“Chan Chan” is a bit of a circular love song. Not quite a ballad, instead occupying a liminal musical movement—though it does move. The song opens with a throaty guitar—a cuatro—and right away the singers circle: they go from the town of Alto Cedro to Marcané, arrive at Cueto and go on to Mayarí and then they are in the loop, circling, swaying, swinging back Alto Cedro, bringing the listener with them to Mayarí again.
Buena Vista Social Club should not be here. But they are. The collaboration which launched them nearly did not happen and the group (despite the success of their eponymous album they are hardly a band as we would conceive) was a get-together of sorts. Buena Vista Social Club is a relic, not just in their sound (which is actually what made them so huge), but each band member is as well. After the Cuban Revolution ended in 1959, Fidel Castro promptly had Cuba’s music venues and clubs closed. The men had each had their Hey Day in the fifties. They are relics.
The clubs weren’t the only thing in decline and retreating into history as Communism was ushered into Cuba. According to Kathleen Lopez, author of Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History, “[a]fter the Communist revolution, many middle-class Chinese Cubans fled the country, along with other Cubans. Some moved to Cuban-American enclaves in Bergen County [New Jersey], where they still live. But in Cuba, there are so few Chinese-Cubans many refer to “a Chinatown without Chinese.”[1] It was the shared plight of the musicians who comprise Buena Vista Social Club.
There is irony in the fate of post-revolution life. The island-nation’s Chinese aided in the support of the revolution, and the suddenly-hushed sounds of the island’s musical culture was carried across the Caribbean, informing not just the myriad regional musics, but global as well—yet both were disappearing. Still, there is “Chan Chan,” and the interpolation that draws on “the feeling of stepping into a world on the verge of disappearance,” of bringing back some of its whispered historicism is a mystic gesture of sonic archeology.[2]
“Chan Chan” is circular…it ends right where it starts, that throaty cuatro and the wandering from Alto Cedro to Mayarí. In Tagalog mythology, by the way, Mayarí is “the goddess of Combat, War, Revolution, Hunt, Weaponry, Beauty, Strength, Moon and Night.”[3] Whether moon or revolution, history follows and it brings us back to face it…to hear its whispers on us today.
[1] https://news.rutgers.edu/feature/chinese-cuban-population-dwindles-traditions-die/20131020#.Xdq5IJNKiu4
You did an awesome job breaking down the song and explaining the political history behind Cuba and its music. I learned new word “cuatro” and felt the circular motion of the song you were explaining. Disappearing histories has been a common theme of our class and reminds me of “Venus in Three Acts.”