Havana Cuba. – Alfredito Rodríguez, who between 1969 and 1990 was the most acclaimed Cuban pop singer, is currently in Miami, where he has lived since 2010, celebrating his 55-year artistic career.
If I dedicate these lines to Alfredito it is not because I like his songs, nothing like that, but because I regret having been too harsh with him when in December 2006 presented on his television program “La Diferencia” the former commander, former summary prosecutor and censor at the ICRT Jorge “Papito” Serguera.
It is that I was outraged to see a repressor of a major brand on the program, playing good, saying that he liked caviar, the songs of Elvis Y McCartney and that he only regretted not having made a “better mistake” in the performance of his duties.
But I have to admit that long before his interview with Serguera, I was prejudiced against Alfredito Rodríguez. I didn’t like him, not so much because I didn’t like his songs, but because of a beautiful girl named Migdalia, a few years older than me and with whom I was madly in love back in 1972 but who didn’t pay attention to me—she didn’t even know. of my love― because she could only regret that the singer, who had been her boyfriend, had left her for another.
Alfredito was a pop star. At that time, in “Buenas Tardes”, the closest thing to a pop music television program that Cubans were allowed, there was always Alfredito, alone or with Leonor Zamora, and Mirta and Raúl, the 5U4 and Los Barbas, with legs like an elephant and their hair cut as far as the curators allowed, trying to sound like Chicago and singing the Stones’ “Honky tonk women” in Spanish in a version they titled “It’s time to finish”.
Alfredito shivered and writhed excitedly, and with him his admirers, when he sang, in the manner of Dyango, those songs by Sergio Endrigo, “Éramos” and “Lejos de ti”, or imitated Julio Iglesias, making faces and holding his hand to the belly when he sang “Sagittarius”, “Good person” or “Oh, I’m infatuated”.
His romantic and catchy songs were very popular and made life more bearable, fundamentally for the pioneers for socialism, their retired grandmothers, depressed housewives and CDR members exhausted by the construction of socialism.
With so many Girasol prizes that Alfredito Rodríguez received, who could have imagined that the Castroites also censored and crushed him? And that in the unfortunate interview that I mentioned, he expressed his gratitude to Papito Serguera for having helped him at the beginning of his career.
They made life impossible for Alfredito, to the point that once, according to what he has said, he went with a bat to fight Radio Progreso and it was very close for them to take him to prison. We found out about this and more after he stayed in Mexico in 2009 and was able, when interviewed, to speak freely, and complain about when they censored songs on the radio, prevented him from leaving his hair long and wearing double-breasted jackets because they used up a lot of fabric, And on top of all that, they accused him in the official press of distorting the public’s taste for being foreign and singing “easy songs.”
Once they wanted to censor a song, which by the way, he had not written, but the Spanish Danny Daniel, because he said “for the love of a woman, I let my veins bleed.” Who has seen a man cut his wrists for a woman? A macho-Leninist commissioner told him. And luckily, with as much homophobia as there was in those years, he did not give Alfredito to sing, by Danny Daniel himself, “The Waltz of the Butterflies.” In any case, if there was no other choice but to dance the waltz, the commissioners invited you to dance it, with Russian boots on, and “where the grass is taller”, as the troubadour Enriquito Núñez sang.
There are those who thought that totalitarian dictatorships allowed and needed rationed and innocuous stardom to lull the masses. Not even that. Not all the pop stars of real socialism were lucky enough to be pampered like Karel Gott so that he would not leave Czechoslovakia when in 1972 he was about to accept a contract in Munich and leave it in the corns to the communists.
Today, with so many reggaeton players, singers like Alfredito Rodríguez are truly missed in Cuba. And since – musical taste aside – I have never doubted that he is a good person, I wish him health, good luck and many congratulations on his 55-year artistic career.
OPINION ARTICLE
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