Calle 13 faces heat after concert

By Sederick Short (OnlineSalsa.com)

AMSTERDAM ---- Last Tuesday the Puerto Rican and Grammy winning band Calle 13 held a very controversial concert at the so dubbed "Anti-imperialist Plaza" in the Malecon district of the Cuban capital Havana. The internationally famous Reaggaeton and Hip-Hop band performed on an outdoor stage on which band leader Rene Pérez fulminated a great deal of bitterness towards the U.S. policy to a frenzied crowd of thousands of Cubans in their teens and early adulthood.

This Thursday Calle 13 is going give the first of their scheduled concerts in Miami where they expect a fierce reaction from people who see their Cuban concert as an indirect support to the communist regime on Cuba. Pérez said before the show: the Cuban-Americans in Florida living in exile and opposing the Castro administration "are going to come at us, be all over us, but it's all the same to us!" 

Monday Perez already admitted the influence of politics in their music, and he also said that they are aware of the political statement they are making with the Havana concert. The location of the concert was at a very short distance from the ‘surrogate’ American embassy named the U.S. Interests Section. Washington has this building instead of an embassy because the U.S. has – to date - no formal diplomatic relations with Cuba.

At the beginning of the concert Pérez started by screaming a lot of ‘strong words’ to the “building behind us” which was closed at the time the show began. He wore a different shirt than his fellow band members did; they wore the same T-shirts as the Cuban national baseball team does. Barely a couple of minutes into the show Pérez took off his own shirt exposing his torso. He screamed: "We're going to talk about sex, religion and politics!" and proceeded to lean far off the stage and over the police barrier to slap hands with their fans whom at that very same moment started to surge forward towards the stage to touch their idol.   

As the evening progressed Pérez kept the profanity level up to the max. All of their fans – a lot of them with ‘Calle 13’ written across their bellies and faces, crowded on rooftops and nearby terraces to have a better look, seemingly enjoying every bit of it.

"He was a good Boricua, and they killed him!", shouted Pérez to the public after the band finished playing the song ‘Querido FBI’, which translated means ‘Dear FBI’. The song is an homage to Filiberto Ojeda Ríos. Ojeda Ríos is an alleged leader of a militant and nationalist Puerto Rican group accused of using a large amount of stolen money to finance attacks and bombings. He died in 2005 during a confrontation with the FBI at a remote farmhouse in Puerto Rico which ended in a shootout. A Boricua is slang for a Puerto Rican native.

The first concert of Calle 13 in Miami is scheduled this Thurday March the 26th  2010 at 8.30 p.m. At 06.00 p.m. – 2 and a half hours before the concert - the world-renowned Salsa and Latin Pop singer/songwriter Gloria Estefan is organizing a demonstration and march for the ‘Ladies in White’ (wives and relatives of Cuba’s political prisoners who tried to stage peaceful opposition marches in Havana earlier this month, but were set upon by government security agents and a pro-government mob) in the streets of Little Havana (also in Miami) to express her solidarity and support to them.