Roberto Carcassés: "Cuba is a beautiful place where not all Cubans can live".

One Monday afternoon I received a message from my sister, from Cuba, telling me that Roberto Carcassés would be playing at 4:00 p.m. at the Negra Tomasa in Madrid. I was visiting the city and, by the way, I would be able to meet some very dear friends. 

As soon as I arrived, I felt the embrace of the notes of the We are engaged occupying all the space next to the reddish haze of the lights. A delight. Roberto was already working his magic on the piano accompanied by Lidia Maria's redemptive voice. During the first break I asked him for an interview, which he immediately accepted. Two days later we made an appointment while I was with a friend (Adriana Fonte) who was invited to meet with Roberto. ipso facto to the conversation. At 3:12 p.m. we were sitting with Robertico in one of the bars near La Puerta del Sol, tape recorder and wine.

It was the first time we had talked, but the fact that we had seen each other in so many comings and goings of Interactivo during twenty years made us very close. I proposed to break away from the interviewee/interviewer scheme and talk among the three of us. Without guidelines or borders, I was moved by the desire to know about him and the future of Interactivo; but all of us with the desire to talk about the pressing issues that concern the country that unites us. Also about the so-called "migration effect" that, in common, was going through us.

Alina HerreraHow has Madrid treated you? Let's start softly (laughs).

Roberto CarcassésSuper good, I know a lot of people here. I'm staying at a friend's house and I'm doing all the paperwork to get regularized and... well, working, doing everything I can: contacts and preparing things for the summer.

AlinaWhen you came here, did you already have in mind what to do with Interactivo?

RobertoInteractive is what we have been doing here, we have already done four shows since I came to live in Spain. A couple with William Vivanco in the summer, one in the Canary Islands and another in Huelva; also the show with Laurita de la Uz and Héctor Garrido. The festival in the Canary Islands; two in Madrid; one in Galileo and another in Clamores, with people who are not originally from Interactivo, but who I know from before like Leonardo Ángel on drums, José Raúl who played bass with me in Cuba and also with my dad; and others I have met here: Lidia María, Emilio Ibáñez, Roque Martínez, or Víctor Navarrete who worked with me and X [Alfonso] when we were teenagers. Interactive is that, people can change because that is the concept, although the first faces are the ones you know the most (William, Yusa, Telmary).

AlinaInteractivo is also a reflection of Cuban society itself, in physical mobility, of being, of not being, and returning.....

RobertoYes, it could be anyone really because Cuban music and Cuban musicians are everywhere, and now what there is in Madrid is incredible, [quantity] of Cuban musicians living here, of tremendous quality. It is something that is not usual. There have always been Cuban musicians here and there have been people who have emigrated to Spain, but what has happened after COVID and the situation in Cuba has been and is being massive.

AlinaWhere do you meet, how do you meet, what is the process of reassembling Interactivo like?

Roberto: Yes, yes, we rehearse in the places we have here for that purpose and we are also composing, making new music?

AlinaWhen you came here, did you leave any discs behind?

Roberto: Well, we made the record because of the 20 years of Interactivowhich was launched at the Fábrica [de Arte Cubano], about a very good concert that took place there. That audiovisual was made by Bis Music and some fragments of it have been shown on television in Cuba. Now we are already working on the new stuff. Alejandro Gutiérrez has done things with me here too, and so... it's all part of the same thing.

AlinaBut besides those four shows you mention with Interactivo, have you performed or accompanied other artists?

RobertoI'm playing here at La Negra Tomasa with Lidia María, one of the singers who works with me. We are doing it in the afternoons, sometimes, and my dad was also there recently. We did a concert in the Berlin, in El Sótano, in the jam Roque Martínez does; and with Roque we have had tremendous chemistry as well, with Pedro Pablo, Yelsy Heredia, Caramelo, with all those people I have met. Recently there was a tribute to Pablo Milanés at the Casa de América, I played, Melón, José María Vitier, Liuba María Hevia, Víctor Manuel, Ana Belén, Carlos Varela, Frank Delgado, it was very nice.

AlinaWhen you present yourself, do you perceive that the Cuban community attends quite a lot?

RobertoYes, at the last concert we did at the Clamores, there were people who told me that they felt as if they were at the Bertolt Brecht, they told me "I felt like I was in Cuba again". 

AlinaYesterday, when I was talking to Kumar, he told me that the Cuban community is very nostalgia-driven, that they go to concerts out of nostalgia, do you think the same?

Roberto: Yes, yes, we make songs from Interactivo that are emblematic such as No closing of the club, not moneyAnd people identify very much with that, it is something emotional. The Cuban always carries that emotion.

Adriana FonteAnd yet, do you feel you are reaching out to the Spanish community?

