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It’s not the Havana of the 1960s but today’s New York, yet the pianist has sometimes felt they are one and the same. He wakes up at noon in his 25th-floor Manhattan apartment, which has a view of buildings arranged like a scale model on the horizon, where everything human seems momentarily wiped out. The pianist had always wanted to live in New York, and here he is. He went to bed late the night before, as he’s used to being a nocturnal creature. “I worked in cabaret all my life,” he says. “The early morning hours have always inspired me.”

He makes himself a Cuban coffee, has breakfast, watches television or does some shopping, goes to the gym, spends time swimming, although he admits, “I’m not a good swimmer.” He sometimes does light exercise, nothing involving heavy weights or anything that might affect his fingering — the way he uses his fingers to draw music from the Yamaha piano sitting near the window, as if the skyscrapers, the lights, and the rooftops of New York were his great audience, witnesses to the eternal ballad of Meme Solís.

He wears a black turtleneck sweater, a striped jacket, matching trousers, and spotless shoes, all perfectly tailored to his 1.82-meter frame. Solís, 87, always seems ready to perform, ever at the ready, just as he was when he was not yet 15 and not yet one of Cuba’s most popular musicians, the accompanist to the country’s great female voices, or the creator of the quartet that took Cuba by storm.

He had been studying music since the age of six at the Rita Capú Conservatory in Santa Clara when he was approached to accompany Olga Guillot, the Queen of Bolero, on the piano. “I was terrified to accompany that giant. That woman was a goddess at that time. I accompanied her, and that marked the beginning of my career.” With Guillot, he began a path as an accompanist, forging close relationships with the most powerful voices of the Havana music scene in the mid-20th century.

“He is a great accompanying pianist and one of the best vocal harmonizers Cuba has ever produced. In both cases, he is perhaps one of the last exponents of two schools to which he contributed the perspective and feeling of his generation,” says philologist and researcher Rosa Marquetti, who is currently working on the biography of the pianist, composer, and singer.

Early in his life, it was Guillot who told him he was going to be “a great artist.” “I didn’t believe her at all; I aspired to be a good pianist, but that stuck with me,” Solís says. He learned something from Guillot: “She told me, ‘The day you go on stage, never do it timidly; always go out thinking that you are the best.’”

Solís also cherishes everything he learned from the other women he accompanied on the piano. Playing with the singer Elena Burke was his first “great experience” when he decided to move from the center of the country to Havana, a capital city that left him speechless. “I’ve known and worked in several capital cities, but the impression I had upon arriving in Havana was the greatest I’ve ever had; it was unique, I don’t think there was another capital city that had that kind of nightlife at that time.”

Havana in the 1950s

Havana was the city of cabarets, nightclubs, and music on every corner. Havana in the 1950s, even in the early days of the Cuban Revolution — which triumphed when Solís was 18 — was the place “where everyone wanted to be.” “People say New York is the city that never sleeps, but that was Havana. There were shows until 6 a.m. There were countless cabarets, with shows, with dancers. There was the Tropicana, the Sans Souci, the Capri, the Havana Hilton, the Parisien, the Riviera…”

Amid so much grandeur and vitality, Solís stood out as the young man who began performing with Burke at Club 21. “Elena taught me a great deal about music. Accompanying her has been one of the most difficult tasks of my life. She was an extraordinary singer. She trained me for her. She loved me very much, helped me a lot in my beginnings, and showed me a whole new world.”

Later, other great figures of the country’s artistic scene came into his life, such as Rosita Fornés and Moraima Secada. “With Rosita, I did my first television program; with her, I learned to move beyond the piano,” he says. Moraima, for her part, was pure “dark humor,” the woman with the greatest “mental agility” he has ever known. “With a beautiful musicality. I fell in love with Moraima’s lovely way of singing. She sang mezzo-soprano; it was a unique voice, and she sang with such feeling; she was the one who captivated me the most. We became very close friends. She left me with her temperament, a precious friendship that lasted until the end of her days.”

It was with Secada that he formed his first vocal group, El Cuarteto de Meme Solís, alongside Horacio Riquelme and Ernesto Martín. “The quartet was everything to me,” says Solís, who, in addition to playing piano, sang third voice in the group. Years later, model Farah María took over as the female vocalist for the quartet, which then became known as Los Memes. By the mid-1960s, they were among the public’s favorite artists. They performed all over the island. They were, as Solís says, “a boom,” which truly erupted when he released his song Otro amanecer (Another Dawn).

