A song asks Cubans to drop Castro’s chant ‘Homeland or Death.’ The government is on edge.

During Cuba’s so-called Special Period, the terrible economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Willy Chirino’s song “Ya viene llegando” became a hymn of hope for many Cubans who wanted change on the island.

It was common to walk in Havana and other cities — there was almost no public transportation — and hear the words, “It’s coming,” blaring from homes. At the time, Chirino, a Cuban-born musician based in Miami, hoped that the Fidel Castro government would meet the same fate as other communist regimes after the Berlin Wall fell. That did not happen, and many Cubans who challenged authorities by singing that change was imminent now live in the United States.

Castro never commented on the song. Neither did the official media.

Thirty years later, “Patria y Vida” (“Homeland and Life”), a new song with almost two million views on YouTube and featuring some of the most famous Cuban singers inside and outside the island, is challenging the government, this time by questioning Castro’s revolutionary slogan, “Patria o Muerte” (“Homeland or Death”).

“It’s over. No more lies. My people ask for freedom. No more doctrines. Let’s no longer shout Patria o Muerte, but Patria y Vida,” reads the chorus of the song that comes in the wake of a nascent social movement led by artists on the island pressing for greater freedoms.

Yotuel Romero, a singer with the band Orishas and the brain behind the project, told the Miami Herald that the song is part of an “awakening of Cuban youth.”

“It was important to tell the world that Cubans today, we want life, that the doctrine that came out in ‘59 belongs to that moment,” Romero said in reference to the year Castro took power.

“With COVID, the fear of death has touched us very close,” he added. “So the word is obsolete. When you say ‘Homeland and Life,’ you add, and that’s what Cubans feel, that we can have both. The Cuba that ‘Patria y Vida’ talks about is a Cuba in which we all fit, whatever we think.”

This time, the song appears to have made Cuban authorities so nervous that state media have launched a campaign to combat its message and discredit its authors.

The official newspaper of the Communist Party, Granma, dedicated several front pages to it. The Cuban news agency called the song “annexation vomit.” Pro-government musicians and artists issued statements and signed letters accusing its authors of being “mercenaries,” “buffoons,” and “traitors.” In a post on social media later removed, Cubadebate called Romero a “jinetero,” a term coined in the 1990s used to describe Cubans who engaged in prostitution, often with foreigners. Romero is married to the Spanish actress and singer Beatriz Luengo.

Current Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel also joined the campaign on social media.

“We shouted Homeland or Death a thousand times last night,” Díaz-Canel wrote on Twitter. “They wanted to erase our slogan and Cuba made it viral on social media.”

Another crisis and new political actors

The uber popularity of those who perform in “Patria y Vida” — Grammy award winners with a global audience and, at the same time, hip-hop and reggaeton stars in Cuba — as well as the delicate political and economic moment the country is going through, help explain both the instant success the song has become and the government’s angry reaction.

The song is performed by Romero, who is based in Spain; Alexander Delgado and Randy Malcom, of the reggaeton duo Gente de Zona, and singer-songwriter Descemer Bueno, who are all in Miami; and the rappers Maykel Castillo, known as Maykel Osorbo, and Eliécer Márquez, “el Funky,” who both live in Cuba.

Fears that the song could generate protests against the government surfaced on a state television news show in which a journalist warned that “insurgency or confrontation is not the way to face any problem.”

As in the 1990s, Cuba is today mired in a deep economic crisis. An attempt at economic reform, undertaken by Raúl Castro in the late 2000s, was stalled for another decade. Aid from Venezuela, which replaced the former Soviet Union as the country’s benefactor, decreased substantially in the past three years as the South American country’s economy plunged under Nicolás Maduro’s government. Tighter U.S. sanctions under former President Donald Trump and the pandemic have caused widespread shortages reminiscent of the crisis of the 1990s.

But the island’s political context has changed, and independent artists, musicians, academics, activists and journalists are now less afraid of confronting the government.

“There have been tough moments” in recent Cuban history, said Bueno, who referred to the year 1994, when the blackouts and shortages led Cubans to protest in Havana and thousands to embark on handmade rafts to immigrate to the United States.

“But this is the most critical moment that the dictatorship has faced,” he said. “This is the moment many people like me have always waited for. If I had been asked to do this before, I would not have been prepared. I would not have had the anger that seeing the way the dictatorship has treated the people in the last year caused me.”

In the last two decades, popular music, and the arts in general, have been acting as a counter-public sphere to state media, channeling the discontent of a part of the Cuban population.

Musical genres such as hip-hop confronted the government by making visible the dissatisfaction with the Cuban revolution of a mostly black or mestizo population. But in the past, the authorities managed to co-opt or push some of the more popular groups, like Los Aldeanos, to exile. Although reggaeton has mostly ignored political issues, its cult of consumerism has shown the erosion of socialist values in the country.

