our origins is a fleeting tremor passing through the body. It causes us to idealize the photographs that repose in our mind – not of a country, but of its corners. Of that one indelible point of its geography, of those spaces close to us that know more about us than we know about ourselves.
Distance, as I already told you, is an ambush, and at times a return, a shipwreck, an uprooting are essential, to demonstrate to us that our profusion of emotions and our reason are two very distinct things. These two roads in life that can become opposing factions under the devastating weight of reality, that always has the last word.
I’ve been back in Cuba for a while, after spending eleven months in Madrid. “Don’t come back” my actual and virtual friends, my acquaintances, told me daily, echoing anyone who was aware of my most recent moods, my nostalgias and outrages. The image of a return was overwhelming. The emotional chaos was too. The consequences to be paid, foreseeable.
In barely a year, the country, – or rather, my city – is something else, another world. It’s an image of people dying in long lines under the sun, to obtain the minimum; of people picking rubbish out of the containers; of trash dominating every corner; of young people getting ready to march out of the country. Life, in summary, is lived with the sensation that something has definitively broken.
As quickly as possible, I tried to look for a place where I could recognize myself during my stay – some site where I could be myself, with my joys and sorrows, with my nostalgias and my internal wars, with the huddled fury of my generation.
Two days after my return, I reunited one night with two of the friends I most admire and love in Havana. Two of the few who are left. People tested by fire, by glowing terror. There we were at night, in the middle of the Yellow Submarine [a club in Havana featuring classic rock]. I confess that I’d called Niurka and Abel in order not to feel alone when night fell, for fear of not recognizing myself anymore in that once-so-familiar spot that was now a door to uncertainty. They didn’t know it, but my call was an act of selfishness, of self-preservation.
Except for an exchange of words with Mick Jagger in the Havana airport, I’ve lived two or three of the best moments of my professional career in the Submarine. One afternoon I introduced drummer Dave Lombardo to the Havana “freak” community; on another, I conversed with Ozzy Osbourne, together with three beloved colleagues.
I ordered some beers of an unknown brand. I drank one, then another. I began feeling that the place hadn’t changed, that it was the same refuge of freedom it had always been for the Cuban rock music community. For those of us who had known the consequences of listening to rock and roll in their youth, and then had fulfilled the impossible dream of seeing the Rolling Stones live in Cuba. Nonetheless, I didn’t feel that sensation of going to the limit, that something earth-shaking was going to happen; one of those feelings reserved only for the velocity of early youth.
I greeted a pair of old acquaintances, while a renovated version of the Cuban rock band “the Kents” blasted rock and roll classics. People were dancing like nothing else mattered. Lili, the vocalist, in a black sweater with “Queen” across her chest, was a force of nature. She poured the same energy into Nirvana that sizzles out of social media. And that, we know, is no small thing in Cuba.
The country outside was unknown territory, but inside Submarine, life remained afloat. Everyone preserved in some way or other that piece of a love they gave us. It’s not easy to feel part of something in a country exiled from itself, but that was the place where all our past histories, our lives, continued playing themselves out. The place where, in some sense, I too, made sense.
The allegories of the Beatles were still there on the walls. In the park, more abandoned than ever, John Lennon pulsed into the night. The beers hadn’t escaped the irksome inflation – they were being sold for 200 Cuban pesos each – but it was a reasonable price compared to other sites according to what I heard around me. I felt good that someone was feeling good. That you could enjoy what was going on, that you could at least afford the luxury of drinking a beer. More so, when it was one of the old rockers that for years have kept going just for the pleasure of listening to and feeling rock and roll music. And that, too, is another trap.
The night lasted some four hours, but the illusion stretched out until the morning, when my inner storm returned. “What am I doing here? What did I come for? What was the real motive of my return?” I didn’t have, nor do I have now, the correct, coherent, or sincere words to respond to those questions that I asked myself as dawn came. I know that time will offer some answers, and common sense will prevail. At least, that’s what I thought behind the Submarine’s curtain of smoke.
I’ve frequently read, even before the shadow of chaos, that there’s no country to return to. I’ve said it myself, I’ve written it, I’ve asserted it. It’s not a matter of pivoting or staying in a country that has left itself behind, together with the hopes of a part of the people, who are busy reinventing themselves as best they can in any point on the planet. It’s a matter of returning (if you have the possibility, the “permission”, or the desire) to those little things that make us recall what we were or what we are. To those little places where freedom has been possible.
I’ve thought about going back to the Submarine at some future time. My time has been short and the hours gloomy. I’ll return to that other country with which I returned to the country. I’ll return with my mother, and we’ll share the illusion of rock and roll in that oasis in the middle of a city that today is a leap into the void.