IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 147

principals of the Raíces Habaneras
project (a group under whose name those
Sunday rumberos performed) who made
sure the project made sense. I also met
Gene Golden there, as well as dancer
Pupy Insua, José “El Chino” Real, and
Román Díaz. One time there, I was
surprised to hear the voice of a very
young Pedro Martínez (unless, in
contrast, that voice made him seem even
younger than he was, sometime before
he was discovered to the great
percussionist he is). The size of the
audience could vary from Sunday to
Sunday, but not the veneration with
which the music was received; despite
its origin and profane nature, it was also
the core of a sort of religion. “On
Sundays this is our church,” expresses
Oquendo at some moment in the film. I
was not the most devoted of their
followers, but neither was I the least
enthusiastic of them. I went to the
Esquina Habanera a bunch of times, but
despite this they don’t seem like too
many. La Esquina Habanera was a
nocturnal version of the year-long
rumbas that took place in Central Park,
although the barriers between the
drummers and their audience were much
more marked, in part because exile is a
compact model of one’s original society,
and all its different levels come closer
together, in part, due to the nature of
these spaces. Both the Central Park
rumba and La Esquina Habanera, in its
time, have occupied a cultural and social
space equidistant from the intimate and
domestic rumba found in tenement
yards, and spectacular and touristy films
and ethnography. This is where the
documentary makes it a point to reveals
the very first encounter of the Cuban and
African abakuas, as if to add magic to an
already magical circle. The Central Park
rumba and La Esquina Habanera helped

create a more accessible, space; in its
own way it created a space more
respectful of the rumba’s essence. This
issue of its essence can be a fearful
thought, if it is adopted too seriously.
Fortunately, the rumba’s seriousness is
childlike: no matter how intense, its funloving and naïve nature will save it from
any fanaticism.
7. I have quoted this text from Nobel
winner Derek Walcott elsewhere:
In serious cities, in grey, militant winter
with its short afternoons, the days seem
to pass by in buttoned overcoats, every
building appears as a barracks with
lights on in its windows, and when snow
comes, one has the illusion of living in a
Russian novel, in the nineteenth century,
because of the literature of winter. So
visitors to the Caribbean must feel they
are inhabiting a succession of postcards.
Both climates are shaped by what we
have read of them. For tourists, the
sunshine cannot be serious. . . . Sadly, to
sell itself, the Caribbean encourages the
delights of mindlessness, of brilliant
vacuity, as a place to flee not only winter
but that seriousness that comes only out
of culture with four seasons.” To see the
images of these musicians protected in
the white winter coat while they unload
their instruments from a car’s trunk,
under intense snowfall, as if they were
going to a religious feast, like knights
preparing for a crusade, forces us to
consider the tragic, tropical tropic
alluded to by the music and dance. At
the very least, we must accept the
superficial joy of the drum, when
wrought from the “natural” environment
of postcards, and their inability to do
anything other than to fulfill their
mission of existing, which is much more
serious than it might seem.
8. “ clave blen” begins and ends with
two concerts: one in Central Park, in

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