Cuba discovers The Beatles, so move over Che!

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Four decades after the event, Cuba has caught Beatlemania.

Fab Four-related venues are springing up all over the Communist island nation, most recently with the opening of a new nightclub called Yellow Submarine.

Talk about revisionism!

Back in the mid-1960s, when girls were fainting en masse over mop-haired John, Paul, Ringo and George, Cuba’s revolutionary authorities weren’t amused.

Back then, the bonds between counterculture rock and leftist politics hadn’t quite been established. As mop-haired turned to long-haired Beatlemania, all Cuban authorities saw was cannabis-smoking singers with bell-bottom jeans and loose sexual mores (harummph… this in Cuba?) thumbing their communal nose at authority.

Beatles music was banned throughout Cuba. It was considered almost treasonous. A house band that attempted to sing Beatles songs would have been arrested. Just listening to ’Strawberry fields forever’ was an official state sin that could have got you in serious trouble.

How ironic that Korda’s iconic image of Che Guevara and the army fatigues that he and fellow revolutionaries wore were adopted by the “Fab Four” and fellow “hippies” as symbols of counterculture rebellion.

Ah, therein lay the problem. Rebellion?

In 1968, Lennon’s song ‘Revolution’ was released during a time of student protests around the world, including against the Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Cuba had just had its own revolution and sure didn’t want another. And let’s not turn the conversation to drugs! The Beatles psychedelic ’Lucy in the sky with diamonds’ (LSD anyone?) must have given Fidel & Co. hallucinations.

Turn the clock forward to the year 2000. Location: a quiet park at Calle 17 and Calle 6, in Havana’s quiet Vedado district. Fidel himself is on hand for the unveiling of a life-size bronze statue of John Lennon on the twentieth anniversary of Lennon’s death.

You can see, even touch, him (Lennon, that is) today, dressed in open-neck shirt, sitting on a bench, his head slightly tilted, right leg resting on his left knee, with his arm draped casually over the back of the dark-green cast-iron bench, with plenty of room for anyone who wants to sit down beside him. The sculpture is by Cuban artist José Villa, who inscribed the words “People say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one” at Lennon’s feet. By night a spotlight denies him sleep. A custodio is there 24/7 to make sure no-one steals Lennon’s glasses. A memorial is held at Parque Lennon every anniversary of his death.

Cuban authorities have since rehabilitated The Beatles, as attested by the opening of Yellow Submarine, across from Parque Lennon, at the corner of Calle 17 and Calle 6.

The former Atelier Club dating back to the 1950s has been cleverly redone with suitably psychedelic décor. Canary yellow seating. Dark blue walls bearing Beatles lyrics. Even porthole windows, and interior piping á la the famous Yellow Submarine album cover. And the house band plays all the favorites. Best yet is the eyes-closed, dreamy-smiley response of the patrons (most of whom are in their 40s and 50s) as the entire crowd sings and sways in unison to ’Let it be’ , as if cast back to an era and experience that Cubans had been denied.

The new club comes courtesy of Artex, the State-run cultural state agency that runs clubs across the isle.

Thus, life-size figures of the Fab Four greet you at the Centro Cultural Los Beatles, which opened in 2009 in Bayamo, in Granma province, where the local group Cubayam sings Beatles songs on weekends. And there they are again, in Holguín, seated by the door at La Caverna The Beatles, which attempts to recreate The Cavern Club—the venue in Liverpool where The Beatles got their start—with graffiti-strewn walls and posters.

Forget salsa! Cubans have suddenly discovered how to dance to the Twist!

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