Irina Pino

Interview with Cuban Rocker Eddy Escobar

With a repertoire of rock-and-roll classics that have been carefully selected so as to set the band apart from others, Eddy Escobar’s band has secured a loyal group of followers at venues around Havana, such as the Maxim Rock and Yellow Submarine. The quality of the band’s performances attests to the agelessness and boundlessness of rock and roll, a genre that will continue to carve out a space for itself in Cuba.

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Fleeing the Cuban Hell

He doesn’t look like a former sailor. He is too big, he seems to have lost his gracefulness at sea, along with all of the hopes he had in his youth. Jose Manuel is now forty-two. He lives on Campanario (“Bellfry”) street, in Havana’s neighborhood of Centro Habana. Those bells, however, no longer toll for him. The only thing he thinks about is how to leave the city of his birth, how to escape his country, which he calls “hell”.

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