On Meeting Carlos Varela, #PoetOfHavana

Artist and songwriter Carlos Varela, whose music is known around the world, is a man admired by prolific artists such as Benicio Del Toro and Jackson Browne, to name a few.
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If the decades-old U.S. embargo against Cuba has achieved anything for those of us stateside, in regard to the arts in Cuba, it's this: most of us in the United States know nothing to very little about what's happening there. As the son and grandson of Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants/emigrants, this hits an especial nerve, as is the case with the artist and songwriter Carlos Varela, whose music is known around the world--a man admired by prolific artists such as Benicio Del Toro and Jackson Browne, to name a few.

Varela got his start in the Nueva Trova movement of the 1980s, in the midst of Cuba's isolation from the Unite States, the Reagan era. The protégé of Silvio Rodríguez, he has recorded eight albums and has toured the world. His songs have been used in movie soundtracks and he's most famously known for his biting use of double-entendre and loaded metaphors that criticize Cuban politics. As you might've imagined, some of his songs have been banned in his home country, despite his feverish followings.

Linda Nieves-Powell, the Puerto Rican writer and producer, invited me to a preview screening of a documentary about Varela, The Poet of Havana, last week at HBO Theater in Manhattan. Other colleagues in attendance to celebrate his life and music--and to discuss contemporary Latino arts and culture--were Cuban scholar Odette Casamayor, poet Caridad "La Bruja"de la Luz, George "Urban Jíbaro" Torres of Sofrito for Your Soul, entrepreneur and artist Rebecca Gitana, writer J.F. Seary, comedian Rob Torres, in addition to Center for Puerto Rican Studies journalist Samy Nemir Olivares.

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Varela was there as well and played a song at the end of the program, a nostalgic ode to his native city that left me feeling haunted. First as an ex-musician-turned writer (with virtually no previous knowledge of such a tremendous artist and his work), but also as a member of the Cuban diaspora who was raised with a more Puerto Rican-focused awareness, the result of estrangement from a politically-conservative Cuban family in South Florida.

How had I just learned about him? Perhaps it's because I work with the creative writing community, a passion that consumes. As Director of the Bronx Writers Center, my attention is community focused, that is, when I'm not working on my own material (which is always). I even connect with writers from around the world, even from Cuba, through Festival de la Palabra, an international literary gathering in San Juan and New York, as has been the case with Norge Espinosa Mendoza, Anna Lidia Vega Serova and Pedro Manuel Reinoso. So the mystery looms...

HBO Latino will be airing the documentary, The Poet of Havana, on October 23rd, and I urge you to watch it and discover Carlos Varela's monumental talent for yourself. Created by the filmmaker Ron Chapman, it promises to break Varela into a new era of stateside awareness, shattering the prohibitive omissions of a decades-old embargo; something that has brought suffering to the Cuban people and has created a cultural vacuum in the United States, rendering nearly invisible the work and life of a man who is adored by fans around the world, as well as by legendary artists.

It is doubtless that others will materialize out of the disintegrating void...

*The Poet of Havana airs on HBO Latino on Friday, October 23rd, at 8pm EST.

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