7 Days [newspaper, Dominican Republic]

A storm system
by Alfredo Prieto

A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.

Singer, composer, dancer, actress and designer Beyoncé Giselle Knowles, better known all over the world by her first name –written in capital letters, as shown in her website– returned to the U.S. after a short trip to Havana which, for various reasons, did justice to a famous phrase that an American critic used to describe her personality and stage presence: “a storm system disguised as a singer”.

The first storm broke in the streets of Havana. Perhaps, judging by her looks of choice here, she wished to be incognito in a landscape that treads water in, if with its back to, a sea brimming with globalizations and old things ranging from cars and buildings to people themselves.

Unsuccessfully, though. She could get away with it no more than other celebrities did, such as –to mention just two examples– Jack Nicholson and the Colombian [singer] Juanes when he came to negotiate the Concert for Peace: she was recognized as soon as she and her husband, the rapper Jay-Z, came out of their hotel on their first evening here.

It also happened when they ate at the privately run La Guarida restaurant, in which several scenes of the Cuban film Strawberry and Chocolate were shot and other famous like Will Smith, Kevin Spacey, Nicholson himself, Naomi Campbell, Jodie Foster and Danny Glover have dined in the past, to say nothing of the very Catholic King and Queen of Spain.

Such was the beginning of a short-lived journey marked by the usual treatment Americans receive in Cuba despite the bilateral differences. Sometimes the lack of regular contacts trigger certain assumptions on the other side that usually evaporate like soap bubbles as soon as the newcomer sets foot on solid ground.

At any rate, however, the visit sparked off an interesting logistic problem: the presence of the police, first at the restaurant owners’ request and then out of sheer common sense, to protect the megastars, not from acts of repudiation against an enemy but from the expressions of sympathy that forced them to appear on the balcony of the Saratoga Hotel, located across the street from Havana’s Capitol Building.

And that enthusiasm, proved by the endless rounds of applause they received from the locals, would be a constant feature throughout their stay, organized not by the Cuban government but by Academic Arrangements Abroad, a New York-based institution licensed by the U.S. Treasury to bring Americans to Cuba on educational-cultural trips.

The couple strolled around Old Havana’s iconic landmarks, visited the Higher Institute of the Arts, watched performances by the Modern Dance Troupe and the children’s theater group La Colmenita, dropped by the restaurant El Gato Tuerto –where she interacted with [Cuban entertainer] Juana Bacallao– and Central Havana municipality’s Casa de la Música, and attended a personal performance offered by singer Haila Mompié.

The second storm unleashed on the other side of the Florida Straits.

As we all know, the right-wing Cuban-American members of Congress, headed by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Díaz-Balart and Marco Rubio and the likes, went bananas over the whole issue.

The first two sent a public letter to Adam J. Szubin, director of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), questioning the legality/legitimacy of the trip and Obama’s policy on cultural exchanges. A polite request for information is not always a virginal act.

G.O.P.’s new golden boy Rubio, in turn, returned to the attack using the same reasons we heard back in the summer of 2012, when he aimed all his guns at the policy of exchanges with the argument of the “rotten apples” and went out of his way to hit them hard, recycling the same slogans displayed by the Bush Jr. administration in 2004: “The people-to-people license program of cultural exchanges granted by the Obama administration,” he told reporters, “has been abused by tourists who have no interest in the Cuban people’s liberties”.

The U.S. media and their headlines waited expectantly to see what the government had to say: Had the power couple traveled to the Island underhandedly to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, as claimed by the said peculiar Cuban-Americans, or had they applied for the relevant license?

The White House’s first step was to keep everything on hold until Treasury made a statement: OFAC does not comment on individual cases. It’s like a stave: silence has an expressive value.

But the answer would finally arrive on Wednesday, April 10. In a letter to both of the aforesaid members of Congress, Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Legislative Affairs Alastair Fitzpayne, said that the couple had traveled to Havana on an educational exchange trip and explained that “although parts of their visit, during which they celebrated their 5th anniversary, may have looked like tourism (…) Beyoncé and Jay-Z fulfilled their obligations and met with the children’s theater group La Colmenita and visited students and professors of the Higher Institute of the Arts”.

This was something that Academic Arrangement Abroad, until then silent, confirmed in a public statement: “The trip was in keeping with the established federal procedures to grant people-to-people cultural exchange licenses. The couple did not receive any special treatment”. Someone higher on the totem pole ridiculed Rubio & Co. by saying, “We don’t meddle if they had a mojito or two”.

Thus the coup de grâce was delivered, albeit the ball would keep rolling down other fields after Jay-Z rapped “Open Letter” as soon as he arrived in the U.S. in response to the politicians’ grilling and attacks.

The question remains, though: the Bourbons neither forget nor learn.

And the polemic goes on.

In 2012, Forbes estimated Carter's net worth at nearly $500 million

II

Jay- Z and Che

I can’t get with that.
Jay-Z

Born in a poor neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, on December 4, 1969, Shawn Corey Carter, better known as Jay-Z, is one of the most famous rappers of the moment thanks to a meteoric rise in the music world that is still in full development.