By that time, invitations to perform on stages around the world had already begun to arrive, but the Cuban government always resisted. “I wasn’t part of the Revolution, and it was very strange that an artist with the popularity I had at that time wasn’t part of it.” That’s how Solís first encountered censorship. Jorge “Papito” Serguera, then-president of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television, told him: “Either you join, or doors will start closing on you.” That’s exactly what happened. “They started taking us off television first, then off theaters, off the most popular venues. They left us with the cabaret and the radio program.” Then not even that. Solís resigned from his job and requested to leave the country permanently.

It wasn’t that simple. The Cuban government wouldn’t let him go so easily. He was pushed into a shadow world of culture. “I made music for other artists clandestinely, while also studying.” It was during that period that he learned orchestral instrumentation. When the government enacted the Anti-Vagrancy Law in 1970, he was required to report to the Ministry of Labor and accept a job. “When the director there—who was a fan of mine — saw me, he felt so sorry,” the pianist recalls. He ended up working for several months in a cardboard factory. People could hardly believe it when they saw the artist doing those tasks. “It can’t be that you’re here,” they would say to him.

He had to wait a long 17 years. After talks with the government of then-Spanish prime minister Felipe González, Fidel Castro agreed to send two dozen prisoners to Spain. Solís, who wasn’t a prisoner, was among them. He left Cuba 38 years ago and hasn’t set foot on the island, his first stage, since then. When he arrived in Madrid, a large crowd was waiting for him at Barajas Airport. “I came to think that no one remembered me anymore, that my audience had forgotten Meme Solís. But that wasn’t the case.” Thus, Solis began his long international career that continues to this day: the pianist has no desire to stop working.

“I feel very bad when I’m not producing, I don’t want to rest, resting too much is bad for me,” he says.

Life outside of Cuba

After Spain, he spent three years in Miami, a city that welcomed him with packed theaters, where he found many of the same people who went to his shows in Havana’s cabarets. Later, he arrived in New York, staying at a friend’s house, who offered him a couch and food — “enough to get started.” Exile gave him the chance to continue being Meme Solís: he worked in clubs, took part in several Off‑Broadway musical productions, performed in countries around the world, appeared at festivals, and received honors such as the Great Musical Legends Medal from the University of Miami, as well as being named honorary president of the Bolero Association in Spain.

“Meme is a legend of Cuban music. One of the most important harmonic masters of all time,” says Félix Romeo, his representative. “What makes him unique is the quality of his art, which has transcended 67 years of his career. He has reinvented himself without losing his essence over time, while maintaining his core principles. What has happened with Meme is something that happens very rarely. He is about to turn 88 and remains relevant with his longtime fans and all those who have joined him over time. He endures because of his talent and the love and respect that the Cuban people hold for him.”

Some time ago, Cuban singer Malena Burke, Elena’s daughter, asked him to go to a recording studio. “Meme, why don’t we go into a studio and record?” she suggested. Solís agreed. “Malena has been an extension of Elena; we have something very special. We’ve worked more together than Elena and I ever did.” From this encounter came the album Malena Burke Sings to Meme Solís, produced by the singer’s daughter, Lena Burke. The album was nominated for Best Traditional Tropical Album at last year’s Latin Grammy Awards.

It is a record that feels like a return to the Havana nights of Solís’s early years. “I said: I don’t want Malena in a recording booth where I can’t see her, but rather in front of the piano, where we can see each other’s expressions, see each other’s breathing, and that’s how that live album was recorded. In two early mornings.” Another of his latest works is the album Juntos de Nuevo (Together Again), with singer Luis Alberto Fernández.

Life seems to have been kind to Solís. He is the composer of more than 300 works, spanning both popular and classical music; the author or collaborator on more than 25 albums; and has performed countless concerts before an audience. He is not a man who harbors resentment — not even toward his own country, which condemned him to ostracism for far too long. Even so, he has no intention of returning to Cuba, because the paradisiacal place of his youth no longer exists.

“I carry Cuba within me,” he says, “but perhaps I was beaten down so badly, and what I went through was so harsh, that I have no desire to go back. I may long for that Cuba, but not the Cuba I see today. It’s very sad. Sometimes I ask myself: how could there have been such a drastic change from the Cuba I knew to this one? That’s why I’m afraid to think that one day I might return and be disappointed.”

