Carlos Varela Begins National Tour in Holguín

By Leandro Estupiñán / Sunday, April 19, 2009. leandro@ahora.cu.
Photos: Amauris Betancourt.
It happened in the Marqueta Square; there was a red ceramics factory many years ago, a concert hall to-be now. I thought the place inappropriate, but I was wrong. The spot proved to be rather small for a national tour starting concert which will take troubadour Carlos Varela along to 12 other places in Cuba. Today, Sunday April 19, he will be in Gibara, in the Humberto Solás International Non-Budget Film Festival, where he has been, year in year out, to return his affection and friendship to his late friend moviemaker Humberto Solás, who passed away last September 2008.

Varela wore black (as he always does) and had five talented musicians keep him company. Singer Diana Fuentes sticks out. Down, before the stage, a sea of young people (teenagers and thirty-and-odds people) and some other from different ages. The first song was 25 thousand lies on the truth. The last The woodcutter without forest, a usual request from fans included in his CD Like a fish (1995).

The first time I listened to Carlos Varela, Like a fish was an underground hit. He was not played in the radio when I got to Havana in 1995 for the second time. Varela had a handkerchief to cover his hair and held a cup at the height of the nose. With a hand, he covered the mouth of the container inside which a fish swam.
The poster, on a street lamp post in Reina street, promoted a concert and, according to what I knew many years later, it had turned out to be legendary due to the crowd it brought together and because, for the first time, he was thrown coins at when singing Coins to the air as a promotion to the video clip where the very Grethel, the muse whom Varela saw through Jim Morrison's eyes, was dancing. It had happened almost one year before.

I found that poster many times those days. The CD Like a fish rendered a successful production with fabulous songs like Small dreams, Family pictures, Habaname or Like an angel. He included also harsh criticisms to Cuban reality like Politics does not fit in the sugar bowl or The woodcutter without forest. It was not difficult to understand why his songs were radioed, “only sometimes”, (if by any chance they were radioed in the nineties), even though his friend and protector Silvio Rodríguez had said that “the ones plotting against Carlos Varela erred, because they think him very hypercritical."

The troubadour questions the world around him, but his criticism is based on a hypersensitivity that seems to get hold of him. He sings to an amusement park tearing apart, to the city getting destroyed, to a misunderstood young girl, to a relative fleeing the country, to contradictions landing on his nose and, next, he warns: “If you knew the pain I feel when I sing to you and you do not understand this love”. It has been thus since Jalisco Park (1989) where he included themes like Guillermo Tell or Tropicollage and where you can notice the personality of someone born in April 1963, four years after 1959.A curious thing turned out to me with Varela. When I got to Havana to major in journalism in 2 000, I ran into the old poster that had confronted me with the musician. Then, he was launching Clouds (2 000), a CD that, although with dreadful songs like Walls and doors, he seemed to me stepping backwards, a capitulation in his background as an artist and reality iconoclast. Maybe I believed Varela had fallen down because I only liked that song out of Clouds.

It was logical, I thought: The hardest years seemed to have gone, and with them all poetical Carlos Varela's amphibology met an end. I was mistaken again. He came out with Seven (2 003) and so dreadful lyrics like the one adorning the melody in Behind the window-glass, a song where he came back stabbing us with a cold and cruel sensibility shouting: “The ones that fled cry, the ones that stay cry more”. That was the Carlos Varela I had always been interested in. The troubadour whose lyrics of love stem from reality and its symbols and circumstances. Now, after having turned 46, he has started this national tour to promote his new work, entitled It is not the end. It is not either for his career: He is a mature man; Voice and fans keep him company. Last night (Saturday, April 18), the Marqueta Square was full with young people singing his songs. And I discovered him in a poster, stuck on a Havana street lamp post in the nineties!The image in the poster stayed there, two or three years right after the XXI century had already begun. I remember they were four pieces of a scratched paper surviving time when I saw it last. I was heading down Reina street to do something I do not remember, while a man sold orange juice nearby the street lamp post. He knew those things were not big things, but they were his dreams. What was it supposed be done about it?