{"id":1115,"date":"2018-07-30T11:23:01","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T15:23:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/?p=1115"},"modified":"2021-05-17T12:42:44","modified_gmt":"2021-05-17T16:42:44","slug":"un-playlist-cubano-para-un-tiempo-mas-diverso","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/un-playlist-cubano-para-un-tiempo-mas-diverso\/","title":{"rendered":"A Cuban playlist for a more diverse time"},"content":{"rendered":"

From that close relationship between music and feelings, Cuban people have organized a flow that accompanies us at any time of life. Passions, dislikes, losses, and joys, are mixed over and over again in that vast repertoire of themes, rhythms, melodies, that make up the musical heritage of the island, populated with wonders although the poverty of what is being disseminated seems to deny such a thing. The homoerotic desire has also been there, almost always between the lines and waiting for a listener who knows how to capture the codes of the secret that is sung<\/span>; in a country where musicians and athletes follow, curiously, starring in the greatest mysteries of the national closet. If we know little of the latter, due to the prevailing taboo, at least among the first few have slipped clues that let us today select a playlist like this, in which there is only a handful of songs where it goes from the homosexual sentiment uncovered that Bola de Nieve always revealed, until reinterpretations that only now, with the sharp look of gender studies, seem to tell us of other sensibilities.<\/p>\n

At the request of my dearest Darsi Fern\u00e1ndez, here is this collection of topics that gays and lesbians on the island have had or can have as theirs. In some cases, the presence of the homoerotic is from the lyrics, at other times it is the figure that popularized them who induces that reading, and in others, despite that their creators deny such filiation, the popular imagination has been more powerful, raising hymns to themes that are not always of a firm quality, but that become manifestos of a community that for so long lived in that darkness that Amaury P\u00e9rez talks about in his \u00a0<\/span>Amor dif\u00edcil<\/span><\/i>. "In Pedro's house yesterday \/ a refined guy came in \/ with a delicate gesture \/ he asked for something to drink": this was how Rita Montaner described a gay man of the 50s in his recording of \u00a1<\/span>Ay, qu\u00e9 sospecha tengo<\/span><\/i>! Mentioning famous figures of Cuban music as lesbians or homosexuals is still an arduous thing, even in these times when stereotypes, clich\u00e9s, have given way to true songs of affirmation and challenge. Here is a little of everything, from that time to the present, in the selected topics, and in which, as a license <\/span>queer<\/span><\/i>, I take it when making a kind of bonus, which I hope will serve as a clue to those who are interested in knowing (and singing) more about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

14. T\u00fa me acostumbraste<\/i>, Frank Dom\u00ednguez, played by Olga Guillot.<\/strong>
\n<\/span>"Music of the sick", they said of the <\/span>feeling<\/span><\/i> some of his enemies. And behind that accusation was the suspicion of desires not always "straight" that follows from the repertoire that several of its main composers induced. La Guillot, true queen of the Cuban drama, takes theatrics of the Frank Dom\u00ednguez theme that manages secret codes to talk about that "strange world" and joins bolero and <\/span>feeling<\/span><\/i> in a recording that homosexuals of their time will have fully understood, as they will have done when they hear it sing <\/span>Me contaron de ti<\/span><\/i>, that other classic by Ren\u00e9 Touzet; <\/span>T\u00fa me niegas<\/span><\/i>, by Juan Bruno Tarraza or<\/span> Pruebo<\/span><\/i>, by Julio Guti\u00e9rrez.<\/span><\/p>\n