Simply Vania

She is an opponent of the algorithm regime. She posts a few family photos and the occasional post of presentations of herself on Instagram, casually, without demands. She knows about Spotify, at least that they listen to her in certain playlists there. On YouTube you can find more of her videos on other people's channels than on her own. Hers has about 200 subscribers and those clips uploaded by "others" exceed half a million views. 

Her name is Vania Borges Hernández. Her work equation is unchanged more than two decades later. First, she thinks about how she wants each of her albums to be. She has the luxury of choosing among producers and musicians of proven quality. She records without the pressure of dates. She herself is a slow descarga, a bolero... She has the consent of those in the know. She holds a Grand Prix of the Festival de Radio France International with the interpretation of Madame Charity and was the winner of the California Song Festival in 2009. But she says that no distinction compares to the popularity award at the 2002 Adolfo Guzmán contest. She is considered one of the leading voices of Cuban timba. Of the female Cuban timba, she specifies. She is pigeonholed by mistake, by the machismo that still inhabits the whole society. She is more.

It is 10 o'clock in the morning of another hot day in early April. Vania walks down to the lobby of the Ciego de Avila hotel in tennis shoes and a light-colored printed dress. Later she will perform with maestros Raúl Verdecia and Emilio Vega at El Patio de Artex in that city. It will be the closing night of the XXI edition of the Piña Colada Festival. Two of the most popular dance music orchestras in the country will play on the main stage. Little worries him. His audience is loyal, despite the fact that his most recent album is not a "premiere", despite the changes in the market. When the obsession of artists is to be trendy, she resists. "In a top ten, I prefer to be the eleventh," she says, mischievously.

"It would be nice, how could it not, to have greater convocation; but I don't choose that, I don't superimpose it over art. The booms are ephemeral. From fame to oblivion is two blocks. This is an endurance race. I am not one to follow fashions. I don't entirely share this tendency to approach artists who are attached to them either, because it doesn't flow naturally on many occasions. What I want is to be remembered, that my work transcends", and he gives a bit of seriousness to his tone.

Vanya shows off her shaved head. Thirty years ago, when she changed her image, she was the center of attention. She had been before, half because of the talent she overflowed; but the boom from then on was greater. Vania continues with her speech of simplicity, about how she likes to be out of the spotlight, and says: "I was a photo model and for the cover of an Afrocuba album they had to shave me on one side, where they wrote Cuba, with the machine. As soon as I got out of the session, I decided to shave my head completely because I looked like a hairball with that sign". 

By coincidence, that afternoon he was supposed to rehearse with Lazarito Valdés and Bamboleo, prior to his first concert with the group. He arrived with a cap that soon began to sweat. He refused to take it off no matter how much they insisted. Lazarito, jokingly, took it off and when he looked back he understood Vania's reasons. "The only thing she said was that she wanted everyone like that that night. Haila cried and kicked, but she cut her hair too," he recalls. 

The national public was unprepared to receive the impact of a look like this. Haila and Vania suffered an escalation of racism and machismo. "Some people think that we did it to implant fashion, because we wanted to show that mulatto women looked good in everything. Nothing seems more ridiculous to me than selling the image that Cuba is all about rum, tobacco and sexy mulatas. I have never understood why we mulatas are 'sexualized' or why it is spread that this is the way Cuban women succeed. We bald women were the reverse. Being mulatto in Cuba in the 1990s was difficult. Being mulatto and bald, twice as hard. They shouted at us 'cocolisas,' 'delinquents,' that we were out of jail, lesbians..."

The implications were even greater, irrational. Television programs were hesitant to interview them or give them a platform to promote their careers. "I think we had no choice but to stand firm. It was revolutionary on our part not to be intimidated. The moment came when they accepted us and when mulattoes, whites and Chinese began to shave their heads. We left behind that nonsense that in Cuba it is better to be pretty than good artists," says Vania.

He came into the world with sheet music written in his DNA. The house was a large concert hall. Her mother sang and her father was an oboist. He quickly discovered that Vanya had inherited musical talent. At a young age, barely knowing how to write the word "oboe," she reproduced the sounds her father made on the instrument. 

He was never forced to learn music. Nor did he need to. In third grade he began studying basic piano, waiting to enter high school and master the oboe. Years later, she graduated as an oboist at the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory. For her social service, she was sent more than 100 kilometers from Havana, with the Matanzas Symphony Orchestra. "It was an experience of self-improvement. I was a teacher. I began to have a greater sense of belonging and to take music and life seriously. I had fun anyway. I did what I liked and what I thought I would always do". 

Nothing could have been more wrong, but Vania had an enormous trail of diverse opportunities ahead of her. Back in Havana, she joined the National Concert Band and then, with her father, the Choir of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television: "It was by accompanying so many popular music orchestras that I got that little bug of dance music".

The distance between classical music and dance music Vania covered in record time, with apparent ease. "It's not a complicated transition for those of us who trained at the academy. I studied all the music and kept that information. Since I was a little girl I learned a lot, because my father used to play Irakere after listening to Mozart", she explains and her gaze is lost in the memory.

Bamboleo was perhaps the highest podium in his career. "Haila must agree with me that it was a main link for [our] trajectory," says the one who initially offered resistance to being part of the orchestra. "I was the first [one] they called, but they still needed to establish themselves and I was on tour at the time," she says. I was singing then with Pachito Alonso and his Kini Kini.

