Vanito on the radio

On a radio station, whose name I will ignore, the announcer announced Habana Abierta with divine script. You know, the song rolled on with that unbeatable swing until Vanito blurted out "how nice a rock and roll with timba sounds.../ Habana Abierta brings it to you in a big way!"; and the music suddenly dropped and the announcer worked her magic to try to fix the irreparable. I can imagine the post-transmission meeting, the brawl caused by the palmero; because Vanito, Ihosvani Caballero, was born in Palma Soriano, although he is also from Havana.

On another occasion Salvador Virgili called me, telling me he had a surprise, that I should pay attention because I was going to be on live -I was cooking something punishable-; he called me back and Vanito was on the program. We had chatted and exchanged ideas, but being in the media was something else and, without realizing it, I launched a whole speech about one of the best Cuban composers of recent years and his successful combination of the most vulgar lineage with the most accurate verse, which could be a precursor of the poetry of the younger boys. And the madness almost stopped me, because he spoke as if Frank Sinatra was there, and he gave me the head on Sunday, because in the end we Cubans almost always accept what comes from outside... but Vanito had only moved away a little bit.

The obvious thing is that Vanito has a work of height. He says that his beginning was marked when he recorded with Lucha Almada, and there are many who point out that album as one of the fundamental of his time. The videoclip, authored by Orlando Cruzata and Rudy Mora, and which defended a phonogram that hopefully will be re-recorded someday, remains in the memory of many. It is true that the years go through us like sabers -Vanito himself recognizes it-; the boys of today have their songs that are perhaps sharper, less poetic, more immediate, but those of Vanito said at the time what should be pronounced with the verb of the common man or with his haughty verse.

Long ago, when I asked him for my radio show about his songs he told me more or less what his formula was: "My songs are typically conversational, maybe I have done that with full intention; I believe that in all my songs there is a tête à tête with those who receive them and I don't think it goes against what the Cuban public usually consumes. The song is not only poetry or only music, I have always said it: it is a conjugation of both things that become a third. One plus one gives three in this case, it is a conjugation of many sound languages and the public receives it, as they like it. In fact, many songs we listened to as children we didn't know where they came from, but we loved them, no matter what they contained". 

Thirty years after what he considers his start, Vanito Brown is still an author whose songs can alert the girl to take her eyes out of her wallet, or tenderly tell the babies of a couple of generations: "sleep puppy, the night is coming", despite the fact that it is a new time and a sharp, immediate song, made by machines as suspicious as inescapable.

I see in these singers not only the defense -that is a complex word- of poetry, of the beautiful over the immediate or lucrative, but even of the most valuable aspect of human existence. To continue behind a guitar, making verses, dealing with the reality of their time, is appreciated.

These musicians alert one how to accommodate the disorders of the chest, the nostalgia of a Havana that to many is more distant, the antics of a girl who wants to go play in the street, or also put out of tune a speaker who proposes a divine script not knowing that a few seconds after the beginning Vanito Brown will sing that "Habana Abierta te lo trae de pinga".