‘We have managed to make noise in Spain’ with the film about ‘Patria y Vida’
Beatriz Luengo, co-author of the July 11, 2021 protest anthem and wife of Yotuel Romero, talks about the documentary with ’14ymedio’
By Yaiza Santos (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – To finish the documentary Patria y Vida: The Power of Music, its director, Beatriz Luengo (b. Madrid, 1982), says that her parents – she is the daughter of a carpenter and a pharmacy assistant – had to lend her money. This is one of the examples she gives to defend herself from the attacks that usually criticize her and her husband, the Cuban Yotuel Romero, also co-author of the song that became an anthem of freedom, charging that they do all this for money. “There are many things I can do in my country, which I have earned with my 20 years of work effort. The cause of Cuba is not defended based on money,” she said.
Despite the couple’s fame and the repercussion of the song, which won two Latin Grammys, the industry turned its back on this project. Today, nine days after the film’s premiere, having filled 25 theaters throughout Spain, they are extending the run in theaters. The industry overlooked them, but the people did not.
At the end of the interview with 14ymedio, a young man, whom we had not noticed, approaches us. He was a fan of Luengo and knew nothing about the song or the film and promised to go see it this weekend. It is very easy to be infected by the passion that the artist transmits.
So Patria y Vida [Homeland and Life] was born in a kitchen?
Beatriz Luengo: Yotuel always carries a coin from Cuba that is dated 1953 and says ‘patria y libertad‘ (homeland and freedom). It was given to him by his father, who passed away in 2018. We were cooking, he took his wallet out of his pocket and we saw that it was falling apart. As he took the coin out, so as not to lose it, we started looking at it. I know he always carries it, but I had never looked at it before. I see “patria y libertad” and I tell him: oh dear!, Yotuel, do you remember the first time I went to Cuba, that “patria o muerte (homeland or death)” was all over the place and I was so shocked?
You arrive in a country like Cuba -I explain here to people who have no context- and since there are no advertising posters, everything is publicity about the revolution, everything is that “Patria o muerte” (Fatherland or death). What you feel, as you get off at the airport and you see that, is “Be careful, either you are with my way of thinking or you are not going to do well here.” So we started that conversation. The Cuban personality is a great contrast to the “Patria o muerte” slogan, I told him. And also, what a pity, because what a country should advocate is for life, that you have a homeland and have a dignified life.
We also pointed out the difference between the O [or] and the Y [and]. Yotuel says the O is egocentric, either you or me, and that Y is inclusive: you and me, your thought and mine, your sex and mine, your race and mine. Suddenly we said “patria y vida,” we went to the piano we have in the living room and started to create this song. We have always been very concerned, as artists, about adding, the exercise of bringing together, because I believe that the strategy that has worked best for the regime has been to divide and conquer, a very old war strategy.
Inviting Maykel Osorbo, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and El Funky, we also did this exercise, as well as Descemer Bueno and Gente de Zona, who have a very loud voice in the world. Although they are from very different genres, we felt it was important to have a single voice, that of the Cubans. And this was the idea: a united vision of art that broke that dynamic of “divide and conquer”.
A friend who participated in the 11 July 2021 [Island-wide protests] asks me to ask him if they imagined that this song would “pump up the blood in our veins in such a way that we all took to the streets and ate our fear”. Did they ever think this would become an anthem?
We never imagined this would happen, because Yotuel had so many protest songs and nothing happened…. He was always releasing songs for Cuba, along with the songs he was releasing with his team, and his team didn’t even put them on the agenda. But Yotuel said: I’m going to keep making songs for Cuba; the day I don’t make a song for Cuba, I won’t be myself. The documentary tells of this twofold difficulty: the issue of Cuba and what the regime is and the difficulty within the industry. It is very important to know this: you get to a platform and say “I have this song with these artists” and they tell you – Yotuel’s manager says it in the documentary and I was very grateful that he was sincere – well, you are going to make a collaboration with some guys who do not have a profile on Spotify, a song about Cuba, a minor tune, a protest rap song, there is no playlist, no streaming platform is going to support us.