His experience in the Kini Kini with Robertón, El Lele and maestro [José Luis] Arango was as short as it was profitable. When he left, he was also a show singer for a short time. He considered offers from different groups and opted for the one that Lazarito Valdés was then beginning to direct. 

"Lazarito is a guy of many ideas, with a very big harmonic head. He mixed jazz with timba, timba with the soul... We were, I believe, the first orchestra that fused timba. That was a novelty and [also] the way we dressed, the way we projected ourselves, without ever being vulgar. That is one of the defects I notice in Cuban music today: the singers tend to make rude gestures, as if it were necessary to raise pressure or [to] make the audience connect with them.

"Wobble was different. It was, for those of us who went through it, a special moment, of realization, of satisfying that greed we had as young people to make the music we wanted, that we liked. It meant a lot musically and personally -Vania goes ahead-; the roots were so strong that even with my solo career I still have to sing It is no longer necessary. That is Bamboleo's biggest song, nominated for an American Grammy along with the album. The late José Luis Cortés called it a timba anthem".

After recording five phonograms with Bamboleo, he embarked on a solo career. She allowed herself the license to be. "I began to have new concerns, I wanted to prove myself without an orchestra and, very importantly, I was pregnant." 

His next performance was at the Adolfo Guzmán contest, where he won the popularity award. "I was born and grew up [near the] Karl Marx theater with my father. What is there to talk about what Adolfo Guzman represents, not only for Cuba, but for the world. To say Adolfo Guzmán is to say music. Here it is not given the connotation it deserves, but just participating in that contest is great. I received that trophy at home, from my people. That is the one that means the most", he says, returning to the sensations that the award caused him. 

His first album as a soloist is entitled Vania Borges (2006), although it could have been Alejandro Sanz. There are 12 Spanish compositions interpreted in the Cuban style. She achieves an album of her own and that's why she calls it that way. "I sang the songs I was authorized to sing, not the ones I wanted, but in the Cuban style of boleros, jazz... It is my favorite album. I enjoyed it a lot. I was able to sing to Sanz in my own way, very much in a descarga style".

Vanya says, however, that she might never have done it. That's perhaps why it's special, by chance: she was recording the track Knock on wood in tribute to Joan Manuel Serrat, when label executives learned that she was a fan of Sanz's music and asked her to cover his songs. "I always saw Alejandro [Sanz] as the favorite singer-songwriter of the young people of my generation. There was no pressure on me to make that record. It was, first, my personal satisfaction, to feel good about myself. And if he liked it, contra, even better. We never established contact, but I knew he listened to some songs and liked them. The comments were always very favorable. The acceptance, even in Spain, was better than I expected. Very curious things happened to me, I met people in the street who told me 'girl, now that you sang it, I understand some of the lyrics'", he laughs.

He then decided to return to dance music with the album I have a job (2011), produced by Manolito Simonet. Surprising that title for an album by someone who could care less about the charts if Vanya wasn't the unpredictable person she is.

"Manolito himself, Jorge Díaz, Piloto, wrote those songs for me, thinking of me", she says and dispels the doubt of whether she is a "minor" artist for not composing her own songs: "I know what I give and how much I give. I am not capricious. Mexican music doesn't suit me, for example. But I'm lucky to be quite versatile. Composing is another art, it doesn't define you. It is more difficult, in fact, to interpret other people's songs and have them be pleased with your work".

With a different accent, she would say "jodedera", she confronted her father. He challenged her to record an album of vitrola music and she accepted without hesitation, but did not comply. Or she did, but later. After I have a job, Germán Velazco proposed her to sign another dance music album. Vania explained that she did not want to saturate her audience or herself and told him about the old challenge.

Simply Vania (2020) is dedicated to the memory of his father. "He was very fond of Rolando Laserie, Panchito Risset, Orlando Contreras... He had a passion for vitrola music. When he passed away, that was my way of revering him. The album has a special meaning for me. We made it in one month, during the pandemic. I recorded with the musicians in the studio and it was very organic. It was nominated for the Cubadisco".

Latina (2021), the most recent phonogram by Vania Borges, which brings together bachatas and other tropical rhythms, also competed for the awards. The frenzy with which artists release songs in recent years sometimes makes one think that her career is incomplete, out of time. "No, I feel very pleased with what I've done," she says. I have worked with the best music producers, the best musicians and the best guidance. I have the joy of singing what I want, when and how much I want."

To a certain extent, Vania is more concerned about the future of Cuban music made by women than about her own. Why is the legacy she helped build almost in ruins, she wonders in different words. "At this minute I'm worried about the lack of identity of women in Cuban music. There are very good voices, but they seek to resemble their foreign referents. It's a pity, because both Haila and I were marked as artists to be original. And the rest as well. You listen to Tania and you know it's Tania. You listen to Osdalgia and you know it's Osdalgia... Today we live in a festival of shouting", she assures with regret.

At her own pace, as if she knew that the goal will always be waiting for her, she plans to finish an album of vitrola music but with reference to female performers. It will be one more gesture to her father. Her only debt is to sing with her daughter, to put her on the path to the world of the arts. In some way, to continue being like her father.