Back in May, I visited Cuba for the first time for the debut of Santiago’s MANANA festival. I knew that the country had a rich musical history that stretched back over centuries, and witnessed the island’s wholehearted embrace of contemporary music and technology firsthand, despite the fact that consistent internet access is still new to most Cubans. Still, given this enormous musical heritage, there was something that surprised me about the music scene in Cuba: there wasn’t a single record store in sight.
Sure, I knew of Seriosha’s Record Shop in Havana, where Gilles Peterson publicly went digging in 2010. I also heard that Cuba had a tentpole state-run label called Egrem, and that most of the vinyl left around were old, beat-up presses of their recordings. Santiago, the internet told me, was something of a vinyl ghost town—despite the fact that it is the country’s second largest city. I learned from people I met in the city that this was mainly because there were so few working record players currently left anywhere, and that the cost of their repair, or that of a new purchase, far surpasses the economic capabilities of most Cubans. My AirBnb host, for example, explained that most locals who want to want to hear music either still listen to CDs, or buy USB paquetes filled with new tunes.
Videos by VICE
Still, I refused to believe that I would return from my trip to Cuba without a disc-shaped memento of all the amazing new sounds I was taking in there. This was, after all, a musical hotbed filled with classic imported cars and charming old buildings—surely they’d have a few forgotten crates of records somewhere.
We Asked Some Cubans How They Think Their Lives Will Change If the American Embargo Ends
A couple days before the festival began, I started asking around. “Discos?” “Vinilos?” “Tienda de música?” I squawked to locals in my horrid, broken Spanish. My inquiries proved unfruitful for days, until I ran into a couple of local rumba musicians—Bargaro and Yessel—chatting over beers at a local music hall during a May Day celebration.
Via my Spanish-speaking travel companion, Brian, I was overjoyed to learn that not only did the guys know where to find records, but they’d personally take us to buy some. The one catch was that we had to join them on a little adventure to a local Santeria ceremony somewhere in a state-run housing facility. After I told them I was a journalist back in the states, they also requested we take photos of the gathering. I thought maybe they wanted more publicity for their religion, but soon realized that like many Cubans, they just wanted to impart some of their culture to curious visitors like myself.
I gazed inward. Would I travel with two strangers into a Cuban public housing complex to witness a religious ritual I knew very little about, just for some inevitably scratched up wax? I thought of what my mother might say, then accepted. Brian valiantly offered to join.
Two days later, we met up with Bargaro and Yessel at the tree-lined Plaza de Cespedes in the city center. They were waiting for us with a small bag of records—perhaps a show of good faith before the impending journey. We hailed a couple of motorcycle-taxis, and en route to en route to Yessel’s home, made a stop at a market filled with chickens, roosters, and mysterious herbal remedies to take photos. Beyond the rooftops of the city, we caught a glimpse of the mountainous backdrop where Castro’s troops shacked up during the Cuban revolution many decades ago.
Located in one of Santiago’s historic artist neighborhoods—per my hosts, a hotbed of rumba drummers and salsa dancers—there wasn’t much to Yessel’s state-owned home, where he said he’d been living for only a month. It was a single-occupant house with a metal roof and one small bathroom. Inside, there was a bed, an electric water heater, a couple of chairs, and an old stereo. The walls were lined with pretty religious ornaments and wedding photos of him and his wife, who I learned was working abroad as a nurse in Venezuela. After welcoming us inside, he left the room, and returned with a large satchel of records he said were owned by a local woman in his neighborhood. As I sifted through dusty salsa and son albums from Cuba’s state-run Egrem label and its now defunct sub-imprint Areito, a few cockroaches jumped from their sleeves. After gaining my composure, I talked to Yessel and Bargaro about Cuban life, and why it seemed so hard to find records in the city.
Yessel.
Bargaro and Yessel learned their craft while growing up in Santiago, where the three main rumba styles—Guaguanco, Columbia, and Yambu—were born. Like many of the Cuban musicians I met in Santiago, the pair made their living working state-approved occupations—in their case, giving drum lessons at a local Caribbean music hall on weekends—and giving rumba and salsa lessons to travelers on the side. On occasion, they’d also help broker record sales between foreigners and locals who owned them—not an uncommon side hustle in Santiago, they said, and one that might be partially responsible for the relative scarcity of vinyl records on the island.
