Reviewed by: My Havana: The Musical City of Carlos Varela ed. by María Caridad Cumaná, Karen Dubinsky, and Xenia Reloba de la Cruz Nolan Warden My Havana: The Musical City of Carlos Varela. Edited by María Caridad Cumaná, Karen Dubinsky, and Xenia Reloba de la Cruz, translated by Ana Elena Arazoza. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. [xxviii, 281 p. ISBN 9781442647718 (hardcover), $75; ISBN 9781442615786 (paperback), ISBN 9781442669000 (e-book), $32.95.] Photographs, interview, appendix, bibliography, index. [End Page 117] My Havana focuses on the recent history of Havana, and, more broadly, Cuba, primarily through the lyrics of the famous trovador (troubadour/singer–songwriter) Carlos Varela. As the editors tell us in the introduction, Varela is “legendary for the intense political honesty of his lyrics” (p. i). Though his lyrics are often critical of the Cuban state, he does not outright denounce it, nor does he entirely embrace any alternative. This ambiguity makes reading about Varela’s work even more intriguing at the dawn of a new era in Cuba’s diplomatic relations with the United States. The book is not a biography per se; the authors do not reveal much about Varela’s upbringing, psychological motivations, or the like. Instead, the book focuses on “[t]he artistic production of one individual” as a way “to understand recent Cuban history—in particular, Havanese history” (p. xiv). This book has a number of particularities that set it apart from most anthologies, biographical or otherwise. Impressively, the book has come to exist in two versions: English and Spanish. Such a production is highly commendable, even inspirational. The book also includes an appendix with lyrics to all the songs Varela has recorded—unfortunately with no chords or other musical markings—translated into English adjacent to the original Spanish. In fact, the songs and translations comprise about half of the entire book in pure page count. There is also the useful addition of an interview with Varela, conducted by two of the editors (Cumaná and Dubinsky). This collection includes seven brief essays (usually around thirteen pages long), a foreword by musician Jackson Browne, and an epilogue by the former British Ambassador to Cuba, Paul Webster Hare. In this way, My Havana is distinguished by its diversity of authors, backgrounds, and approaches. As Cumaná and Dubinsky put it in the introduction: This book brings together musicologists, historians, international relations experts, film scholars, and journalists from Cuba, Canada, Britain, and the United States to explore, assess, and appreciate the impact—local, national, and international—of Carlos Varela’s work. (p. xiii) This diversity of authorship is refreshing and provides much to ponder, but it also might disappoint some readers in ethnomusicology, musicology, and closely-related fields, who could rightly bemoan certain lacunae (explored more fully below). Most strikingly for a book ostensibly about music, the focus is almost entirely on lyrics, at the expense of musical sound and performance (though Susan Thomas’s contribution is a clear exception). Even the back cover of the book characterizes the approach as a “lyrical exploration” of Varela’s work. The overemphasis on texts, combined with the general tendency to talk about how music “reflects” society and history rather than how it makes it, attenuates much of the book’s potential for theoretical insights. “To join, magically, poetry and music, it’s really a blessing,” said Varela in the included interview (p. 112). Unfortunately, half of his equation is mostly missing in this publication. That is not to say that the authors have nothing to offer when focusing strictly on texts. The authors perform their own specific contextualizations and analyses, at times creatively and enjoyably. Some of the most cogent and intriguing essays are those by historian Karen Dubinsky, film scholar María Caridad Cumaná, and ethnomusicologists Susan Thomas and Robin Moore. Dubinsky’s essay masterfully interweaves Varela’s lyrics to illustrate historical themes, portraying the songwriter as an “underappreciated historian” (p. 52) and illuminating how he maintains a simultaneous stance of “rebellion and loyalty” toward the Cuban government (p. 53). Dubinsky marshals disparate verses from throughout Varela’s poetic oeuvre, making it seem effortless. María Caridad Cumaná’s essay makes a strong argument that Varela...
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Jul 20, 2016
Pedro Demenech 
Open Access
