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Buena Vista Anti-Social Club: Inside Cuba's Hidden Metal Scene

Buena Vista Anti-Social Club: Inside Cuba's Hidden Metal Scene

2012-05-16
Source: Spin


As the world gets smaller and more connected every day, Cuba remains isolated and repressed, mired in poverty and outdated technology. It's no wonder that the country is responsible for some of the angriest, most extreme metal on Earth.

The park at the corner of 23rd Avenue and G Street in the Vedado section of Havana isn't much to look at by the standards of fading, crumbling glory that prevail in Cuba's capital city. In fact, it's less a park than a median that bisects the wide expanse of G Street: some patches of green grass, a few paved walkways, and maybe a half-dozen benches, all within about 100 square feet.

Amed Amed

At 1 a.m. on a warm, windy Friday night in mid-March, the park is a sea of long, dark hair and black concert T-shirts — Slayer, Bathory, Gorgoroth, Megadeth. I've been led here by Amed "Helheim" Olivares, frontman for Abaddon, a young band that, hours earlier, had played a relentless, assaultive 45-minute set at an Art Deco cinema a few blocks away during the first night of the third annual 666 Fest, a weekend-long celebration of Cuban black metal. After wiping the corpse paint from his face and the black, upside-down cross from his arm, and stowing the nail-studded armband he wore onstage, Olivares finds me outside after the show. He claps me on the shoulder and smiles widely.

"For metal in Cuba, you have to see G Street," he says......





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