Wi-Fi Cards, DIY Parties, and Food Rations: I Went to Cuba’s First Major Electronic Music Festival
“Locals know to grab the albums to try and sell them,” Bargaro said. “Some older people used to own record players and play the albums for us as kids, but [the record players] are long gone now—most [people] threw them out or they simply broke. It’s hard to buy them today; no one can afford them.” He further explained how other some locals he knew had sold their records to the local library, which refurbished them and eventually also sold them off to travelers.
Yessel (left), Brian (center), Bargaro (right).
“Records really are in danger of extinction here,” Yessel added. “We have no way to get new ones and tourists keep coming and buying them. It’s hard not to sell them—it’s a good way to make money here if you can.”
After our chat, I bought 40 records for one peso each, feeling undoubtedly a bit dodgy for directly contributing to the extinction Yessel had described. But when Bargaro left to pay the woman who owned them, and told me she had literally jumped with joy when he handed her the cash (for reference, the average monthly salary in Cuba is 20 pesos) I felt a bit more at peace.
After Yessel’s house, we hailed a few more motorcycles. Between drags on a filterless cigarette, Bargaro muttered the address of our next location into my driver’s ear, who quickly peeled off in the direction of the Santeria gathering, leaving me hanging on for dear life to the metal bars on the seat.
Eventually, we came to a stop at what looked like a never-ending sea of large concrete cubes. As we entered the housing complex—a sprawling series of units simply numbered 1-9, their light-colored walls etched with the occasional political message—the guys led us to a market shack to pick up a couple of cold beers. Here, they explained to me that some of the newer sections of the complex were being built by Venezuela’s government, a longtime economic and political ally of Cuba. Kids played soccer atop patches of grass, dirt, and concrete, while some old men relaxed in the shade.
We walked into one of the unmarked buildings, went up four flights of stairs, and entered a small one-room apartment, where we were greeted by a multitude of people, many of them friends of Yessel and Bargaro, as well as a male priest. An older, silver-haired woman—the clear matriarch of the house—welcomed Brian and me with a kiss. Everyone had gathered here for a ceremony known as “Cajon de Muertos,” a traditional Santeria practice centered before the worship around an igbodu (altar), a shrine decorated with blue, white, and red drapes.
The casually dressed male Santero, or priest, led the service while participants took turns kneeling at the altar. Once it was my turn, I was instructed by the priest to rub some coconut water on my forehead (which is known as a blessing of the head), and then rang a small bell before placing a few pesos in a basket as donation for the next ceremony. In front of me was a giant frosted cake, a few unopened bottles of rum, and some cookies—all offerings to a deity whose name I never caught. One twenty-something woman present was dressed head to toe in white and when I asked others what was going on with her they explained she was partaking in a ritual referred to as Asiento, or ascending the throne. From what I understood from the locals presents, it was essentially an adult baptism.
Throughout the ceremony, three drummers in ceremonial garb banged furiously on conga drums while a younger man cheerfully chanted call-and-response songs in the Yoruba language’s offset of Lucumi, a form of Haitian dialect. Some people took videos on their smartphones of the dancing while cold beers circulated as the entire room grooved, jumped, clapped, and joked for hours on end. From afar, the proceedings could be mistaken for an afternoon cookout.
The festivities only paused once, when someone randomly found a SIM card—relative gold in Cuba due to the scarcity of mobile data—on the ground, causing the entire room to momentarily pause their celebration. After that, a dinner of pork, rice, vegetables, and some cold noodles laced with pork and a white sauce was served. Bargaro and Yessell introduced us around to many of their friends—also rumba musicians. Even as two American strangers, we felt totally welcomed.
The sun began to set, and Brian and I decided it was time to start the journey home. We said our goodbyes to Bargaro and Yessel, who we would see perform two days later at the first day of MANANA, and hailed separate motor-taxis to travel back to our AirBnb.
While cruising on the back of a rickety bike—with my satchel of dusty old records crammed into my backpack—I reflected on the experiences of the last 12 hours. Any vinyl buyer will tell you that the format is consistently exhausting—whether putting a dent in your paycheck or breaking your back shlepping a full bag of records everywhere—and trekking around a steaming Cuban city to buy records was certainly no exception. But, as any seasoned digger also will also attest, the beauty of collecting vinyl is in the chase, and the stories and personalities you encounter along the way. During a recent DJ gig back in Brooklyn, when I finally cued up one of the Cuban grabs—a funky salsa album by Los Van Van—to a swaying room, someone came up to me and asked, “Where’d you get this one man?” I couldn’t help but chuckle.
Special thanks to Brian Merlano for his translations.
David Garber is on Twitter
