Descemer Bueno, an extraterrestrial genius - Periodismo de Barrio

Through the cracks of the fifth-floor apartment on Ten Eyck Street, in the city of Brooklyn, through the windows and doors and the landfills of the place, the song “Guajira, I love U 2 Much” filters, which it comes from outside in an advertisement for the Pepsi soda brand, the drink that everyone drinks then in the harsh summer of New York.

“Just born, that really doesn't happen to people,” says Descemer Bueno, and he firmly believes that he is a lucky guy and that things like this don't happen easily. "At first I thought it was something normal, but after 20 years you realize that this does not happen."

It is 2003. Two years earlier, Descemer had arrived in the United States from Cuba at the hands of the Venezuelan musician and producer Andrés Levin, to join the fusion band Yerba Buena, which also included Cucú Diamantes (voice), El Chino ( voice), Xiomara Laugart (vocals), Rashawn Ross (trumpet), Ron Blake (reeds), Sebastián Steinberg (bass), Pedrito Martínez (percussion), Terreon Gully (drums) and Horacio Hernández (drums).

The theme, in which Descemer intentionally mixes English and Spanish, is presented to Levin, who at first does not believe in its success. The song would later appear on the soundtracks of more than one American film as well.

“Guajira, I love you too much”, the lyrics say, over and over again. "Oh yeah, little girl, I want to fly with you, touch your belly button."

Descemer was offered money on several occasions for the rights to the track. Without thinking, she sold it piece by piece until she got ten percent.

“I needed to eat and I started selling the pieces of the song. He signed whatever paper it was to have the money, because New York is not easy”.

Descemer estimates that he had to sleep at least two nights in a city park after the Polish owner of the building on Ten Eyck Street put a notice on the door telling him to leave the space for not paying the bill. monthly rent.

On the third day, Descemer ignored the notice and entered the apartment. The Polish owner, who was really willing to help him, told him after taking him to court: “What do you need to function like a normal person?”

His home in North Miami, where he now receives me, has a hall whose walls are hung with awards for the million-dollar sales of his recent musical hits. In the center, a Yamaha piano, and to his right, in a corner, offerings of the Yoruba religion where Descemer has Obatalá crowned.

A call from her 12-year-old son Desci interrupts our conversation just at the beginning. "I love you, Papi," he tells him, and the artist replies that he loves him too.

The patio of the house is large. In it, a mural stands out with the figures of the musicians Benny Moré, Santiago Feliú, and the santero Sergio Pupo.

Descemer, 50, wears tight pants with floral details, a sweater with imperceptible silver dots, and a green hat with a bird feather growing on the right brim. Lulu, the dog that she lost a month before and that her Facebook followers helped her find, restlessly climbs on her legs over and over again, while he tries to calm her down, even though she seems to calm down more than anything else. itself. The next day a deposition awaits him in which the answers he offers to the lawyers of Alexander Otaola, a popular Cuban presenter from South Florida with whom the musician, winner of several Latin Grammys, Goyas and Billboards, has disputes, will be registered under oath. legal documents that will take you to court.

While the presenter exhibits Descemer's intimacies and shows him singing in Cuba, in bars belonging to the family of a military man at the service of Castroism, Descemer publishes a video in which Otaola appears stealing underwear in one of the chain's stores Burlington.

Trumpist and bizarre, the presenter has a show on the YouTube platform that is watched by 113,000 people every week from Monday to Friday, and that Cuban truckers from Miami love to tune in to while they make their kilometer-long journeys through the intricate highways of the United States.

***

Descemer Bueno (Photo: Alejandro Taquechel).

The family home, located between Picota and Paula streets in the Belén neighborhood, in Old Havana, was mainly a women's house. The great-grandmother, the aunts, the mother. Descemer's grandmother did not, because the grandmother, who danced with Chano Pozo in the "Los Dandy" comparsa, was murdered in the neighborhood by police officers, a diffuse story that the family does not usually talk about.

Descemer does not remember any other men than him during his childhood in the house in the Belén neighborhood. His father, Pedro Bueno, spent a long time in jail for reasons that the singer does not mention, and then, when Descemer was eight years old, his father emigrated to Spain and, in 1979, to the United States.

From his home in Fort Lauderdale, Pedro Bueno, 85 years old today, a jeweler by trade while he lived in Cuba, answers the phone and says that if he has a memory of his son's maternal family, it is the predilection he has always they had for music and that they unquestionably deposited in the child.

“Descemer was a little boy who paid a lot of attention to everything, a very strange boy, he frowned and began to listen to the songs, very curious, a very calm boy. Descemer is a good person, not because he is my son, but he is a great human being, ”he says.

