How Cuban Music Made Me a Better Historian

“If you want to learn anything about the history of this country, you have to start listening to Carlos Varela.” This advice, offered by a colleague who was helping me make my way through a Cuban film archive a decade ago, proved remarkably true. I arrived in Havana in 2004 to research child migration conflicts. But what I also gained was an appreciation for music as a form of social history. Cuba’s Carlos Varela, about whom I’ve just helped to edit a new anthology, has become not only a much-loved musician but also my favourite Cuban historian. He’s a testament to one of the many truths sung by Bruce Springsteen: “We learned more from a three minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.”

Good musicians can be great historians because they take us places that only the poets can go. Varela’s music charts the emotional landscape of city of Havana, as well as the dreams and disillusionments of his generation: those who inherited but did not build the Cuban Revolution of 1959. He performed one of his signatures, “The Sons of William Tell,” for the first time in 1989 in the venerable Chaplin theatre in Havana. It instantly became a generational anthem, because it imagines how William Tell’s son grew tired of being target practice for his dad. For decades, Cuban audiences have sung along to the chorus – “William Tell, your son grew up, he wants to shoot the arrow himself” – leaving no doubt that this is a piercing commentary on the arrangement of Cuban political power. His decision to record a live version of the song underlines its importance as what one Cuban journalist termed “our hymn of independence.” On the recording, the sound of a huge theatre singing along builds to a roar when the son tells William Tell “it was now his turn to place the apple on his own head.”

Varela sings about the stuff of newspapers and textbooks: immigration conflicts, the US blockade, Cuban state censorship, post-Soviet world politics. But he does so with the musicianship of a virtuoso (alternately rock, folk and jazz) and the imagery of a poet. Unlike Varela’s Cuban fans, I don’t hear the traumas and dreams of my youth narrated in his music. Rather, I have found evocative and instructive examples of epic poetry. The 1961 child migration scheme Operation Peter Pan – the topic I initially came to Cuba to research ten years ago – forms the backdrop for one epic, “Jalisco Park.” Images of empty playgrounds, flying airplanes, and absent friends tell the story of Cuba caught in the Cold War in the 1960s...