RobertoYes, little by little. There are people here who follow Cuban musicians, sometimes there are many Cubans, but there are also many Peruvians, Argentines, Latinos in general, who follow Cuban music and are going to our concerts. What happens is that it takes a little time, because Interactivo is not a group that is really known here. Beyond the fact that I am doing that and at the same time my solo piano work, trio, quartet, I am open to all of that. Cuban musicians get along very well, we love each other very much and everybody respects and helps each other. There are always groups and people who don't, but the opportunity of being here and not being in Cuba is precisely that there are many possibilities and you can make your own way. In Cuba it is difficult to do that, really. Almost impossible.

AlinaAlso because there are fewer and fewer musicians, it is a problem that can no longer be covered up.

AdrianaAnd people started to play in bars, like the Eclectic, but the market started to close...

RobertoIn Cuba, all institutionalism has broken down. Everything is already very polarized. Not only in Cuba, it happens in the rest of the world as well. But in Cuba, as it is a country in such bad conditions, all that is expressed.

AlinaThat same new world of the private sector, that the times and amounts of payment are different from the Cuban institutional bureaucracy with the musicians and their works, is eroding the possibility for Cuban musicians to develop in their own country..., did you see yourself in that situation? Have you managed to replace that here? I know it's very little time, but do you see that possibility? Was [leaving] a good decision?

RobertoYes, absolutely. I left Cuba wanting to leave Cuba, something I never thought would happen to me. That doesn't mean that I don't want to go back to Cuba, I will try to go back whenever I can, without stopping saying what I say and doing what I do, but I really had to leave.

AlinaYou had closed the doors, Robe, I was (and we were) witnesses even from a distance...

Roberto: Yes, yes, the censorship is already ridiculous, the repression...

Adriana: What you said in F.A.C. no one had ever done before, did the group continue after that?

RobertoNo, we had already finished the gig at the Bertolt Brecht. After F.A.C., we went back to play I think once more and that was it. I remember that once Iván Camejo, who lives in Miami, went to the Brecht and I said "here is Iván Camejo" and I greeted him. I asked him "don't you want to do anything" and he answered "no, no, because I once got up at a David Torrens concert and started talking and making jokes and everybody looked at me saying 'look at this fat nasty guy making jokes and he cut the concert in half' (laughs). I do all this story through the microphone in the Brecht and I tell him "well, Ivan, anyway, welcome. Homeland and life, homeland or death, and freedom". The next day the president of the [Cuban] Music Institute, the people from my company, everyone gathered with me. It was really disrespectful. And one of the things I told them when they told me how I was going to say that in a place like that, was "you are not the owners of the places, you are public administrators, that belongs to all of us, what is public in Cuba belongs to all of us, you are not the owners, simply".

So I left the Bertolt Brecht. The audio was on fire, the tables, the chairs, there was no beer, there was nothing, and to top it off, it was still the same. Just as decadent and just as bad. So, you can't swim against the current. They cancelled several concerts, then I played at the Fangio. I played there for a while, playing very well. There are two or three places in Havana to play, and places that open, and places that close, but you know..., the weight is very high (laughs).

Roberto Carcassés and Alina Herrera Fuentes. Photo by Adriana Fonte

Adriana: I wonder if people make a living from music here in Madrid? 

Roberto: That's something very general, you can't answer it as something general.

Adriana: But, for example, you're just doing music-related things?

RobertoI am, but I am in the process of regularizing my status, in this case I am with my wife, who is regularized because she is already Spanish; everyone has a specific situation in terms of papers. It is very difficult to generalize. There are people who work in music and other things, who do Uber, or work as waiters, or whatever because that's fine. There are also times of the year in each country, there are times when there is more work for musicians than others. For example, the end of the year, January and February, are a bit more complex times. On the other hand, spring and summer are the festivals, and many more places open to the public. In Ibiza, in the Canary Islands or right here in Madrid or Barcelona, there are places that only operate in summer. Then there is more work for the musicians. Although something always comes up.

AlinaWhat strikes you about the music scene in Spain, which is not only Spanish?

RobertoMadrid is an important cultural center in the world right now. It is significantly so for Europe. That is, it always has been, but now even more so.

AlinaHave you been particularly struck by any trend, anything you see emerging, any new movement or sound?

RobertoRight now everybody is coming, all the great musicians of the world come to play in Spain. They come in summer, they come in winter, and there are people already living here, like Cucurucho, there's Joao del Monte too...

AlinaDo you feel that there is still some interest in what is happening musically in Cuba? Now that you are installed abroad, do you perceive that interest?

RobertoRight now urban music is what generates more interest on a large scale, but Cuban music and what has to do with Cuba has always been part of the life of this country, all my life. Here in Galicia he lived MachínHe was a great Cuban singer that nobody knows in Cuba, and he became famous living in Spain. Cuban music and Cuban musicians have always been part of the environment in Spain.

