Santiago,
Cuba, January 18, 2006
Long Live
Los Van Van!
By
Local Correspondent for SalsaPower in Santiago de Cuba
Translated to English by Jacira Castro
There
were more than one hundred thousand people chapeando
during an open-air festival held in the Plaza de la Revolución
Antonio Maceo in Santiago de Cuba. You could feel the overflowing energy
and spirit of the crowd. It was a tribute to our apostle, the master
writer and poet, José Martí.
Los
Van Van opened the show at 9 p.m. with the song Chapeando,
and three and a half hours later, at 12:30 a.m., you could still hear
the music playing three kilometers away in the Ferreiro Park!
After Los Van Van finished playing the first song,
the concert was interrupted briefly by the local governmental authorities
who proceeded to give Juan Formell, Director of Los
Van Van, the keys to the city!
That afternoon,
my collegue, Nadav Levanoni, Local Correspondent for
SalsaPower in Israel, called me at home to let me know
that he had returned from Baracoa in order to enjoy the Los
Van Van concert that evening.
Earlier
in the morning, in our Technical Services Department at the offices
of UNEAC in Santiago, there was a lot of hubbub getting all the necessary
elements together to assure the lighting system for the evening's concert.
And that
evening, at the exact moment the concert began, the Holguín-Santiago
baseball series was beginning in the adjacent Guillermón Moncada
stadium. Both plazas are only about 100 meters apart from each other,
and a sea of people filed by: young, middle-aged, elderly, small children.
All the hard work of the governmental and cultural authorities in Santiago
de Cuba were rewarded with a hugely successful pair of events!
A few days
earlier, on Monday, January 16th in Havana, there was a meeting held
in the Hurón de Azul room at the headquarters of UNEAC. Present
were the composer Rodulfo Vaillant, the producer, Joaquín
Betancourt and the director of the musical group Cosa
Latina, the Englishman, Keith Johnson. They
were discussing projects whose aim is to protect the Cuban musical patrimony.
It is symbolic that the Los Van Van concert ended with
the song Agua and the chorus by Rodulfo Vaillant,
from the well-known song, Se muere de sed la tía.
At
the Ferreiro Park, when at half past midnight you can feel the thump-thump
of Los Van Van, and there is a sea of people drowning
in a dancing frenzy, I happened to notice the sculptor, Alberto
Lescay, walking the streets of Santiago de Cuba near his monumental
work of art, the figure of Antonio Maceo on horseback,
underneath whose watchful eye our city is dancing tonight.
The concert
was truly extraordinary. Never, since the plaza had been built in 1991,
had so many people come together spontaneously. Something very interesting
happened: I would go up to small groups of people, generally families
or friends and all throughout the plaza during the concert, I would
ask them, "What Van Van song is this? What are
they playing?" And nobody ever seemed to know the name of the song!
They just danced, overflowing with happiness and enjoying the pure rhythm
of the music, without caring about the name, the words, or even if they
were singing in tune! It was a descarga of more than three
and a half hours without a break, and Formell up on
the state the entire time.
They played
Bipo, Candela, Pica Pica, and for three and
a half hours, without a break, the Orquesta Los Van Van
proved, before more than one hundred thousand people, that they are
still on the top of the Hit Parade in the hearts of the Cuban people,
especially those in Santiago.
This page
was last updated on
22-Jan-2006
