{"id":14243,"date":"2020-01-13T17:15:29","date_gmt":"2020-01-13T22:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/?p=14243"},"modified":"2023-07-13T17:49:49","modified_gmt":"2023-07-13T21:49:49","slug":"diony-rock-cubano-venus-zeus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/diony-rock-cubano-venus-zeus\/","title":{"rendered":"The curse of the Diony"},"content":{"rendered":"

No freak gets as excited with the nine o'clock cannon shot as the one who attends, on the last Friday of the month, to the amphitheater of Old Havana. At that moment, the shouting of those waiting for the first song begins. Those who cannot get in because the place is crowded stay outside the walls to listen and sing from afar, at the risk that a policeman asks for their ID card or \"invites\" them to accompany him. What rarely happens is to see someone leave before the end, because a Venus concert is, for those who are not in the audience, an opportunity to listen and sing. <\/span>rockers<\/span><\/i> 86, as Easter Sunday for the Catholic faithful.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the unloading of six strings, the nightly ritual begins. The atmosphere sounds like <\/span>heavy<\/span><\/i>fast guitar, fast guitar, intense drums. Five thousand souls are waiting for the skinny guy in the T-shirt to begin to fire, via microphone, the songs that everyone knows: <\/span>speed metal <\/span><\/i>with their own lyrics and always in Spanish. The <\/span>front man<\/span><\/i> of Venus approaches the audience and the sonorous assault begins. <\/span>Message<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Nuclear threat<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Of the hardest metal<\/span><\/i> pass like a flurry through the chanting audience. With infinite energy, the singer wears out the stage; he either lies on the floor or throws his clothes in the air.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

His name is Dionisio Arce, everyone calls him Diony. As he watches the crowd, seduced by the rock ecstasy, he suspects that his vocal cords are making history. He is not wrong.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

-When the group began to grow, they made life impossible for us,\" recalls the vocalist, three decades later, from his office as director of the Cuban Rock Agency. Venus had become a mass phenomenon and was attracting as large an audience as a salsa or guaracha artist. That bothered \"those at the top\". For them, the rocker was the scum, the antisocial, the delinquent, the homosexual... You were flirting with the music of the enemy, and no political or cultural leader cared about changing the mentality. If you talked about rock and roll, you fucked up, brother, you fucked up....<\/span><\/p>\n

The birth of Venus<\/h3>\n
\"En

In the 1980s, Venus reached its peak of popularity. Photo: Metal World.<\/p><\/div>\n

The eighties were times of incomprehension and censorship towards rock and metal. A yes but no, a \"I chew you but I don't swallow you\". Since the previous decade, classic rock combos such as Almas Vertiginosas and<\/span> Dimensi\u00f3n Vertical enlivened the semi-clandestine parties of Havana with their versions of <\/span>hits <\/span><\/i>But once imitation turned into stagnation and the Mariel exodus left the area with a shortage of performers, young rockers felt the need to fill a void. When heavy metal arrived in Cuba and Venus began rehearsing in 1982, its members had a clear idea of where to direct their music: something different and original, with a defined identity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Roberto <\/span>Skippy <\/span><\/i>Armada, the bass player and founder of the piquete, had a friend who wrote some lyrics and was eager to see rock bands defending their own creations. That is how Humberto Manduley - today a historian of the genre - became the piquete's lyricist. In its early stages, a couple of vocalists passed through the ranks but never really took off, and it wasn't until the arrival of Diony, whom Skippy knew from the neighborhood, that <\/span>Venus<\/span><\/i> assembled its core.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first step for the band was to gain acceptance in Havana's cultural centers in order to be able to perform regularly in front of the public. Once the one located in Carlos III and Castillejo opened the doors to rock, the most difficult part remained: to conquer a skeptical audience accustomed to English versions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fortunately for Venus, the situation improved within a couple of years. Diony was in the show business vein, thanks to her artist mother, Velia Maria, and became <\/span>showman <\/span><\/i>of rock and roll. He began to wear a T-shirt and tight striped pants, perfected his vocal technique and although he sang in front of fifty people, he imagined an auditorium with more than three thousand.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The rockers of the new generation began to identify with this music, faster and more powerful than hard rock, and the band performed in Centro Habana, Marianao, Arroyo Naranjo and Alamar, covering almost every corner of the city.<\/span><\/p>\n