It’s 1.30am and the band El Guajiro y su Changüí, led by freestyling lyricist Celso Fernández, are cooking on all burners. They’re onstage at an open-roofed venue in the city of Guantánamo in Cuba – just 20 miles from the infamous US-owned prison in Guantánamo Bay – and playing changüí, the region’s hyperlocal music. Changüí is reportedly a mashup of a Congolese word meaning “jump for joy” and the Guantánamo slang for “party”, and sure enough, this is some of the most exuberant, party-starting music imaginable.
Changüí is not for spectators – anybody can be part of the show. Havana star Elito Revé suddenly jumps on stage and joins in on the scraped-metal guayo and vocals, soon followed by Yarima Blanco, a hotshot on the guitar-like tres. On the first day of the 11th edition of the festival Changüí Elio Revé Matos – named after Elito’s father – these musicians, performing for a nine-judge panel in a competition, are playing changüí the way it’s been done for more than 150 years. For the next three days and nights in late June, the whole city of Guantánamo will come alive with music, and more than 20 mostly local groups will play multiple times a day.
But today’s Guantánamo is very different to the one I left behind in 2019, after spending close to three years recording these groups “in situ” and writing a photo book. The loss of tourism during Covid depleted the island, along with Trump’s 2021 reinstatement of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, which has seriously limited the flow of money in and out.
Though sanctions were slightly eased by Joe Biden in May, Cuba is still deep in crisis. There is no medicine and numerous hospitals have closed. Food is often left in the ground as trucks don’t have enough petrol to deliver it into the cities. The peso is devalued and inflation is rampant – a half kilo of beans costs three days pay or more for most Cubans, including the musicians. Power cuts of between four and 16 hours a day are common (although thankfully not during the festival). More than 4% of the island’s population have left since 2022, including some of the musicians and dancers, and a couple of groups could not make the festival amid worries about there not being enough food to feed them all.
“But we are resilient and we will get through it,” says changüí historian Gabriel Rojas Perez. “If the world explodes, the only survivors will be cockroaches and Cubans.”
Changüí is one of the oldest musical forms in Cuba: a rural, riff-based, call-and-response, largely improvised homegrown dance music that came out of the plantations around the mid- to late-1800s. Rural communities would gather after a week working the plantations to sing and dance from Friday to Monday morning, or even longer on holidays. The music trickled into the city with migrating farmers in the early 1900s. Then, like blues, it spread across the country in the postwar years, after Elio Revé changed up the instrumentation and moved to Havana, seeping it into a lot of Cuban music from Buena Vista Social Club to Los Van Van.
Until the mid-1940s changüí was rural music, with no official groups, until composer and musicologist Rafael Inciarte Brioso cherrypicked the best Guantánamo musicians to form Grupo Changüí de Guantánamo – a version of which still exists today. They are considered the standard-be