AdrianaAnd do you think that, beyond the immense crisis in the country, Cuban music will survive?

RobertoIt doesn't even need to survive. Music, art in general, things that are valuable, are always happening. The creativity of artists is always in motion and even more so in moments of crisis. It's in moments of crisis that you generate thoughts, ideas, music...

Alina: That's right, I totally agree.

AdrianaI was talking to Yosvani Terrywho is a master of masters...

RobertoHe is a brother of mine from my childhood, from my generation. Yosvany and I had a group called Columna B and that group was Dafnis Prieto, Yosvany Terry, Descemer Bueno and me. 

AdrianaWell, he was telling me that he was worried about the state of art schools, of musicians....

RobertoYosvany was in Cuba last January and we went to the art schools, we gave classes and played [in the schools]. And it's true that, even having the internet at hand where all the information is, there are things that students don't know, don't know, that at the time when we studied you had to know perfectly well: who were all the great jazz musicians, Charlie Parker, or Benny Moré, and many people don't know who Chucho Valdés is in the schools. 

Adriana: As I worked in the archive of AM: PMI read the fragment of your unpublished novelSo, I wanted to ask you about the writer Robertico, who is little known.

RobertoI wrote that novel and have not published it. I intend to publish it this year. I am in talks with a publishing house that will possibly bring it out.

Alina and AdrianaThis is a first! (laughs).

RobertoYes, it's a first. But with them or not, maybe I'll bring it out next year. It has already gone through the whole revision and cover process. Alejandro Arango did the revision, the artwork is my dad's; the proofreading was done by Natasha Bolivar, Natalia Bolivar's daughter. So I'm very happy with the result, but you can't create expectations?

Adriana...because it is a box of surprises.

RobertoBut well, [some] writers who have read it have made very important recommendations that have helped me, like Wendy Guerra, Radamés Molina..., and I'm happy with the result because it's the first book I'm going to publish.

I write like that sporadically. When I sat down to write the novel I had written a lot mentally. That is, when I finally organized the structure of what I wanted, I sat down to do it. I write thoughts and things that come to my mind, ideas that can later be turned into a song.

However, by the time I sat down to write it, everything had happened, the censorship, and I said to myself that I had to do it. It is a fictional novel, but very autobiographical in the sense that the main character is very much like me.

AlinaRoberto Carcassés is saying "I will not give advances, read the novel" (laughs).

RobertoIt's fictional anyway. After that I went to Miami, I went to Juan Manuel Cao's program, with Interactivo, with Francis [del Río], and things happened there that also have to do with Cuba's political context. That is to say, all that has been recorded in some way in several interviews, and there are many other things that I don't tell in the book. Things that happened afterwards, that are still happening because what you write at this moment is in constant dialogue with what has happened and is happening in Cuba. Everything you tell is still relevant.

AdrianaI didn't live through the Special Period, but the situation now is critical.

Roberto: What is happening now, economically, is as bad as in the Special Period, but in those times I was 20 years old, and my generation (X Alfonso, Descemer Bueno, Yadam González, Yosvany Terry, Kcho) are people who have a work and an importance in what is music, art, and they are all my brothers, my great friends. But we were all in our twenties, we were in Cuba and we felt that we could be creative and do things when we were in Cuba. Not now, the 15, 20 year olds, what they want is to leave, that's what they have clear. So it is very different in that sense. The magic has been lost, everything has become mediocre. There are no more arguments to maintain what is happening in the country.

Everyone who has grown up in this process at some point has believed in paradigms, at some point has supported those ideas or collective utopias, but the way it is happening has no place. It is a very personal process for each Cuban, disbelieving has been a national trauma, those who live inside, those who live outside, those who are there, those who are not.

Adriana: Besides, this thing of leaving Cuba but taking Cuba with you everywhere....

Roberto: Because what is happening with Cuba is that Cuba is a beautiful place where not all Cubans can live.. And that is wrong. 

AlinaWhere and how does Roberto Carcassés see himself in five or ten years?

RobertoI don't really know where I see myself in the future. I really enjoy playing and being creative, so I'll be wherever I'm given that opportunity as often as possible.

***

Forty minutes completed the conversation. Roberto said goodbye with much affection, with a broad smile and with the haste of attending to family and work obligations. Nevertheless, he left on the table ideas, reflections, sentiments that move us beyond music. The voice of such an authentic, talented and seasoned Cuban wove many threads in common with the heartbeat of a nation that wants, needs, to survive its own crisis and that, undoubtedly, connects with anyone who feels like a daughter of the "miraculous island".

Roberto Carcassés and Alina Herrera Fuentes. Photo by Adriana Fonte