Saturday, May 22, 2010

Decades After Its Heyday, Disco Fever Grips Cuba

Decades After Its Heyday, Disco Fever Grips Cuba
by Nick Miroff
May 21, 2010

In the 1960s and '70s, Cuba's Communist hard-liners viewed rock 'n'
roll, American pop music and long hair as signs of moral decadence.

But some things in Cuba have changed since then. These days, Havana is
back in the throes of disco fever.

A resident of Havana, Ricardo Fragela is a huge, lumbering man with a
warm smile and an impressive music collection. His living room is an
archive of American pop and rock 'n' roll.

He holds an autographed CD case as if it were a bar of gold. The pop
disco ensemble KC and the Sunshine Band sent it to him from Florida
after he wrote a fan letter.

As a teenager in the late 1970s, Fragela would tune his radio to the
faint signals of radio stations out of Miami and Key West. He wrote down
Casey Kasem's Top 40 countdown every week, filling entire notebooks.

"It wasn't illegal to listen to that music," Fragela says. "We were just
decent young people, who studied and went to school, and weren't hurting
society in any way. We just loved the music."

More than 30 years later, on a recent Saturday afternoon in the bar of
the Karl Marx Theater, a crowd of 100 or so is writhing in the darkness,
dancing in choreographed rows like on an episode of Soul Train.

There's a big disco ball on the ceiling, and music videos pirated from
VH1 are playing on a huge TV screen. Kool & The Gang hits like "Get Down
On It" and "Celebrate" are pulsing from a wall of speakers.
A fan of Kool & the Gang shouts during the band's concert in Havana in
December.
Enlarge Franklin Reyes/AP

A fan of Kool & the Gang shouts during the band's concert in Havana in
December. Cuba's Communist authorities no longer frown on American pop
music and rock 'n' roll.
A fan of Kool & the Gang shouts during the band's concert in Havana in
December.
Franklin Reyes/AP

A fan of Kool & the Gang shouts during the band's concert in Havana in
December. Cuba's Communist authorities no longer frown on American pop
music and rock 'n' roll.

In the 1990s, at the height of Cuba's post-Soviet economic crisis,
Communist authorities opened new discotecas all over the country, mostly
to appeal to foreign tourists. The venues were too pricey for most
Cubans, and they sat empty for much of the day.

Fragela and his friends had families of their own by then, but their
musical tastes hadn't changed. So they persuaded some of the
state-run-club managers to hire them as DJs for afternoon dance parties
that would appeal to an older, more Cuban clientele. They were dubbed
discotembas — temba is Cuban slang for a middle-aged person who's a bit
past his or her prime.

As disco fan Samira Reyes explains it, temba is more of a term of
endearment than an insult. Pot bellies, wrinkles, a receding hairline —
that's temba.

The discotembas take place on weekend afternoons, making it easier for
parents to get child care. And they are often over by 9 p.m., so it's
not hard to get up for work the next day.

Harry Otero is a disco lover — and a grandfather.

He says discotembas are different from the discotecas that play popular
salsa and reggaeton music. People are polite enough not to smoke, they
don't drink much, and there are no drugs, he says.

"We're grandparents now," he says, "so we have to set a good example."

Otero was on the balcony of the Karl Marx discotemba with Ibis Garcia, a
56-year-old actress with heavy eyelashes and tall heels. She said the
music makes her nostalgic, and the nostalgia is what keeps her young.

"This music makes me feel young because I am young," Garcia says.

"And there are other things that keep me young, too," she adds with a
wink. "Like men. How do you like that answer?"

And with that, Garcia went back to the dance floor, the Bee Gees
"Stayin' Alive," and a party no Marxist could resist.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127035026&ft=1&f=1004

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