The musical producer Roberto Ferrante has tried to be controversial and has only managed to be beaten.
Havana, Cuba. – The best example to understand the differences between a provocateur and a fool was offered a few days ago the Italian music producer Roberto Ferrante. He wanted to go viral with What he wrote about Celia Cruz and Benny Moré And yes it was a trend on the Internet, but at a price too high, as much as perhaps to ruin, which is always paying those who do not warn the danger of trying by force to place among the gods a simple mortal.
Celia, Benny, Ignacio Piñeiro, Miguel Matamoros, Elena Burque and Omara Portuondobeyond musical tastes and spotify numbers, they belong to Olympus, not only of music but of universal culture, and they will not import fashion, politics, ideologies or visualizations and billing on YouTube to measure their greatness and genius. They will always be at the top, radiating genius and good taste about us, even if in the future there were no Italian adventurers, the labels, digital platforms and algorithms that manufacture Trending topics.
Trying to demolish the gods of the altar where they put them the destiny and unquestionable quality of their works is not irreverence but a resounding stupidity, more if what is intended is to place in their places a promise that will need to spend the test of time, of the audiences of today and of those who will arrive or not over the years, to know if it belongs to there where the little common sense intends to install it only to “provoke” Profan), even at the expense of making a fool of them because that sells, and what matters in these times is to invoice quickly and furious, before the phenomenon goes out of style.
Fidel Castro already tried in vain the same against Celia Cruz (and against anyone who did not fold at his cravings). He wanted to erase her from Cuban musical history, but the Guarachera knew how to properly propose, only with the greatness of her art, the beating she deserved. He wanted to condemn it to dismembered, knowing how dismembered and opportunistic are fans of Castroism, but did not take into account the power of true art to impose itself against the most fearsome adversary.
Castro and ferrant are wedges of the same stick, there should be no doubts. Not only are there similarities between the claims of the dictator and those of the Neapolitan producer but the attack (because without a doubt it was) of the latter, launched on the eve of the 99 anniversary of the greatest enemy that Celia Cruz and the Cuban people had, for nothing it was mere coincidence.
The Italian, who was among the wave of left -wing European adventurer who arrived in Cuba in the 90s trying to make a fortune while oxygenating the regime once the “socialist field” disappeared, knew very well what he wrote in that unfortunate message and who insulted, and that disrespect launched with all intention of offending – especially an important part of the Cuban exile, for which Celia Cruz is a whole symbol beyond music – is very similar in “style” to which for years he has used the dictatorship to discredit the artists who considered annoying.
As for the sales and success of Planet Records, it was not necessary Roberto Ferrante has decided to wander and get in with that regime that has allowed him for almost thirty years to keep his business in Havana, with how jealous the communist party is in matters such as cultural promotion and the music industry.
But Ferrant, nobody knows why miracle of the “God Fidel”, not only seems to go unnoticed in the eyes of the regime with its turnover of 4 million euros per year, which not only leave the cast and the distributions (a group that the regime needs to control, monitor and, at the same time, keep away from the official media and even of the very ministry of culture), and that interferes, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently. state (in the case of productions with musicians such as Alexander Abreu and orchestras like Los Van Van), but, in addition, licenses of all kinds are allowed, including those that denigrate the image of the woman, which in all the videos produced by Planet Records appears only as an object of desire, disposable once used, a piece of meat available to the male.
Not only is silence about official institutions such as the Cuban Women Federation (FMC) and the National Center for Sexual Education (CENEX) but, above all, the impunity of which the Italian enjoys, which owes its fame in the nights Havana more to its facilities for sexual trade and alcohol than to the music it produces.
Because, before his most profitable product mentioned him in the extensive litany of names and motes with which all his songs end, no one in Cuba who did not frequent him as a friend, knew who that Italian was that he arrived in the late 90 Virtues
As someone who has known him since his early years in Cuba, Roberto Ferrante, despite the merits behind the success of Obsessionof the Dominican Aventura group, and others such as those of Anticsby Nicky Jam, among the most memorable, in Havana it was only the “yuma” with which you could drink and smoking (more than cigarettes) without the police from becoming an annoyance, the foreigner with whom he could go from Rumba to Don Cangrejo in the days when frequenting that place meant transferring the limits of the pleasures and the law, with a license of those who had to enforce it.
But for the regime, Ferrant, in addition to being that “yuma” that leaves money and that consumes in large quantities the “national product”, was the ideal instrument to carry that most difficult part of the flock, which due to a matter of “cultural hierarchies” (which is the formula used by the commissioners of the Cuban culture to marginalize everything that does not commune with the ideology of the regime) had “Official culture.”
As the adventurer, opportunistic and accomplice who is, Roberto Ferrante could fulfill without any problem the entrusted mission, more when he knew how to get money on those margins of the culture and, even more when the permission came with other incentives such as doing and undoing, between Havana and Miami, all that his useful fool delirium allowed him to imagine, “everything” while neither he nor his representatives were too much.
So Ferrante, a few days before the birthday of the “bosses chief”, wanted to give to the regime his tribute in the form of an offense against what represents above all Celia Cruz, an example of cultural resistance to a dictatorship that still persists in pretending to annihilate the most authentic national culture and replace it with a political ideology that dictates the guidelines of artistic creation.
The product that Ferrante intends to offer, as part of the criminal and systematic replacement of the most authentic symbols of our nation, is none other than that same rude, vulgar fantoche, a reflection of themselves, molded by the ideologues of a dictatorship that wishes to place the image of Fidel Castro where it does not correspond to being, as long as it was the architect of the disaster that has put in danger the national pride, so necessary for the prosperity of a country.
Luckily, Roberto Ferrante has tried to be controversial and has only managed to get beaten. Because what he did was as “casual” and “spontaneous” as Fidel Castro’s poster in New Yorkthat rather than illustrating the dangerous influence of the dictator’s ideas in sectors of American society, what he has achieved is to show us where those millions of Gaesaa few days after we discovered how much the product of so many decades of looting and repression amounts.
