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Cuba's "World-Class" Music Education?
The New York Times has a goo-goo
story up about how Carlos Varela, "Cuba's Bob Dylan" (quick
question: what does the world wrongly think it has more of,
"fill-in-the-blank-country's Bob Dylan," or "the Silicon Valley of
fill-in-the-blank country"?), who is currently in the U.S. trying,
as the headline says, "to sway America's Cuba policy with song."
Here is your requisite NYT-Cuba WTF paragraph:
His life has been marked by the highs and lows of the Cuban revolution. The government gave him a world-class education in music and theater, but refuses to broadcast many of his songs, which have veiled critiques of the Communist leadership.
This "world-class education" stuff I'll never
understand. When you're talking particularly (though not only)
about the humanities, whether music or literature or architecture,
how can any education be "world class" if it is utterly and
intentionally choked off from a thick chunk of the outside world?
Is it technically possible to provide a world-class education in
music while, for instance,
banning the Beatles?
You used to see the same kind
of credulous nonesense written about the former East Bloc. What
literate, well-educated, artsy people! (Never mind that many were
pretty well educated, often better educated, before the
Red Army began policing the borders.) But the joyless, restrictive
dead-endism of communist thinking poisoned the humanities there as
much as anything else. One of the first things that
Czechoslovakia's post-commie
Fine Arts Academy rector did was fire each and every one of the
professors. A Czech classical music student I knew flunked out of
one key oral exam by failing to properly answer the question: "What
is music?" (The correct answer: Music is art that is experienced by
the ears.) With whole swaths of music and literature banned, and
expression/exchange frowned upon and criminalized, many artists
and/or free-thinkers would aim to receive as technical an education
as possible (for instance, in engineering, or the restoration of
old buildings). In Cuba, I befriended an architect and former
revolutionary who finally turned his back on Castro after the
regime suddenly announced post-1989 that it could no longer afford
to import Central European newspapers and journals. A revolutionary
architecture that willfully cut itself off from the global
conversation, he decided, was an architecture without
foundation.
It should be intuitive that closed systems generally produce bad learning, with only occasional exceptions of results produced by grotesque over-emphasis (for instance, medicine in Cuba, and swimming in East Germany). But apparently it's not.
Varela's offical website here. I wrote about the island's crappy culture of information back in 2002. Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin wrote about "Castro's favorite propagandist" in 2007. And Michael Moynihan caught up recently with Cuban punk rocker Gorki Aguila for ReasonTV:
Finally, for connoiseurs of terrible music, here is Varela's pal Jackson Browne singing "Going down to Cuba," a song whose righteous lyrics about Americans' freedom of travel cannot begin to make up for the line "They make such continuous use of the verb to resolve."
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Fist of Etiquette|12.30.09 @ 7:01AM|#
Say what you will about Castro, at least when he never posted a 3MB jpg on the internet.
Suki|12.30.09 @ 7:03AM|#
Only because the Imperialist Capitalists refused to share their bandwidth.
Fist of Etiquette|12.30.09 @ 7:04AM|#
Ugh. Early morning commenting. Ignore that extra "when" in there. In fact, ignore the whole comment.
Suki|12.30.09 @ 7:12AM|#
Too late, hehehehe. Make your time!
Fist of Etiquette|12.30.09 @ 7:40AM|#
Well, he changed the picture and made me look like a dick. You win this round, Welch.
Matt Welch|12.30.09 @ 8:15AM|#
Not at all! My mistake, etc.
Fist of Etiquette|12.30.09 @ 11:48AM|#
Well then, I look like a dick for a different reason altogether.
The Art-P.O.G.|12.30.09 @ 8:13AM|#
What you say?
The Art-P.O.G.|12.30.09 @ 8:16AM|#
Move 'Zig'.
|12.30.09 @ 9:53AM|#
For great justice.
Fist of Etiquette|12.30.09 @ 1:02PM|#
Hey, where'd all my base go?
Matt Welch|12.30.09 @ 7:38AM|#
I have scrubbed the image from our memory. Thanks, comrade.
BakedPenguin|12.30.09 @ 7:57AM|#
You know Matt, you could have reset the resolution so it wouldn't be so large.
Just sayin'
Matt Welch|12.30.09 @ 8:16AM|#
You might be shocked by how stupid I am about technology.
ed|12.30.09 @ 8:22AM|#
Not at all.
