Cuba and Mick Jagger's Kiss

Cuba and Mick Jagger's Kiss
Yoani Sanchez - Award-winning Cuban blogger
Posted: 10/05/2015 2:41 pm EDT Updated: 10/05/2015 3:59 pm EDT

We never got to hear Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston on our national
stages. Freddie Mercury died without touching down in Havana, and when
The Beatles broke up, we were a country where English music was
considered ideological diversionism. We followed the career of Elvis
Presley from a distance and the charismatic Amy Winehouse slammed the
door on life without stepping foot on this island. However, now we are
about to regain part of what was lost: Mick Jagger's emblematic mouth is
here, the eternal youth of The Rolling Stones has arrived.

While the analysts debate, looking for signs of change in the Cuban
political or diplomatic scene, transformations are capricious and take
another direction. This country is not going to change itself into a new
nation because John Kerry visited, nor because of the third visit by a
pope in less than two decades. But Cuba is changing when people like
this British rocker, icon of good music and of the greatest possible
irreverence, touch down in Havana.

The vocalist, 72, has made his way through the streets of Havana leaving
a trail of incredulity and beating hearts. It is not, admittedly, the
excitement provoked by Beyoncé or Rihanna with their escapades in this
theme park of the past, but Jagger's visit has more profound
connotations. For several generations of Cubans he represents the
forbidden, an attitude toward life that was denied us by an obsessive
police control.

For a political system that tried to form the "New Man," with a Spartan
spirit, "correct" and obedient, this skinny guy with his turbulent life
signified the anti-model, what we must not imitate. However, the
laboratory man hawked by the pedagogical manuals didn't work out... and
Mick Jagger won the battle against the prototype of the militant boy,
hair cut short and willing to denounce his own family.

A friend close to 70 came out into the streets this Sunday with the
energy of a girl celebrating her fifteenth birthday. "Where is he?" she
asked the guard at Hotel Santa Isabel, where the official news reported
the idol of her youth to be staying, but the man gave her no details.
Like an obsessed schoolgirl, she walked all the streets around the hotel
looking in the windows, to try to see the lean figure of the leader of
the Rolling Stones.

The lady displayed none of these reactions toward the American secretary
of state, nor before the Bishop of Rome. For her, all these exalted
visitors were in the range of the possible, no longer surprising nor
moving. But Jagger... Jagger is something else. "I don't want to die
without seeing him," she told me on the phone, with the conviction of
one who will not tolerate leaving this world without "closing an era,"
putting the capstone on her "best years," she told me.

My friend infected me a little with her enthusiasm, I must confess. No
sermon in the Plaza of the Revolution, no speech to open an embassy,
caused my stomach to jump this way, a sudden feeling of living in
historic times. A nervousness that will last until we see the legendary
British band play next March at the Latin American stadium, in front of
a crowd that will try to recover its lost years.

Jagger is much more than the living legend of rock and roll presented by
the media. This beanpole, all mouth, all energy, all life, embodies a
time that they snatched from us, an existence that we could have had and
that they took from us.

It seems a shame to me that the political analysts don't realize it: the
future Cuba could start with the Rolling Stones in Havana.

Source: Cuba and Mick Jagger's Kiss | Yoani Sanchez -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/cuba-and-mick-jaggers-kis_b_8246666.html