Havana’s new trendsetters
Hirsute style has never been stronger in Cuba, but you can forget the whole Fidel Castro look
On a recent evening, tourists in banded hats and guayabera shirts climbed out of pink 1950s-era American cars to puff cigars, drink mojitos and listen to Buena Vista Social Club classics at the Hotel Nacional. It was one of those frozen-in-time Havana scenes that Americans, enticed by their flag once again flying over the US embassy and the promised easing of a 50-year embargo, can’t wait to witness.
They may want to avert their eyes from the new Havana style on display down the block at Chacal & Yakarta’s “Party Full Nasty” reggaeton concert. In a scene out of Magic Mike, the stars attract a crowd of ogling women wrapped in bandage dresses — but they also draw an army of acolytes adorned with curated beards, towering bouffants and lots and lots of pleather.
At first glance, the scruffy audience recalls another outdated Cuban archetype: the Barbudos rebels who grew beards while hiding in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Yet the trendsetters of modern Havana are not Fidel Castro and Che Guevara but El Yonki, Los Desiguales and other commandants of the reggaeton revolution. The obsessively coiffed troops wear a uniform of diagonally cut oversize T-shirts and harem sweatpants, and they like to shout lewd lyrics that rile the crowd (“Mami, scream if you want ...” is not exactly “Hasta la Victoria Siempre”).
“A lot of people are following us, and we are a model for them and how they live their lives,” Michel Anaya Salazar, 26, better known by his stage name, El Happy, said as he explained his grooming regimen and showed off his “bling bling” religious bracelets and Cazal sunglasses. “I feel responsible.”
There is surely plenty for which to hold El Happy responsible. Critics have pointed out that “Cubatón”, like other iterations of reggaeton, can be musically grating in its tinny repetition, and lyrically misogynistic in its vulgar depictions of women. But perhaps highest on the list of things that El Happy and his comrades should feel responsible for is sculpted eyebrows.
“Same as women,” said Africa Amada Rodriguez Cruz, who hung on her boyfriend’s hairless arm before the “Party Full Nasty” show. “They pluck their eyebrows and shave their whole bodies.”
The look, like the music, is everywhere. The hundreds of reggaeton fans with dyed and gelled hair who sit at dusk on the wall of the Malecón, the promenade overlooking the Bay of Havana, look like a perched flock of tropical birds. And the beats pump out of 50s-era cars and computer screens (and computer screens attached to the dashboards of 50s-era cars) across the island.
Back in 2011 the government tried to stop the imperialist menace. First it complained that the exceedingly explicit hit Chupi Chupi “put the soul of the nation in the balance”. Then, in 2012, Orlando Vistel Columbie, the president of the Cultural Ministry’s music institute, banned the music from radio and television, declaring: “Neither vulgarity nor mediocrity will be able to tarnish the richness of Cuban music.” The music survived, however.
“The thing that keeps reggaeton alive,” El Happy said, “is the transcendence of reggaeton.”
As the government has relaxed restrictions, the music and the fashion influence of its stars have spread across Cuba and taken over Havana. Fans have overcome highly restricted internet access by passing around reggaeton videos like contraband via memory sticks. They get pleather gear that they believe to be imported from the United States or Mexico at private (non-government) shops on Galiano Street, near the towering, scaffold-encased Capitolio dome.
But the true stamp of reggaeton’s influence here is the hair.
On the streets of Havana, fans wear their hair like Alejandro Santoya, better known as El Yonki (derived from the word “junkie”). El Yonki’s big hit is a song called La Barba, or The Beard. “It signifies experience,” he said of facial hair on a recent evening, as he rhythmically pumped the brakes of his expensive Chinese sedan and reached into the glove compartment for hair wax. “It gives you a serious look.”
In Old Havana, where old men play Buena Vista songs for tourists by the Havana Club Rum Museum, Bittista Pérez Rubisel, 25, who goes by Tito, came out of a sandwich shop that played a loop of visually and lyrically filthy reggaeton videos. He expressed admiration for the “European”-style beards of Los Desiguales (hit song: Mas Fashion). When asked how a European beard compares with that of Fidel Castro, Rubisel turned reverent.
“He can wear it how he wants,” he said, kissing his hand and pointing it to the sky. “He’s the jefe.” Rubisel felt freer to speak about haircuts. “Mine is the shark,” he said, running his hand down the length of his hair. “It’s shaved on the sides, but the top goes all the way down to the back.”
Rubisel then ran through other popular hairstyles. To display “the scissors”, he pointed at his friend, who had a small patch of hair in the back of his otherwise shaved head, like a slipping skullcap. There was “the Yonki”, named in honour of El Yonki, in which sides are shaved below a towering top. And then there was “the steak”, which Rubisel said consisted of a flattened top hanging off a shaved head like a combover. Sensing some bewilderment about the name “the steak”, Rubisel turned to the visual aid of the ham hanging from his sandwich.
To get the new Havana look, young men visit special barbershops around the city. The undisputed mecca of these salons is Donde Dorian.
Camouflaged on a residential street opposite a wall with obedient graffiti extolling the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, the salon’s drab facade gives way to a bright front room selling Hollywood cigarettes, Cristal beer and espresso from a vintage machine. Above the polished bar is an LG flat-screen TV playing the ubiquitous reggaeton videos of poolside bacchanals.
Around 11pm on a recent evening, a line of young men waited in the back room for their turn in the seat of Dorian Carbonell Fernandéz, 31, who was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and sculpting the eyebrows of Robert Richard Esteves with a straight edge razor. Fernandéz looked in a mirror, lined with boxes of Bulgari and Fendi colognes, and reached over the fence of Esteves’ hair to pluck up wilted locks within. He then blew out the hair up with a blow-dryer. Fernandéz’s hair blower always points up.
“They all come to the salon before going out,” Fernandéz said of his nearly 20 clients a night. His own balding hair closely cropped, Fernandéz said he started in a state-run barbershop but had creative differences with his partners. “Back then there was no styling and they wouldn’t even wash hair,” he remembered. “I wanted to be different.” His dream is to start a chain and help bring Cuban men’s style back to the glory days.
Back down the street from the Nacional, one of Fernandéz’s most accomplished clients, Chacal, jumped on stage and sang: “Mami grita si tu quieres un tubazo, un tubazo, un tubazo.” A crush of women answered in the affirmative, pumping their chests as if doing vertical sit-ups.
While many men in the crowd admired the singers’ hair, Miguel Estevez Figueredo stood by a red leather wall in the back of the club, speaking over the din and ignoring the repeated brushes of pleathered shoulders as fans pushed toward the stage. He said he preferred the longer beard of other Cuban heroes. So he wanted a beard like Fidel’s? “Different,” he said. “Darker.”
They pluck their eyebrows and shave their whole bodies