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Dawn breaks in Havana. It’s May Day – Labor Day – and people begin gathering early at four strategic points in the city, in order to march with signs and banners to the José Martí Anti-Imperialist Platform. In the year 2000, Fidel Castro ordered that the public event venue be built across from the United States Embassy, in order for him to speak directly to the U.S. and demand the return of Elián González, the six-year-old boy whom Cuba turned into a political trophy in the eyes of Washington.

Today, it all seems so distant: Castro died a decade ago. And Elián, now 32, graduated as an industrial engineer and has a daughter. Certain things, however, remain unchanged: the enduring cold war with the Americans, and the warning to Cubans that, if they miss the annual parade, they could lose their meager monthly salary — even their job — or at least earn the disapproval of their boss.

Irma, an epidemiologist who asks that, as a precaution, her real name not be used by EL PAÍS, isn’t even worried about getting into trouble anymore. “I’m not going to the Platform,” she says over the phone from her workplace, the Institute of Immunology and Hematology in the Havana neighborhood of Vedado. “I can’t make that walk while I’m starving, no way; I have to save my energy.”

Some people got up before dawn and joined the throng heading toward the Malecón, the esplanade that stretches along the coast of Havana. José Luis Amador, a resident of the Palatino neighborhood, told the state press that the homeland was in danger and, therefore, the people had to “defend it.” A taxi driver from El Mónaco heard the urban singer Bebeshito’s music blasting near Carlos III Street, while some neighbors were finalizing preparations for the patriotic event.

In other parts of the capital, however, there was silence. People were staying home; it didn’t seem like the government had called for a major parade. “Most people aren’t in that May Day spirit,” the taxi driver says. “People are hungry, people are fed up. I was just at the hospital: I got my daughter’s tests, because I know how to get things done. With a little money for the doctors, the antibiotic appeared.”

The caravan of workers, numbering more than half-a-million Havana residents, according to official figures, carried Cuban and Palestinian flags, a banner that read “Ideas are our weapons,” a sign demanding the release of Nicolás Maduro from a New York City jail, as well as portraits of José Martí, Camilo Cienfuegos, Che Guevara and, of course, Fidel Castro. None of the images of Castro showed him in his later years (when he was a frail old man in his Adidas tracksuit), but rather as the young guerrilla fighter wearing an olive green uniform: strong, vibrant, capable of waging a sustained struggle against an empire. The imagery is a reminder that the revolutionary leader remains alive in the nation’s consciousness. An industrial worker grabbed the microphone and declared: “Fidel continues to call on us to resist and win.”

The Cuban leadership has no intention of letting the figure of its supreme leader die. Recently, they installed a screen in Havana that, through the use of artificial intelligence, invites Cubans to take a picture with Castro. “Hello, compatriots,” Fidel could be heard saying on May Day. People posed, and the deceased leader’s voice, still intact, said: “Until victory… one, two, three… forever!”

President Miguel Díaz-Canel, along with several attendees, had his picture taken with the Comandante. This was a gesture from the government, meant to remind the population about the man who brought them all to where they are today.

Emilio Basilides Alfonso, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Havana, vehemently believes that Castro is “more alive” than ever. “Fidel’s influence is as omnipresent as the misery that defines daily life on the island. And I’m not referring only to material hardship, which is already serious enough, but [also] to a deeper desolation: the distortion of the national character.” However, there’s a part of Castro that, according to the university professor, is fading with time. “Castro survives only in the minds of those who are ‘asleep’ — those who are afraid to admit that they were deceived — and in the minds of the ‘awakened,’ who know exactly where power resides. Outside that circle of nostalgia or cynicism, his figure fades into irrelevance.”

This is the fear that the leaders of the regime have today: that people will forget the man who, for decades, kept an ideology afloat despite the country’s collapse. This is especially concerning for them now, as there’s not only a crushing economic crisis, but also a notable leadership vacuum.

Marching at the head of the workers’ caravan on Friday, May 1, was Raúl Castro – Fidel’s brother and former first secretary of the Communist Party – escorted by his bodyguard and grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known as “El Cangrejo” (“The Crab”) and the man who met with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to negotiate Cuba’s future.

