Cuba Son

How is it possible that men of this age can make music with such force? The band ‘Son Jubilados’ (the pensioners) consists of eight talented musicians with an average age of past seventy. They learned the trade in the ‘university of the street’ and still perform today. Not only on stages, but also and especially in the street: on the sun-drenched squares, steps, porticoes and markets of Santiago, the home base of ‘son’, the most popular style of Cuban dance music. ‘After our deaths, we will still be playing, because we hand down our music to the next generation’, one of them says. Wherever they play, people dance, sing and clap along. After all, it is claimed, every Cuban has the heart of a bohemian.