One of the most enthralling events of the last few days was the Rolling Stones concert in Havana on Friday night. I once went to one of these strange events , as a work assignment, in Washington DC, and thought I had been clever to take binoculars so that I could get a good view of the caperings of Mr Jagger and Mr Richard (as people of my generation still think of him). Alas, the sound was so worryingly powerful (loud won’t do as a word, the first wave from the banks of speakers actually seemed to strike me in the chest like a light but definite blow), that I had to spend the whole evening with my fingers jammed into my ears to preserve my hearing. So I could only take brief breaks from this to use the field glasses. If I ever go to one again (Heaven forfend) I aim to take earplugs *and* binoculars.

I reckon they are some sort of pagan celebration, a pre-Christian manifestation like football matches, in which people willingly take leave of their reason in return for feeling they are part of something greater than themselves. In my view this something is not very nice, and I find it rather frightening. Why is it that men lose their reason in crowds so much more than they do alone?



Soccer and rock music both leave me cold, but I have been tempted by this mass emotion once or twice on big demonstrations (I recall feeling a twinge of it at Easter 1966 in Trafalgar Square, my first CND ban-the-bomb demonstration and the culmination of a couple of days of mass politics, which had included sleeping on the hard wooden floor of a church hall in Kentish Town and a lot of foot slogging and shouting). It was coming on to drizzle, there had been some ritual scuffles up towards South Africa House, and we were singing a parody of 'Jerusalem' the only line of which I recall being '...and that the bland shall lead the bland'.

But I didn’t like the loss of control involved and held that part of myself back. I hope I always will. People like me fear unreason. I’m fairly sure that in any but a very advanced society I would have been clubbed to death quite early in life, for the serious offence of not being one of the crowd. School bullying is a modern instance of this which does sometimes end in death, though usually in the form of suicide.

But I digress. In this moment in Havana, Cuba did a sad thing. It went straight from the depths of Castroism into the new neo-liberal world (I use this expression consciously and deliberately to annoy a conservative friend of mine who says that the use of the term is an invariable sign of hopeless stupidity. I simply don’t agree. In fact I think this is a very good example of why it is a useful formula. Capitalism has not defeated communism in a triumph of Christian conservatism. It has merged with Communism in a bizarre synthesis of Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping, in which it is glorious to get rich, personal morality is more or less irrelevant, the state monitors minds and regulates all, but yet takes no responsibility for anything, and the freedom of the market entails no freedom of thought, but there are lots of consumer goods and self-indugences to make up.

Cuba was admittedly never all that Christian, thanks to the great power of Santeria, a distillation of African pre-Christian faiths. But Christianity was certainly one of the things the Castro despotism strongly discouraged in its early, murderous years, when the Guevara monster was supervising mass shootings at La Cabana, and smirking at lawless show trials, and Huber Matos was, as he delicately put it, having his genitals pierced by Mr Castro’s torturers, for daring to criticise his old comrade.

And Pope Francis, interestingly, tried and failed to get the concert switched to another day because (like me) he reckoned that raucous, sexually-charged and far from reverent event such as this shouldn’t really be held on Good Friday in any part of the world where the Christian faith is widely practised.

I’ve given up trying to explain to most people why this is important. Perhaps I should mention the role of a certain rather famous raucous crowd on the first Good Friday, to give you some idea. But so few people now recall Good Friday as a solemn day of penitence and reflection (though we’re happy to respect similar days in the calendars of other faiths) that it is more or less useless to suggest that it matters. Of course this mixture of indifference and scorn is reserved for the Christian faith, the one we’re all trying so hard to escape because we’re afraid its strictures might in some way apply to us and load us with obligations we dislike. I wonder how the Rolling Stones management would respond to a similar request to avoid performing during a solemn commemoration in a Muslim or Hindu location.

But back to the concert and the coverage of it. There was a lot of talk about how rock music was *once* banned in Cuba, as if it was seen as subversive by the Castro despotism. In fact (the use of the word ‘once’ is a rather feeble nod to this) this has not been the case for many years.

The Guardian, in an excellent report on this event http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/25/rolling-stones-cuba-historic-concert-diplomacy noted ‘Very little rock music was played on the [Cuban] radio and TV until John Lennon released the politically driven Power to the People, which was approved by the Cuban government and heralded a change that continues. (Lennon now has a park named after him in Havana, as well as a statue of him sitting on a bench)’. That statue was unveiled 16 years ago. And Wikipedia records that ‘Power to the People’ (check the lyrics for yet more evidence of John Lennon’s famously stupendous poetic talent) was released in March 1971, 45 years ago.

So perhaps there are other reasons why the Stones have not performed in Havana before , apart from the alleged subversiveness of rock music (which is in my view not at all subversive in Communist states, since the things it attacks, family, conservative culture, self-restraint, etc, are not things such states value). Could it be that money and logistics played a part?

I was interested by this part of the Guardian story : ‘Funding was the next problem. With average salaries of about $20 a month, the vast majority of Cubans are unable to afford even a cut-price ticket, let alone the usual sky-high fees for a Stones gig. The answer was to stage a free concert, a throwback to the band’s reputation-making gigs at the end of the 1960s...

'...In Cuba, they have managed to put on a free concert thanks to the sponsorship of Gregory Elias, a 62-year-old entrepreneur from Curaçao.’

This is also interesting

http://www.rollingstones.com/2016/03/01/the-rolling-stones-announce-free-concert-in-cuba/

Also note in the Guardian story that Gorki Aguila, a Cuban musician not beloved by his country’s authorities because he is very rude about them, had his doubts : ‘Although he is a fan of the Stones, he feels the British rockers are being used. “If I could speak to them, I would tell them they are disrespecting the rights of artists in this country who are not able to express ourselves,” he said. “The tyrants here are trying to portray an image of Cuba as an island of happy people. If the Rolling Stones don’t talk about what is going on here [in terms of human rights violations], then they are indirectly serving as collaborators with the Cuban tyranny.”'

If The Rolling Stones did mention political liberty during their concert, I have not seen a report of it (Has anyone? Please let me know if so). Barack Obama certainly did, most emphaticall, mention this issue, on live Cuban TV as far as I can find out, though the state newspapers did not mention this. He also pointedly met dissidents at the US Embassy in Havana. Just before he arrived Cuban police arrested (yet again) the ‘Women in White’ whom I once saw outside the Church of Santa Rita in Miramar, making their extraordinarily courageous peaceful demonstration against the imprisonment of their husbands for political dissent .

Cuba always locks up dissidents on what it says are normal criminal charges, and thus denies having any political prisoners. It’s an evasive lie. I remain deeply perplexed by the strange death in a supposed road accident in 2012 of the late Oswaldo Paya, an utterly principled opponent of the Castro state who pointedly sought no support from the USA and was opposed to neoliberalism. Look it up and see what you think.

The Sunday Telegraph reported that senior officials of the Castro police state (its ‘Committees for the Defence of the Revolution’ monitor the lives and thoughts of the people in every street and block of flats) had been present at the concert.

I’m not surprised. I imagine they’re as indifferent to Good Friday as the Stones were. That common, shared indifference to what was once the most solemn day in Christendom is an interesting symbol of the fact that the formerly Communist states seem always to go straight from Communism to the most ultra-liberal, secular form of society, well symbolised by the Stones and their hymns to self-rule.