Mezcla plays at the concert tribute to John Lennon, the night after the dedication of the Lennon park and statue.  Pablo Menendez is the guitar player in white.

Marxist-Lennonists by Pablo Menendez

Born in Oakland, California, Pablo Menendez, son of blues/jazz/folk singer Barbara Dane, went to Cuba in 1966 at age 14 to study music for a year.  Instead, he made Cuba his home.  Here are Pablo's memories of the Beatles music in Cuba, and comments on playing at the Lennon tribute concert with the band he founded, "Mezcla."

The Beatles were never "officially denounced" but there were problems around rock and roll and the Beatles etc. thirty years or more ago, and for many people, starting with Abel Prieto, Cuban Minister of Culture, it was a very important emotional thing to "vindicate" John Lennon and the Beatles and rock and roll. So the concert and the "official" dedication at the Lennon park had a lot of extra-musical symbolic importance.  The U.S. press has toed the line once more in characterizing our reality by repeating that "the Beatles were banned by the Communist Government" which is not exactly true.  I mean, back then, Cuba didn't even have a Culture Ministry and there never was a "party line" on the Beatles as far as I know.  There were lots of different individual interpretations about what was or was not "revolutionary culture" in a country that had just had a massive literacy campaign and where reality had been altered radically, leaving many short-sighted (or not thoroughly educated) people in a state of confusion actually, or grasping for new dogmas to replace the ones subverted by the triumphant Revolution.  I can think back personally and remember that we used to play the Beatles and all the latest U.S. rock and roll at our parties at the Art School (Cubanacan) in the '60s with no problems at all.   I  was just talking to some veterans of the first Venceremos Brigades of the late '60s that remember hearing the Beatles and other U.S. rock played over the sound systems of their agricultural volunteer work camps . . . and I do too when we art students used to go chip in during the grapefruit harvest on the Isle of Youth.

Back to the concert in 2000.  The Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, who was a Beatles fan in high school back then and has a very good novel that spends a lot of time with the characters debating the merits of Lennon and McCartney, organized what is at least the third major national event honoring Lennon.  (The other two were organized by us musicians with support from Cultural Ministry dependencies). The concert was held at the Tribuna Anti Imperialista in front of the U.S. Interests Section (U.S. Embassy).  So, seeing that huge crowd of young and middle aged people, including the Minister of Culture, at the end of the concert holding hands (like they were singing We Shall Overcome, or the Internationale) singing Hey Jude and Imagine together with all the participating artists, was quite a sight! The sound quality and the performances of the artists and their pronunciation of English or expertise in "American" rock styles was not uniform . . . some were actually pretty good.  Some did pretty close "covers" of the Beatles or later covers of Lennon's songs, others were more creative.

Mezcla did a version of Norweigian Wood with Bata drums and jazz sax and it sounded pretty good.  Then we did "How Do You Sleep?"  I wanted to say something about how artists are human and made mistakes sometimes...and then "dedicate" the song to people who stand in the way of art in the abstract . . . meaning both the F.B.I. agents who checked out Lennon and gave him visa problems and the dogmatic people in Cuba who wanted to beat up kids for listening to "American music", but the organizers had used the format of having a young couple that reads the news on T.V. to read things about the songs and Lennnon  between songs to ease the stage tech changes, so they had asked people to just sing their songs and not talk, so, in the interest of collectivity, I did just that.  The texts read by the two announcers were pretty close to what I wanted to say anyway. It worked out fine, and people don't relate to the English lyric anyway, but more the spirit of the performance and everybody spoke very well of us later.  It was on National T.V. and people loved it.

Pablo  Menendez with his mother, U.S blues/jazz/folk singer Babara Dane.

Click on the image below to learn more about . . .

Pablo Menendez & "Mezcla"

Osamu Menendez & "Havana"

Amaury Perez

Barbara Dane

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Text (c) 2002 Pablo Menendez Photos courtesy of Pablo Menendez & Barbara Dane