Raúl hadn’t appeared in public since the announcement of the deaths of 32 Cuban soldiers who were killed in the attack on Venezuela back in January. At the age of 94, some say that he still pulls the strings of power in Cuba. To his left walked José Ramón Machado Ventura, a 95-year-old former member of the Politburo who once hinted that he wants to live to be 200; and to his right, Miguel Díaz-Canel, 66, who was born when the other two men were immersed in the 1959 Revolution. Amid the dialogues with Washington, the possibility of removing Díaz-Canel from power in Cuba was leaked, but the president has said that he won’t step aside. “I’m not afraid,” he asserted. “I’m willing to give my life for the Revolution.”

On May 1, as the Cuban people marched in Havana, President Donald Trump – speaking from Florida – announced new sanctions against the island. He promised to end the war in Iran in order to free up an aircraft carrier, send it to the Caribbean and take Cuba “almost immediately.” Díaz-Canel responded to the threat: “No aggressor, however powerful, will find surrendering Cubans,” he asserted. Rather, “they will encounter a people who are determined to defend sovereignty and independence in every inch of the national territory.”

At first glance, the march on May Day may seem like a repetition of previous years. But the Castroist regime knows that this is a unique event: not only are they celebrating Fidel Castro’s centennial, but they’re also reaching the 70th anniversary of the Revolution with a completely devastated economy, blackouts lasting more than 20 hours a day, a migration exodus of almost three million people in the last five years, widespread discontent that has led people to take to the streets, as well as real tension with the United States. Trump has promised “a new dawn for Cuba.”

Faced with this scenario, the Cuban government has called on the people to reaffirm their commitment to the homeland. On the Anti-Imperialist Platform, an improvisational poet recited a few décimas (10-line stanzas) in front of the parade attendees: “If the socotrocos (slang for “idiots”) enter the Cuban capital, they’ll find out that Havana is full of crazy people.” Some attendees applauded him.

Defending the homeland

Among all the posters in the parade, one stood out with a statistic: more than six million Cubans, according to the official registry, have taken part in the “Signature for the Homeland” movement, an initiative launched by the government a couple of weeks ago to commit Cubans to defending the achievements of the Revolution at any cost. This comes amidst the small cold war being waged in Cuba’s perpetual summer, with threats from Washington, an oil embargo having been in place for more than three months, drones flying over the island and U.S. Navy military exercises in Caribbean waters.

According to Díaz-Canel, the campaign is about more than just signing a petition. “It’s an act of unity in defense of national sovereignty,” he asserts. The petition also serves to support a declaration entitled “Girón is today and always,” referring to Playa Girón, a beach on the east bank of the Bay of Pigs. It makes it clear that Cuba is prepared to defend itself with arms, just as it did 65 years ago when a failed military landing by Cuban exiles took place.

The message put out by the campaign has been explicit: the Cuban Revolution “will never negotiate its principles.” It’s necessary to keep repeating this amidst a discontented population that has taken to the streets not only to demand food and electricity, but also freedom.

Katrin Hansing, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York (CUNY), has spent the last three decades researching race, migration and inequality in Cuba. She has observed how, today, the official rhetoric resonates with very few Cubans. “The political, ideological, revolutionary aspect is barely felt. In Havana, you no longer see the slogans and posters on almost every block like you used to; the ones that are there are old. Most people are exhausted from the daily struggle [to survive], but also from politics, from the lies. There’s a collective weariness. The symbols, the codes… everything looks very old. Everything is very worn out.”

Even so, the anthropologist notes how the Cuban government still insists on continuing to speak to the people with the same language that it used 40 years ago. The people, however, have changed. The people are tired.

Some government delegates arrived at the door of Irma’s neighbor, asking her to sign her “Commitment to Cuba.” The 80-year-old woman came out of her house angrily: “I’m not going to sign,” she told them. “I’m diabetic and I don’t have milk for breakfast. Bread comes once a week. And I’m only surviving because of my daughter and grandson. Otherwise, I would have starved to death.”

Irma herself, like her co-workers at the Institute of Immunology and Hematology, was forced to sign the commitment book at her workplace. She did it. “If you don’t, you don’t get paid,” the woman explains. She earns about 5,000 Cuban pesos a month, equivalent to just under $10.00, and, when her workday ends, she has to go out and clean houses. “They want the world to believe that people sign voluntarily, [but] that’s not the case. It’s outrageous. This isn’t a country anymore; this is the end for Cubans.”

