Through Music, a Quiet Diplomacy
December 29, 2009
Trying to Sway America’s Cuba Policy With Song
By GINGER THOMPSON
WASHINGTON — When one of Cuba’s best-known musicians landed in the United States, his first appearance was not onstage, but on Capitol Hill.
Carlos Varela, often referred to as Cuba’s Bob Dylan, had come to remix an album with his good friend Jackson Browne. But he also hoped to help reshape relations between the United States and his homeland.
So before going to Hollywood to work on the album, he stopped in Washington early this month for meetings with legislators and a lunch with a senior White House official. Later he held a jam session in the House Budget Committee meeting room.
Almost everywhere Mr. Varela, 46, went during his weeks here, including at universities and policy institutes, small talk about music gave way to pressing, albeit polite, questions on policy.
“I don’t represent any government or political party,” he said. “But perhaps that’s why governments and politicians might be willing to listen to what I have to say.”
The singer and songwriter, making his first trip to the United States in 11 years, is part of a movement by artists, scholars and businessmen to change United States policy toward Cuba from the bottom up. Nearly a year after President Obama took office promising to open a new era of engagement with Cuba, the two governments seem stuck in the same old stalemate, with Washington demanding that its Communist neighbor adopt democratic reforms, and Havana railing about American interference.
Tensions resurfaced Dec. 5 when Cuba detained a United States government contractor who had traveled to Havana without proper authorization to hand out communications equipment to dissident groups.
Still, even while jousting continues at the highest levels of government, the Obama administration has quietly expanded cultural and academic exchanges as a way of reaching out directly to Cuban people. Many of those who participate try to avoid politics.
“We are all about the music,” Robert Bell, the singer and bass player of Kool and the Gang, told The Associated Press before the band took the stage Dec. 20 in Havana. “We don’t come as politicians, we come as musicians.”
Others see such exchanges as chances to fill a political vacuum.
“Everyone who has gone to Cuba comes out questioning our policy because what they see there is nothing like what they have been told by American politicians,” said Andy Spahn, a political consultant to Steven Spielberg and others, who hosted a party for Mr. Varela and has taken celebrity clients to Havana.
Stephen Rivers, a celebrity public relations consultant who has made numerous trips to Cuba, said, “There’s so much fiction surrounding our relationship.” He described Kevin Costner’s being mobbed by Cuban fans during a 2001 visit as evidence that the island was hardly cut off from American culture.
“The truth is, we are much more isolated from them than they are from us,” he said.
In September, hundreds of thousands of Cubans gathered in Revolution Square in Havana for a “Peace Without Borders” concert led by the Colombian-born singer Juanes. The concert, which featured a number of American musicians, was organized with significant logistical and licensing assistance from the Obama administration.
Before the event, polls showed that more than half of the Cuban-American community in Miami, led by those who fled repression on the island, viewed the concert as an affront. Afterward, more than half expressed a favorable view of the event.
“Juanes opened the door for change,” wrote Sergio Pino, a businessman and a powerful voice in the Cuban exile community who was once a staunch supporter of the trade embargo against Cuba, in a letter to The Miami Herald. “It is time to rethink our strategy.”
Also in September, Cuban environmental officials, previously denied visas to attend conferences in the United States, were invited to Washington to discuss conservation issues relating to the Gulf of Mexico. In October, a group of environmental experts from the United States went to Havana to continue the talks.
“I know people are complaining that President Obama has not made any changes toward Cuba, but from where I sit, there’s been remarkable change,” said Daniel Whittle of the Environmental Defense Fund, which organized the trip.
Despite its decades-old embargo against Cuba, the United States has long been the largest foreign supplier of food to the island. Mr. Obama lifted Bush administration restrictions to make it easier for American farmers to do business with Cuba. In November, dozens of them attended the Havana Trade Fair.
Then in early December, Mr. Varela arrived in Washington. It was his first United States visit since 1998; he was denied a visa in 2004 by the Bush administration, which routinely denied visas to Cuban artists and academics as part of an effort to topple the government by isolating it.
In a meeting with Representative Howard L. Berman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Varela suggested a different approach.
“There are some Cuban politicians who use the isolation to their benefit,” Mr. Varela said. “But I do not believe that anyone in Cuba could stand in the way if the United States decided to open relations. If the United States did that, the change in Cuba would be unstoppable.”
Using music to bring together opposing sides in one of this country’s longest-running foreign policy debates might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea inside the Capital Beltway.
Before the Juanes concert in September, Mr. Obama told a reporter from Univision that while such events did not hurt the United States’ relations from Cuba, “I wouldn’t overstate the degree that it helps.”
Mr. Varela, whose trip to the United States was sponsored by a nonprofit political organization called the Center for Democracy in the Americas, said he was not naïve about the magnitude and complexity of the tensions between the United States and Cuba.
His life has been marked by the highs and lows of the Cuban revolution. The government gave him a world-class education in music and theater, but refuses to broadcast many of his songs, which have veiled critiques of the Communist leadership.
Over the years, politics has cost him a band (members defected in Spain in 1997), a brother (he left Cuba 12 years ago) and perhaps a chance for greater international acclaim.
The fact, for example, that his lyrics have never landed him in jail, like many Cuban political dissidents, has contributed to suspicions among some Cuban-Americans that he is a Cuban agent.
Music, he said, is not going to bring a rapid end to 50 years of political conflict. But, he said, in the absence of meaningful diplomatic exchanges, musicians can serve as more than celebrities.
“Music is not going to move governments,” he said. “But it might move people. And people can move governments.”
