MADRID, Spain.- Cuban rapper Jorge Lian García Díaz, known as Jorgito Kamankola, in a recent interview with CubaNet explained his decision to settle in Madrid permanently, after many years traveling between Havana and the Spanish capital.
Author of opposition songs such as “Los sentinelas me fusilan”, “A pico de botella” and “Será mi sangre”, Kamankola also talked about the context of current Cuban music, the repression on the island and the language of his songs, one of the fundamental elements when it comes to transmitting their messages with such force through music.
― You had been coming and going for years (between Havana and Madrid), and a few months ago you decided to settle here. Why the decision now?
― I never wanted to leave Cuba, although my songs were always critical, and although I knew perfectly well that I was exposing myself to censorship, I decided to stay. I thought that I had to take the sticks because somehow I believed that through my art I was helping to improve the country, until I realized that the Cuban regime does not want any help. Because he doesn’t want any change. For a long time I lived with that doctrine of “I’m staying in Cuba” because at some point I also believed that staying had added value, and precisely from that ideal they feed, and no, staying in Cuba has no added value. . Living with that thought is fair to fall into their game and their trap.
In spite of everything, I kept wanting to stay, even knowing that I was playing his game and that it was not helping to improve anything, I decided to at least give the cress (be critical) and try to annoy as much as possible, and suddenly I realized what for me it was the lid to the knob: I had become a social sensor, how could there be censorship in Cuba if they let me sing, sometimes, but they let me. Then I understood that I was one more gear in that devilish system: “how can they say that there is censorship in Cuba if Kamankola sings”. That moment was the hardest, because I realized that in every way I was being another tool for it to continue working, and that’s when I decided to break with everything. I think that I do more good for my people in this exile out of conviction than not being a puppet anymore, and with pain I changed my Maxim Rock crowded with the most beautiful public in the world for a bar in Madrid where four cats listen to me, but my art and my conscience sleep peacefully.
― You have composed many songs dedicated to Havana, such as “La ponina”, “Tráfico de luz”… Can you talk a little about this relationship between your music and the city?
― Havana is the city I like the most in the world, that’s where I am from and will be forever. Regardless of the songs I write for her, I feel that I will never be able to return all the energy she gave me, all the songs she gave me, all the magic I experienced in her streets. Havana is that eternal love for which I fight every day.
― Do you think that the change of space is influencing your music?
I have changed my country, but not my heart, I continue to beat Cuba, each time with more strength. The further away, the stronger my love and my desire for change for my country. Thank God I have the muses with me and I don’t stop sprouting art, art of freedom.
In your songs you use a very peculiar language. Where does this jargon come from? Is it directly related to the type of music you make?
― I am from El Cerro, a poor neighborhood in Havana, I have always been a street person, I absorbed every drop of purity from the neighborhood, and I am a defender of jargon. For me, jargon is the truly native language of every corner of the world, those codes that only those of us who have lived in those codes understand. It’s something that I love. In Spain people don’t understand shit and it’s hard for me to eat my jargon, but the muses won’t let me give it up. I am passionate about my marginal language, my words and my own sayings from my birth and upbringing.
― Can you comment a little on the song “Down with everything” that you released last August?
― “Abajo todo” is a chronicle, a testimony; I think I managed to summarize in four verses a real event that happened in my country when the July 11, 2021 the Cuban people, tired of hunger and misery, took to the streets to ask for freedom and the end of the dictatorship, when the Cuban police commanded by the dictator Diaz-Canel went out to repress that people with sticks, with shots, with jails, with torture, where today there are minors in prison and people sentenced to 15, 20 and even 30 years of imprisonment. “Abajo Todo” is the most frontal song I’ve ever done, with names, surnames, subjects and predicates. The muses demanded that I abandon metaphors for this time, and I respect art purely, if it comes to me naked, it stays naked.
― How did you start in music? / Do you have specific references or influences?
― I started rapping in 1999. My influences are all songs with meaning, it’s all pure art. One of the biggest passions in my life is listening to songs, one of the things I enjoy the most in life is when the artist sees himself first as a human and then as an artist. That is the greatest value of art.
― What do you think of the current music scene in Cuba?
― This question only leads me to this answer, which is this phrase from Martí, the greatest of all greats: “There is no more embarrassing spectacle than that of servile talents”.
― About music censorship…?
― Artists make art, repressors censor. Art is impossible to stop when you are a pure artist, the repressors will fall and art will continue its eternal path.
― Apart from the space you have in the Calvario bar, can you be seen anywhere else in Madrid?
―In Madrid from time to time I put on concerts with a band in venues around here, although to tell the truth in Calvary I am happy, singing drunk and stoned, for the four crazy people who, drunk and stoned, feel each one of my words; sometimes it doesn’t take much more than that.
“Are you composing something now?” Projects in hand?
Thank God I compose every day…