Maydelis Solanis is a resident of the city of Bayamo, in eastern Cuba. The government delegate from her neighborhood didn’t come to her door, “because she knows” what Solanis thinks of the system. But she did go to other homes to ask for signatures in defense of the homeland.

“People don’t want to sign; they say they have [no reason] to,” she shrugs. Yesterday, she heard a commotion. When she looked out the door, she saw that it was a neighbor arguing with the delegate. “He told her, ‘What am I going to sign [for]? The lack of electricity? The lack of food? The lack of medicine?’” Solano warned her children that they couldn’t sign any documents at school without her consent.

Yoel Acosta and his wife’s greatest fear is that the Cuban Army will conscript their 17-year-old son (he’s the minimum age for mandatory military service in Cuba). Their fear has grown, now that Díaz-Canel speaks about a “people’s war,” with Donald Trump not entirely ruling out the possibility of a military attack against Cuba. An officer from the Ministry of the Interior came to their home in Baracoa, a city in the province of Guantánamo, to have their son begin the required examinations for military service. “Neither I nor his mother agree [with this],” Acosta says. “We fear he’ll be recruited to participate in wars, or be sent out of the country as a mercenary, as they’ve already done with other young men. Now, with the tension between the United States and Cuba, we’re even more scared about his physical safety.”

According to Acosta, young men who do their military service are also being made to sign a pledge to “defend the country against aggression.” Otherwise, they’ll be “labeled as counterrevolutionaries and could be imprisoned,” he says. In Cuban hospitals, according to people interviewed by this newspaper, authorities are threatening staff with restrictions on their participation in medical missions abroad. While the government takes a considerable portion of their salaries, these missions provide some economic relief to healthcare professionals. Some workers in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MIPYMES) are also being forced to sign a written agreement with the state.

But on the island, Solano notes, people are preoccupied with whether or not Trump is coming. “You spend your life wondering what he’s going to do. Is he coming? Is he not coming? That’s what many Cubans are hoping for these days, because daily life is a burden and it becomes overwhelming,” she says. “It’s like trying to climb a mountain with a heavy backpack and never reaching the top.”

The creative resistance that nobody wants

On April 30, the day before the May Day march in Cuba, Díaz-Canel met with dozens of workers to tell them that it was essential to resort to “creative resistance,” a concept he’s been using since taking office as president of the country. Throughout his eight years in power, Cuba has never emerged from its deep crisis. In a conversation with Pablo Iglesias — a former left-wing Spanish politician who visited Havana this past March as part of a humanitarian flotilla — the president seemed almost proud of the creative resistance that Cubans have demonstrated during this crisis. He referred to a variety of actions: people gathering to watch telenovelas in front of the only working television in the neighborhood; electric trikes being converted into ambulances; or residents who set up communal kitchens and cook with charcoal.

“With the concept of creative resistance, you not only resist, but you develop,” the Cuban president explained to Iglesias. “It’s not about resisting with submission, but resisting with creativity.” He also said that he understands that “the people are suffering, that there are limitations, that there are shortages,” but emphasized that the “Cuban spirit of resilience, solidarity and joy hasn’t been lost.”

“This rhetoric stems from a political construct built from within the government, which tries to highlight certain convenient aspects amidst the profound structural crisis that Cuban society is experiencing,” notes sociologist Elaine Acosta González, a research associate at the Institute for Cuban Studies at Florida International University (FIU). The expert explains that, “by highlighting certain aspects of Cuban sociocultural identity, [the government] deliberately conceals the ineptitude of the leaders [with the] everyday survival strategies that citizens have had to develop to cope with the various impacts of the crisis.”

Some (those who can) continue to leave the island. Writer Jorge Fernández Era was accompanied by members of the state security apparatus until the very last moment when, a few weeks ago, he boarded a plane to Spain. It pains him to see how the thing that he dedicated his best years to has ended. “The Revolution stole my dreams,” the 63-year-old writer laments. “Nothing remains of the Revolution… and even less of socialism. [Cuba is now] a mixture of capitalism, feudalism and slavery, with a dash of primitive communism. The rest is crude propaganda.”

Fernández Era didn’t leave Cuba with relief, but with despair. He knows that something has been taken from him. “I’m leaving behind a country that I love… but [it] has ceased to be a country.”

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