If we had been told that Patria y Vida was going to be a viral phenomenon on TikTok, we would have laughed. When it started to go viral on TikTok, we couldn’t believe it. The same platforms that one day rejected us, began to pay attention to us. People can see how we have also confronted an industry that has stopped looking at this kind of subject matter since the numerical algorithm came into existence. Because in the last century, there was more room for songs with a social topic. Sam Cooke with Martin Luther King, Billy Holliday with Strange Fruit, or Scorpions with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bob Marley, John Lennon…
In the documentary, there is an image that makes people cry. On the day of the release of the song, only the very brave YouTubers wanted to cover the release of the song, and you see the guys connected to a live stream, like any kid anywhere in the world, and suddenly the electricity is cut in the whole island and the internet is cut. On the screen you see the whole of Havana going dark. The people in the cinema at that moment say: “ Holy shit.” It’s something you can’t expect. When the power comes back on, you see Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara in the neighborhood of San Isidro, on a corner with people singing the song loudly.
That image reminds me of Yotuel crying at three in the morning. At that time I was in the last days of my pregnancy, I wake up feeling sick and I find Yotuel crying like a child on the couch, “Look, mami, look!” We were petrified, we didn’t even know what to say. Already on 11 July, I don’t want to tell you, it’s something that still freezes my blood with shock. Imagine how many times I have seen the documentary, because there is not a day that I don’t cry about 11 July, because the whole room cries, because everyone sees the freedom, they feel part of it. That is the magic of the documentary. I didn’t want to tell a point of view. I want people to ride on that emotion. You are not seeing an external feeling and analyzing it from the outside; you are inside, with the Cubans, in the demonstration, you are with that lady in Old Havana who pulls down her mask and says “patria y vida.”
Before 11 July, what was the realization of what that song meant, they saw some power in it, and they immediately started a pathetic war of songs. How did you live those months before 11 July?
Well, the first thing that was very crazy was Díaz-Canel posting “patria y vida.”
They said it was a phrase pronounced by Fidel Castro.
There were two or three tweets by Díaz-Canel, with the hashtag #PatriayVida. As if trying to make the song their own, it was very surreal. Then, of course, they realized that there was no way. Then came the 62,000 millennials, then a song of some policemen rapping, and then they included some children. This was also sad. When I saw those children, like attacking, I felt very sorry for them, because in the end children are the great victims of all this suffering.
In a key part of this documentary entitled “The true story, not the one incorrectly told,” Jade, Maykel’s daughter, appears. And starting with Jade, people get emotional and get goosebumps, especially when she sings: “The chicks say ’peep peep peep peep’ when they are hungry when they are cold.” She sang it as just another little girl who sings that song, as we have all sung it, but it makes people cry because when you come from where you come from, from the images you see, and that little girl sings that, the song takes on a different meaning and brings tears to your eyes.
A beautiful, brave girl, whose father is imprisoned, a man who has done nothing criminal, that the International Courts have already said the trial of Luis Manuel and Maykel makes no sense, they were sentenced without a defense lawyer, without witnesses, they are in maximum security prisons. This week we visited Father Angel, trying through the Church to send food and toiletries for Maykel and Luis Manuel, and the Church cannot help us either.
Why can’t it help them?
They have told us that they cannot help, that it is a sensitive issue. That is what we have been told.
Another who also immediately used Patria y Vida as a slogan was José Daniel Ferrer, also in jail and without a trial.
It is terrible what happened to José Daniel, he is also in the documentary. He is a brave man and he alone deserves a documentary.
Why do you think that after so many years, with so much information available, the reality of Cuba is still distorted, especially in Spain?
Look, I am glad you asked me this question. The reason why we decided to premiere here, which is the most difficult country, is because it was necessary so that the media would have the opportunity to see what is happening on the island, to publicize it. What is going to change the context of the island is the people making noise. On Monday the media already covered us, in about eight newspapers, because the news was the surprise of the Spanish film Patria y Vida because nobody believed in us.