His debut album Reasonable Doubt (1996) and The Blueprint (2001) are considered among the best hip-hop classics of all time. With fifteen Grammy Awards to his credit, in 2000 our man in Havana was ranked by Forbes Magazine as the world’s wealthiest rapper, with an approximate annual income of $81 million and a net worth estimated at more than $990 million.

It’s all a result, not only of his work in recording studios and on stages, but also of his good flair for profitable investments and great business acumen.

Besides, Jay-Z is part-owner of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, co-owner of the 40/40 Club, and co-creator of the line Rocawear, and he’s got a lot of money invested in Carol's Daughter, a line of beauty products, none of which is exactly alien to the rich and famous.

TIME Magazine has just listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, alongside Jennifer Lawrence, Justin Timberlake, Barack and Michelle Obama, Christina Aguilera and Beyoncé, whom he married in Paris in April 2008: truly the incarnation of the “American Dream”.

In the words of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Jay-Z “embodies so much of what makes New York New York. A kid from a tough neighborhood who grows up in public housing, overcomes lots of bad influences on the street, never lets go of his dream, makes it to the top –and then keeps going, pursuing new outlets for his creativity and ambition”.

There are not many references to Cuba in Jay-Z’s ethno-lyrics. Before his trip to the Island, he had already set tongues wagging on account of his connection with Che.

Not that his work and thoughts ever match Guevara’s; it’s just a peculiar rapprochement, epidermal by definition, to keep up with the guerrilla’s cultural commercialization in America (and elsewhere), which includes things like having some coffee in a university campus (Che Café, specializing in green infusions and maté leaves), Converse advertisement using [Cuban photographer] Korda’s renowned picture, a French perfume for those “who want to feel and smell like a revolutionary”.

And there are other marketing monstrosities like, of course, the famous “Cherry Guevara” ice-creams made by Ben and Jerry’s, a firm established in Vermont by a hippie pair which stemmed from the 1960s’ counter-culture who at least combine goods production and social activism, environmentalism and other issues typical of the U.S. left’s progressive outlook.

Indeed, a few years ago Jay-Z had his photograph taken while wearing a chain around his neck and a Che Guevara T-shirt.

He said then that he considered himself “a revolutionary” because “he had become a millionaire on his own in a racist society”, which would amount to grant such status, by extension and nothing else, to a rancid, wealthy, dark-skinned aristocracy wholly integrated into, or absorbed by, mainstream America whose members very often go as far as to deny their African descent, the same one that Jay-Z, however, seems to love as much as he does money and business.

He decided to elaborate, remarking that he was not a Marxist like Che… and left us wondering what he means by that beyond what’s already common knowledge.

He said he would read more about Guevara later on and found a number of similarities to his own life. But these boiled down to just two: asthma and sports… a rather graphic admission that he didn’t understand a damned thing.

He wears chains, as befits a hip-hop figure’s identity, except his is magnified owing to his all but obsessive cult of wealth as a synonym for power.

He flaunts a 5-kilo chain manufactured by Rafaello & Co. and bought with a green American Express credit card that he holds to be the first of its kind made with Cuban raw materials.

That’s what the line “green card for the Cuban linx” means in Suit and Tie, a rap song he sings in Justin Timberlake’s album The 20/20 Experience, released last January. And he goes down that path again in Public Service Announcement –from The Black Album (2004)– in a line about how he picked up the most beautiful girl thanks to his chain (Got the hottest chick in the game wearing my chain) and calls himself rap music’s Che Guevara (I’m like Che Guevara with bling on), with all of the action taking place in a world full of luxuries, jewels and a Lexus, one of the most expensive cars worshipped by jet-setters.

Madonna, who never really left the ghetto but is no less a millionaire than Jay-Z, went a little further with the cover of her album American Life (2003), showing her picture “as if she were a twenty-first-century Che Guevara”.

Considered to be one of her most controversial and least commercially successful yet, her album openly criticize U.S. society’s prevailing materialism, thus swinging her pendulum away from her start as that “material girl living in a material world” of the 1980s.

“My muse for my newest album was Che Guevara”, the Evita singer told Oprah, and then said that Guevara represented “a revolutionary spirit”. And even if she didn’t necessarily agree –needless to say– with The Communist Manifesto, she said that “there are some good aspects to socialism” and she was sympathetic to what Che had fought for, which doesn’t make her a radical but shows at least that her grasp of the subject was quite more down-to-earth.

Sociologist Peter McLaren’s evaluation of historical evidence is right: “The United States,” he wrote, “has a seductive way of incorporating anything that it can’t defeat and transforming that ‘thing’ into a weaker version of itself, much like the process of diluting the strength and efficacy of a virus through the creation of a vaccine”.

Jay-Z’s pathetic case proves that they have been true experts on that.