A Requiem for Cuba
X Alfonso’s new album AIRE reprises anthems of hope and Habana blues.
X Alfonso’s new album AIRE, released today, ends with his song “Interrogante” (“Question Mark”), a rock-rap ballad that questions complicity in a society “that blinds us more and more,” that he first recorded in 2006. Earlier this month, Alfonso released the new version of that cri du coeur together with a video loop of a sad clown, his face lined and naked save for a red ball nose and falling tears. Alfonso’s voice rides a crescendo of emotion over a pared down arrangement of piano and strings.
“I made this one with the tone of a requiem,” he told me during a video call last week. “For me, it is now without a question mark. This has to come to an end. I think it’s time.”
Like other tracks on the album, which are covers of anthems by emblematic Cuban songwriters of the last six decades, the song’s message is universal, but unmistakably refers to Cuba. The songs on AIRE “create an emotional dialogue between times, styles and visions of the country.” Alfonso explains that the album title stands for Acordes inolvidables y romances de Esperanza (Unforgettable chords and romances of hope.)
Alfonso’s intention is that the record will inspire not only nostalgia among Cubans of different ages but contemplation; that the songs will make people pause, take a breath from the speed of the feed and listen to the “deep lyrics that shake you out of the everyday.
“We need to breathe these songs again in order to understand the why of things today,” he says, adding that recording them was also a way for him to “trace my own story.”
Una vez yo soñé que podíamos volar sobre los muros
Los muros que no dejan ver ese sueño que yo tengo de otro amanecer
Once I dreamed we could fly over the walls
The walls that block the view of that dream I have of another dawn
“Interrogante,” X Alfonso
Alfonso’s parents are the founders of the fusion group Síntesis, formed in the early 1970s. X and his sister Eme Alfonso recorded the 2022 Latin-Grammy winning album Ancestros Sinfónico with a current configuration of the band. X (spelled Equis on his birth certificate) came of age with Havana’s hip-hop scene, but had grown up with jazz and afro-Cuban music, and also listening to songs by the authors of the sixties folk nueva canción.
He was also influenced by a next generation of singer-songwriters, notably Carlos Varela, whose realist lyrics tell stories of contemporary Cuba.
“Carlos was at my house all the time from when I was seven or eight years old,” says Alfonso, who is now 53. “ He would debut all of his songs there, he played together with my Dad, he ate at our house. He lived close by. I played guitar a lot with Carlos, and I played his songs.”
Varela joined Alfonso for the version of his song “Como los Peces” (“Like Fish”) included on AIRE.
“Como los Peces” is an anthem for me,” Alfonso comments. “It’s a song that touches every generation, everyone in Cuba. It’s a very intense song [which references the Miguel Matamoros’ classic “Lagrimas negras” while comparing repressed peoples’ unexpressive eyes and silence to that of fish.]
“Today we are still like fish,” he adds. “Because if we open our mouths we get arrested.
“I played it very simply here, putting all of the emphasis on the words and the melody. With bass and percussion, very typically Cuban. And singing in the traditional trova style. I was playing with the kind of choruses you hear in the great historic boleros of Cuban music.”
Y los padres ya no quieren hablar de la situación
sobreviven prisioneros y acostumbran a callar
como los peces
And parents don’t want to talk about the situation anymore;
they survive as prisoners and get used to keeping quiet,
like fish
“Como los Peces”
In the 1990s, a bluesy rock movement in Havana formed against the backdrop of the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the scarcities in Cuba that launched the rafters’ crisis.
Subsequently, says Alfonso, “in five years more than a thousand rock bands disappeared in Cuba. Hardcore bands, alternative, there were even country bands. By necessity, those bands ceased to exist. People left, other groups came apart, others just couldn’t keep going. We used to get together and hang out, we played at festivals. Then you started to hear, ‘no, that singer left, that arranger for that band is gone – and that whole scene was lost.”
Descemer Bueno and Kelvis Ochoa were among the young artists who wrote songs with Alfonso for the soundtrack to the 2004 film Habana Blues, about a rock band whose members struggle with capitalist realities when representatives of the global music industry start to arrive in Cuba. Characters in the movie debate about selling out, and must decide whether or not to leave Cuba for the sake of their careers.
“It’s a story I lived myself,” Alfonso says. The songs “Habana Blues” and the moving “Arenas de Soledad” from the soundtrack are included on AIRE. “I wanted them to have the same cadence, calm, with the same message.”