Fidel Castro, who ruled with an iron fist and kept intellectuals in check, died in 2016, and in the years since, criticism on social media and protest actions such as those carried out by members of the San Isidro Movement (MSI) and 27N have amplified questions over the government’s legitimacy.

“The San Isidro Movement has been working as a group for three years. Their approach combines culture with civil rights activism,” said artist, writer and art professor Coco Fusco. “Music has been part of the MSI vocabulary from the beginning. The group includes rappers like Maykel Osorbo. I see ‘Patria y Vida’ as an extension of this effort.

“The collaboration between musicians inside and outside the island is a powerful message for Cubans and also for the Cuban state,” she added. “It overcomes the official discourse that always seeks to divide Cubans into good and bad, revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, islanders and exiles. United we win.”

Members of that movement, including Osorbo and artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who is also featured in the “Patria y Vida” video, went on a hunger strike in November last year that ended in a violent eviction by the police. The event sparked a public protest by young artists, who stood in front of the Ministry of Culture to ask for freedom of expression on the island and later organized the group known as 27N.

Bueno and Romero said that the song is part of the push by young people to question the government’s policies. And the song, which includes images of the protests and repressive acts by the government, has generated more visibility for these demands.

Not lost on many artists are the racial and class layers underpinning a song in which all those involved are Black artists who came from the barrios.

The San Isidro Movement members “are cultured people; they come from the people, they come from below,” said Bueno. “I have always thought that the impulse [for changes in Cuba] was going to come from the most resented among the people. It has always been known that in the poor neighborhoods, we have been living with the minimum.”

In a telephone interview from Havana, Alcántara also highlighted that successful artists like the performers of the song, “who come from the barrios and are Blacks like us, and decided at one point to make a more commercial type of music and have things to lose, now join forces in a song that cares for the people and gives them back their desire to fight.”

“Art has to come out of its bubble,” he said. The song, he added, has connected with the Cuban people and is an example that art “is not an ornament, it can be an agent of change.”

From silence to singing ‘dictatorship’

For Bueno, Romero, and Gente de Zona, all Grammy Award winners, the song represents a turning point in their careers. For years, they garnered international success while also performing on the island, for which they received harsh criticism in Miami.

The lyrics of their songs also avoided addressing political issues. When he first arrived in Miami, Delgado, from Gente de Zona, said he did not know who Chirino was.

The duo also generated controversy in 2018 for asking for a round of applause for Díaz-Canel, who was present at one of their concerts in Havana, and whom they called “our president.” At another show in 2017, they were seen alongside Raúl Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro.

The mayor of Miami removed the duo from a year-end concert in 2019. Influencer Alexander Otaola went so far as to publicly call for revoking their permanent residence in the United States.

The Cuban government has also attacked the song’s authors, suggesting that it was produced to respond to pressure from Cuban exiles in the United States.

“It gives me great joy to know that artists who have lived under the Cuban regime take positions against the dictatorship. But at the same time, it saddens me that some people still believe that ‘the Miami mafia’ hides behind the success of this song,” renowned music producer Emilio Estefan told el Nuevo Herald. “The most important thing about this song is that it will help those who are still confused in Cuba to realize how terrible the dictatorship is, through a message of freedom.”

Several of the artists interviewed by the Miami Herald said that fear of not being able to return to the island and of reprisals that relatives could suffer led them to remain silent.

“For years, we knew that it was a model that did not work, but like every Cuban who lives on the island, we adapted to survive and not get into trouble, to be able to sing to the people that we love so much,” said Gente de Zona in a statement sent through their manager. “But the situation in Cuba is already unbearable, and looking the other way or remaining silent was no longer an option.”

Bueno stressed that the great popularity that the authors of the song now have in Cuba, and which the authorities fear so much, is based precisely on the fact that they continued to perform on the island, unlike other musicians like Chirino or Estefan, who have never been authorized to do so.

For Romero, stepping into the political song genre came after talking to Cuban friends and watching videos on social media of the long lines to buy food, the deteriorating situation in hospitals, the repression against dissidents and members of the San Isidro Movement and 27N, and “of all the human rights abuses that are being committed in Cuba.”

“We artists cannot be blind,” he said.

Despite the government’s attempts to stifle the song’s popularity, the message has reached global audiences as diverse as the European Parliament — where Romero and Alcántara will appear on Friday — to Latinos who follow the Lo Nuestro music awards.

“We know how things work in our country. We know that we are in the presence of a dictatorship,” Delgado said at the awards last week. “And who better than us, music performers known worldwide, to stand in favor of the people. We are going to continue promoting this song, ‘Patria y Vida,’ and we are not going to stop until Cuba is free.”

El Nuevo Herald reporters Sarah Moreno, Arturo Arias and Mario J. Pentón contributed to this story.

Follow Nora Gámez Torres: @ngameztorres