Fall out over the Juanes Cuba concert is trickling out nationally. Huffington Post writer Miguel Guadaloupe's post today compares the Colombian rock star to both the Dixie Chicks and Bruce Springsteen - he compares the backlash from some sections of the exile community against the multi-Grammy winning singer to the backlash the Chicks suffered for their comments about George Bush. And Guadaloupe compares Juanes Sept. 20th concert on Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion to Springsteen's concert at the BErlin Wall in 1988 - an event Guadaloupe says some credit with helping bring down the wall. Springsteen, like Juanes, said he just wanted to play for people who'd never had a chance to hear his music before.
"It’s great to be in East Berlin," Springsteen told 160,000 East Germans. "I want to tell you, I’m not here for or against any government. I
came here to play rock ’n’ roll for you East Berliners in the hope that one day
all the barriers will be torn down."
Juanes wants to turn the Plaza de la Revolucion, site of so much political history, demogoguery, and pain, into a giant rock party for a few hours.
Of course, it's unlikely that Juanes will suffer the kind of sales slump and radio blacklisting that the Chicks did; his audience is young and international, and even if some Cuban-Americans in Miami boycott him, it probably won't have much effect (in the recently released Cuba Study Group poll of 400 Cuban Americans on the Juanes concert, only about one-quarter of them even owned one of his CD's.). And this weekend Juanes is appearing at a giant radio event at Madison Square Garden sponsored by SBS, the Cuban-American owned, Miami based radio chain - the kind of unspoken quid pro quo that artists do all the time for airplay, but which could do him some extra good at this moment.
And on Wednesday, Enrique Santos' popular morning radio show on 98.3 FM La Kalle in Miami featured an interview at Juanes house, while Santos - known for his prank calls to Castro and Chavez, and for his ardent anti-Castro, anti-communist stance - came out in strong support of Juanes and the concert. Santos even called him the Latino MLK, and called for "respect for Juanes, liberty for Cuba".Most of his callers (definitely a younger, more nationally mixed group than the audience that listens to AM exile talk radio) were also mostly supportive.
Meanwhile, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, just off a 5 day visit to Cuba to explore trade with his home state, told Reuters that the Sept. 20th event would be "healthy" for U.S.-Cuba relations.
To hear the singer talk about the show himself, check my story and Pedro Portal's fantastic video here.