Every person who decides to go to the cinema is a contribution to something that has to make noise because that is our purpose. That is, to cover not just us, but also what is happening in Cuba from different points of view, because in the end it is always the same, it comes down to repression. This is the first thing. Indeed, here people are looking the other way because Cuba was romanticized at a certain moment and people live in that romanticization.
The other day a person said to Yotuel, and I am sure that the person was not saying it to offend him: “I went to Cuba and it was amazing, it’s like traveling to the past,” and Yotuel said: “Cubans don’t want to live in the past, Cubans want to live in the present.” That bothers Yotuel a lot, as it bothers him to see actors who go and take a picture riding in an almendrón (vintage American car) with a mojito, or singers, and say how beautiful Cuba is, how beautiful the people are, getting into a car which ordinary Cubans have no access to and drinking a mojito that is worth a doctor’s salary.
What was your first contact with Cuba?
As soon as I arrived with Yotuel in Havana, at the airport. I was carrying several suitcases because I was bringing gifts for Yotuel’s family. It was the first time I was going to see them, I was going to meet them, I had about three suitcases and two of them were little things for the people. And Yotuel was carrying a suitcase. Just passing through the police checkpoint, how they treated me, how they let my suitcases through with absolutely no problem, “Welcome to Cuba,” and how they mistreated Yotuel… As soon as we got in, they put him in the police area, they held him for an hour, they opened his suitcase.
What do the people of Cuba not see and what does the documentary show? That in one day the whole world talked about them and that if they had stayed in the streets, today we would be talking about freedom
Knowing who he was, that is, recognizing him?
Yes, Yotuel, as the film also shows, started rapping in the 90’s. He went to Paris, founded Orishas and Orishas was very successful. Then the government wanted Orishas to do concerts and they refused to sing for the dictatorship, so they were banned in Cuba. Yotuel also here, in the media, always said “Freedom for Cuba,” “Cuba needs a democracy,” so he was not welcome. Yotuel, who is an only child, had his mother, who was not allowed to leave Cuba. One of the times we managed to get my mother-in-law to come, but not my father-in-law. Whenever I have gone to Cuba it has been to see his family, which we could not bring with us.
We would arrive and all the time the feeling was “You are not welcome here.” They put people to watch us, they would come everywhere with us and it was very uncomfortable to feel that we had people watching us.
Luis Manuel in jail, Maykel in jail, Jose Daniel in jail. Is there any hope? How do you see the future of Cuba? What has to happen? It seemed that 11 July was it, and suddenly all that vanished with repression and fear.
I believe that there is a reality that was not told to the 11 July demonstrators. If you go out into the street, they cut off the Internet and all you see is repression against those who demonstrated, you don’t go out again. Now, what did the Cuban people not see and what does the documentary show? That in one day the whole world talked about them and that if they had stayed in the streets, today we would be talking about the freedom of Cuba. Because it is an ideological war. There has been a lot of support for the idea that Cubans are fine, that they are happy, and 11 July broke that idea. We are only artists, musicians, a small contribution, but I do believe that in this ideological war, it is very important that Cubans here make noise to break this attitude in Spain of looking the other way when it comes to Cuba.
When people take to the streets, then the world really starts to watch. I feel that also the people on the island when they see the documentary, will see a side that they did not see before, the international repercussion that their bravery generated. I hope that this will help them to go out to the streets. Because what is true is that everything has to be activated from within. It is the Cubans who have to fight for their own freedom, like any other country; it is they who have to light the fuse.
Would you return to Cuba if freedom were achieved?
Of course, we would take the first flight. Besides, look, Celia Cruz’s manager, Omer Pardillo, told us that she used to say all the time that she was going to return to a free Cuba and that when she arrived in Havana a double-decker bus would be waiting for her, one of those buses with no roof on top, to go singing her songs from the airport to Havana, that she did not want to waste a second in a car, that she wanted to go singing. I hope we can fulfill Celia’s dream. Then Yotuel pours cold water on my idea and tells me: “Mami, that bus does not exist in Cuba.”
Translated by LAR for Translating Cuba
Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.
