March 26--REPORTING FROM HAVANA -- A few days after President Obama's historic visit to Cuba, an arguably bigger rock star is getting ready to play Havana.
Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones are playing a free concert in Cuba on Friday night, capping a week of milestones for the island nation.
Hundreds of thousands of fans were already beginning to gather around Havana's Ciudad Deportiva complex, where concert organizers had shipped in a stage the length of a city block from Europe for the event.
"We've performed in many incredible places, but this concert in Havana is going to be a historic event for us," Jagger said in Spanish in a video the group released before the event. "Thank you for welcoming us to your beautiful country."
The concert -- a surprise last stop on the band's Latin American tour -- comes after a whirlwind week of reconciliation between the U.S. and Cuba. After decades of tension dating back to the Cold War, Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro met Monday in talks aimed at increasing dialogue and easing economic restrictions on trade between the nations. On Tuesday, the leaders of once-enemy nations sat side by side at a baseball stadium as a Cuban team took on the Tampa Bay Rays.
Like the baseball game, the Rolling Stones show is another event that would have once seemed impossible.
There was little room for rock 'n' roll in Fidel Castro's Communist revolution, which distrusted bands like the Beatles and Rolling Stones as agents of cultural imperialism. Rock records were hard to find, and while some musicians experimented with rock in underground venues, anything too public or flamboyant risked reprisals from the government.
Famed Cuban musician Silvio Rodriguez lost his TV show in the late 1960s after he defended the Beatles on the air.
Cuban leaders saw counterculture music of the 1960s and '70s as a direct challenge to their authority, in part because it had its own revolutionary air, said Eric Zolov, a Latin American studies professor at State University of New York at Stony Brook, who has studied rock music in Cuba. "It's subversive," he said. "It challenges hierarchy, challenges paternalism and is anti-authoritarian. You can't build a revolution built on irreverence."
Restrictions on music are long gone, and rock has since been eclipsed by reggaeton, rap and electronic music as the most popular forms of music among young Cubans.
But for a generation of older Cubans who loved rock music -- albeit quietly -- the Stones show Friday may be as significant as Obama's visit, Zolov said.
"For people of that generation who looked at what was happening in the counterculture in other countries, it's got to be a kind of vindication that we were right, it is revolutionary to embrace rock 'n' roll," Zolov said.
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