Fluffy|12.30.09 @ 8:27AM|#
Not at all.
Ted|12.30.09 @ 8:29AM|#
Not at all.
Xeones|12.30.09 @ 9:00AM|#
Not at all.
Fluffy|12.30.09 @ 7:02AM|#
The content doesn't matter to the Times. All that matters is that it was "free".
healthscarequotes|12.30.09 @ 7:27AM|#
we should be thankful for their closed system because otherwise, with their 175% literacy rate, those cubans would start to realize how great they have it.
¢|12.30.09 @ 7:38AM|#
Communist supertroubadours will subtly critique us all!
Fluffy|12.30.09 @ 8:28AM|#
I am drawing dirty looks based on how hard this made me laugh.
Tim Cavanaugh|12.30.09 @ 7:55AM|#
The correct answer: Music is art that is experienced by the ears
Is that true for dance music? You can't feel a beat through your ears.
Communist Music Professor|12.30.09 @ 8:00AM|#
You fail, too! Get job at tractor factory!
|12.30.09 @ 9:53AM|#
Dance music isn't art, silly.
SIV|12.30.09 @ 8:16AM|#
Jim Crow Mississippi produced a lot "more than it's fair share" of true world class musicians without much of that world class education stuff.
ed|12.30.09 @ 8:27AM|#
The definition of "world class" must be the inability of the critic to understand Spanish and keep up with those pesky yet exotic salsa beats.
|12.30.09 @ 8:39AM|#
Cat, specification: Get a cat.
|12.30.09 @ 11:12AM|#
I'm planning on getting a cat this summer. Should I sell tickets?
Marc|12.30.09 @ 2:19PM|#
Was he in the same band as Vaclav Havel?
Billy!|12.30.09 @ 9:00AM|#
I think you can have a perfectly fine music education without hearing the Beatles.
|12.30.09 @ 9:24AM|#
Who gives a shit about Cuba?
Open up trade to Cuba and they'll become ugly Americans just like us.
ed|12.30.09 @ 10:30AM|#
Complete with fat asses.
The Art-P.O.G.|12.30.09 @ 9:43AM|#
I wonder if Varela is from Cuba's Minnesota?
Sean Healy|12.30.09 @ 9:54AM|#
No, you're getting it all wrong. Cuba's splendid isolation from the crassness of consumerism actually forms the basis for its superior cultural education. Duh. I can't believe you missed this. Of course, when the people of Gaza are 'blockaded' it's basically Auschwitz II. Correction: it's worse than Auschwitz, which had an orchestra. If only the Cubans lived in Gaza instead of the hopeless Palestinians - then it would be a paradise!
cubano|12.30.09 @ 6:24PM|#
lol, you are sooooo wrong, you obviously don't kbow my people
|12.30.09 @ 11:48AM|#
It took me almost a decade to unlearn the "superior education" I got in music school.
|12.30.09 @ 2:46PM|#
like my standard reply to the Cuba 100% literacy boast....What good is 100% literacy when the government controls what you can read?
|12.30.09 @ 4:23PM|#
Matt should visit Cuba, or read some contemporary Cuban authors [Leonard Padura, Abel Prieta]. He would discover that books are uncensored, common, and well written. Forbidding the Beatles only made them more popular. It's like any forbidden fruit, all the more tasty. Also, check out the John Lennon statue in Havana. A most remarkable piece of art... Then, remember who in the 'free world' is forbidden to travel to Cuba. After all, we might be corrupted by the All Powerful Commies.
Drew W|12.30.09 @ 4:34PM|#
That Jackson Browne song was the lowest point of his concert last summer in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. It was greeted with much appreciative applause, of course. (I just wanted to hear "Late For The Sky.")
|12.31.09 @ 7:39AM|#
Browne's song is the poorest piece of propaganda I have ever listened too.
|12.31.09 @ 7:40AM|#
Typo; listened to. "too"
Alain Latour|1.1.10 @ 11:31AM|#
When I was doing a BA in German at University of Havana, a professor told the class that it was the West Germans who built the Berlin Wall.
Alain Latour|1.1.10 @ 11:31AM|#
When I was doing a BA in German at University of Havana, a professor told the class that it was the West Germans who built the Berlin Wall.
Trackback| 1.3.10 @ 3:55AM
fix your credit, on fix your credit, links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
دردشة|7.2.11 @ 12:32PM|#
thank u