Alfonso ventures that the album will bring together Cubans now living around the world.
“I haven’t given it to many people to listen to yet, but the ones who have heard it have called me overcome with nostalgia,” he says. “I have audio messages with people sobbing and talking to me about so many things that happened. Music can take you to places that you didn’t even remember. It can bring back pain that you never even knew that you felt.”
During our interview, Alfonso was sitting on a terrace of the house where he and his family are currently residing in a town near Porto, Portugal. They left Havana last June, for an unspecified stay abroad.
“Everything became very complicated,” he says. “I didn’t have a way to get my daughter to school since there is no gas. I couldn’t get anything done. Not even this record that I was trying to make. I could have ridden my daughter on a bike, but no.
“I went through all of this already years ago,” he says with a soft laugh. “I’m not going to do it again. We were waiting to see what happened. But things got worse and worse and worse [in Havana.] So now we’re here.” (Alfonso has two older children who live in Europe.)
AIRE opens with “Sueño con serpientes” (“I Dream With Snakes”) a classic by Silvio Rodríguez that evokes the whack-a-mole quality of life.
“I had already done two versions of this track before, because it’s a song that is so current, it doesn’t lose its message,” Alfonso says. “Silvio wrote this song 60 or 50 years ago. But it’s the same today. Every day you are struggling with something, you leap over obstacles, intellectual, personal, political. It’s the same bureaucracy, the same issues with visas that prevent you from traveling, with immigration, everything.It’s a song that touches on what we are living through in these times.
“In my personal life, in my country, it’s constantly the story of “Sueño con serpientes,” he adds. “It’s the story of solving a big problem and another one pops right up.
“There used to always be a minimum of hope that things would get better,” he says, turning the conversation to current events in Cuba. “Very slow, but it was there. There’s been a regression. The people want to progress and develop themselves, and the government is always stopping it. Before it was that tomorrow we are going to be able to do this or that. Now they are constantly blocking and blocking everything. It’s gone backward, a regression in every way, on the part of the United States and on the part of Cuba, especially after the three years of glory we had with the opening under Obama.”
For Alfonso, the reversal of what was celebrated as a historic détente between the two countries in 2014, has been measured by the decline in activity at the Fábrica de Arte Cubano, (the Cuban Art Factory), a cultural center in an old factory whose creation he spearheaded, and which quickly became a must-stop for the American musicians and celebrities who flooded Havana in the aftermath of what was then deemed a thaw between the two countries.
“A lot of people had gone back to Cuba then, a lot of artists had come back and started playing music,” says Alfonso. “They wanted to come back to their country, start again. So that regression was very hard.”
Today, the Fábrica is still open, but, due to fuel shortages, only two days a week. And most of the public attending the concerts, exhibitons and workshops there are locals.
“Now the quality of the program is the same, but we’re an island inside of an island,” says Alfonso, who still participates in the programming of the venue remotely.
“If it’s socialism, capitalism, communism, whatever, if people can plan their lives, if there is a way that the city can progress and improve, that there will be jobs, medicine. If things are going to get better, what do you care who is up there at the top?” asks Alfonso. “Now what the people want is to live. To work and have enough money to do things that they want to do, take a vacation in another country, whatever.”
Another artist who figures prominently in the making of AIRE is the folk rocker Santiago Feliu, who died in 2014.
“I was with him a lot, we were working together, making videos and suddenly he was gone,” Alfonso says. “Santi was a little disorganized, he was a hippie. I wanted to organize his songs and introduce them to people who didn’t know them, or so that people could hear them again.
“Then I realized that I wanted to make a record with other people who have been significant for me.”
There are two tracks by and with Feliu’s recorded voice are included on the album, “Buscáme (Sobrevolando sobre un sueño)” and “Para Tí.”
“Para tí” is a song that is so beautiful,” Alfonso says. “Again it’s about that human touch. Let’s see if it can inspire young people to look into each other’s eyes.
For me the idea of this record was very clear – that it hasn’t only been me, that there were various generations sending these messages, this way of thinking. AIRE is a record that touches on almost every point of life. It’s a record for falling in love again, feeling again. It’s a very human message, (a call to) look for what we’ve lost.
“I rely on several generations to deliver this message again,” he concludes. “My own songs and the songs of those generations of musicians talk about the same thing. Hope. Life. Living. There is always hope.”
"There is always hope.”