The American group Audioslave broke decades-long barriers with a thundering concert before thousands of Cuban fans, who knocked over barriers of their own to get closer to the first United States rock band to play an outdoor concert in Cuba.
Chris Cornell’s scream — ”I won’t do what you tell me!” — boomed off the high-rise apartment buildings on the stage’s south side on Friday night as feedback shrieks from Tom Morello’s guitar drifted into the night breeze over the Caribbean to the north.
”This is the best thing that has happened here this year,” said 25-year-old rock fan Omar Juanes.
”The best thing in your life,” shouted a nearby friend who darted back into a crowd of more than 3 000 people — many with dreadlocks, body piercings and-or tattoos. A few swooped through the outer scatterings of the crowd on roller blades.
It was a marked difference from the orderly, clean-cut crowds who march in massive anti-US protests along the Malecon waterfront at the same venue: the Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Tribunal, before the US Interests Section, or diplomatic mission.
Even before the three-hour-plus concert, hundreds of fans were so eager that they sent metal security barricades clanging to the pavement and rushed forward to fill a 50m-long area that had been reserved for special guests — mostly workers and
teachers with exemplary official records.
Seemingly relaxed if numerous, police at the scene allowed the fans to stay in the invaded space and several were seen joking with tattooed youths in Metallica T-shirts swigging rum from glass bottles.
Scores of people watched from apartment balconies high above the stage — not that they could have slept anyway.
US government travel restrictions on Cuba and the Cuban government’s ambivalent attitude toward rock music have severely limited visits by US rockers to Cuba and have kept out the harder, grungier versions altogether.
Officials often cite pop-rocker Billy Joel’s 1979 indoor performance as a rock and roll landmark here.
But elemental grunge, thrash and metal are the most popular styles of rock an island that is rich in its own complex, polyrhythmic popular music.
Audioslave had the whole crowd screaming and dancing when it went back to its frantic, pounding, grungy roots, but left those in the back merely toe-tapping on some of the newer, less frantic songs.
”We would like to have stronger music — bands like Metallica,” said a gaunt man sitting alongside friends on the Malecon seawall who gave his name as Walter Delgado (32). Two of his friends also insisted they were named Walter. Even so, he said, ”We are happy for the first time in our rock and roll history.” – Sapa-AP