Castro rocks to anti-U.S. Welsh band

HAVANA, Cuba -- Welsh band Manic Street Preachers have become one of the biggest Western acts to play in communist Cuba.

President Fidel Castro drew cheers from the youthful crowd when he took a seat just before Manic Street Preachers performed an hour-long set with songs denouncing U.S. policy towards the island nation.

Fans paid just 25 cents --- 17 pence -- for Saturday's concert by the Welsh stars, whose hits include A Design For Life, Everything Must Go and If You Tolerate This.

Castro, 74, stood and applauded after lead singer James Dean Bradfield performed an acoustic version of "Baby Elian," an anti-American tribute to the seven-year-old boy at the centre of an international custody dispute who was returned to Cuba from the U.S. last year.

The song calls the United States "the devil's playground" and says that Elian was "kidnapped to the promised land."

Band members also dedicated a song to three-time Cuban Olympic boxing champion Felix Savon.

Castro fulfilled a personal ambition of the band's three Welsh musicians by meeting them backstage before taking his place with 5,000 fans for the invitation-only show at Havana's Karl Marx theatre, frequently a venue for political rallies.

Members of the avowedly anti-American band had previously said that their presence in Cuba, to launch a new album called "Know Your Enemy," was a "gesture of solidarity" with the island and that if Castro came to the concert, it would be "the greatest honour" of their lives.

Times change

"They were very nervous when Fidel came in," one backstage source said.

Castro's government frowned on Western music as a "decadent" influence in the decades after his 1959 Cuban Revolution, and many Cubans recall being harassed for wearing long hair or listening to rock and pop music from Europe or the U.S..

But Castro has lately been at pains to show times have changed, first by appearing at a homage to slain Beatles star John Lennon last year and then by attending Saturday's concert.

Castro was accompanied by Cuba's long-haired Culture Minister Abel Prieto, a poet, throughout the concert.

"That the president of the island comes to this concert is truly a revolution," said Gil Pla, a singer with local rock group Joker, who was at the concert. "For a long time, we were catalogued as anti-socials, but this shows that now we are OK, they have realised that rock is culture too."

Manic Street Preachers
Government of Cuba

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