One morning the government sent the maternal family from Belén street to a shelter in the Bahía neighborhood for 45 days, supposedly to fix the building, and the 45 days turned into ten years that forever defined the future of their families. aunts, and their cousins, and the new members who later arrived.

Years later, Descemer will publicly blame Eusebio Leal, Historian of Havana, for having robbed the house.

“It can only be said that my family's house was robbed directly by Eusebio Leal in 1992. They protested and were sent to the worst of shelters and that was the end of a united black family that fell into disgrace.”

One of Descemer's aunts had studied medicine; his mother, Mercedes Martínez, studied Architecture and Geography; and aunt Farah María, nicknamed La Gacela de Cuba, became a musical icon of the art scene of the seventies.

Descemer's cousins, who were born or raised in the shelter, began to get into trouble and one by one ended up in prison. He has even seen some of those Descemer cousins ​​only in prison, he doesn't know them in other facets. Now that they are of legal age, they are still in prison, for reasons that follow one another and that become endless cycles.

A few months ago Descemer received a call from Cuba telling him that one of his cousins ​​had killed another. The last times the singer visited Havana, one of those cousins ​​asked him to buy him a house because they were going to kill each other. So it was.

“It's realizing that deep down I come from a marginal family. That is total marginality, that does not exist in normal families”.

Another cousin was kept from prison last year when his mother, Tía Consuelo, died of a stroke. He lacked very little time to fulfill justice. The young man, who was stabbed in the arm in the Bahía shelter, later did the same thing that they did to him and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Descemer heatedly attacked the Cuban government: "You do that because you are fucking racists." Another of Descemer's cousins ​​died of AIDS.

“We have been biting quietly year after year. That was a family that could have stayed together if they hadn't gone to the shelter. And what do I have today? A completely dispersed family”, assures the singer.

Descemer still receives letters in Miami from Cuban prisons. Once one of his inmate relatives sent him a Jesus Christ made of soap.

The family finally managed to leave the Bahía shelter only when one of their stubborn aunts said she was not going to vote for any president and that she would make the people around her not vote either.

Descemer particularly remembers two moments from his childhood: the mother visiting prisons or detention centers, and the mother disciplinedly attending each of the volunteer jobs that were called for them to assign her a house that they never gave her.

Even so, Descemer fared better than the rest of his family. Before leaving Cuba, the father guaranteed him and his mother a room on the site that had become an old hotel on Villegas street, between Sol and Muralla, where the neighbors stood in line to use the communal bathroom, where the mother de Descemer had a small kitchen outside the room, and where very often, when Descemer came home from school, the space would be flooded with sewage, as the residents of Old Havana well know happens.

Descemer can't imagine how, but his mother always managed to keep food on the table. The assets that the mother came to acquire speak of her strength: she was the one who owned the only telephone in the entire lot, and she was the one who bought the only television, around which the other children in the building gathered.

“My mom is the only one, my mom and my aunts,” says the singer.

The first piano that Descemer had was also obtained by his mother, who had them bring it up to that reduced space in such a way that later, when they left the lot forever, they wanted to take it with them and could not. To this day the piano remains in the same place.

It is in that lot where Descemer will meet Genoveva, the lady of the neighboring house, very Catholic, a widow, who never had children, and who was white.

“Because of that lady I began to naturalize colors and races,” he maintains and says that he came to consider Genoveva, who took care of him and instructed him, a second mother.

For many years Descemer will live on the site where the neighbors kept their doors and windows open, letting the air flow, and where people entered the house without warning, and where the man who charged for electricity services it also passed as if that were his lot or as if it were his own house.

It was his mother who took him to study music, first at the cultural center in the Belén neighborhood, and then at the Manuel Saumell Elementary School of Music, where he failed the admission tests on the first attempt, but passed the exam. second time.

After Saumell, Descemer went on to study at the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory. There he belonged to a small jazz group in which he played the double bass with a peseta, and qualified as a guitarist and soloist.

His friend and fellow student at the time, Fabien Pisani, who would be his neighbor many years later in the Ten Eyck street building, remembers that they put together the Latin jazz band Yemajazz, a period that he considers to be one of much experimentation and growth.

Pisani says of Descemer: “As a musician and creator, he is someone of profound sensitivity and intelligence, who has never ceased to amaze those of us who know him well. His work has been one of the most important guidelines in the evolution of the Cuban music scene in the last 30 years due to its freshness, originality and ability to incorporate new languages ​​and sounds”.

When Genoveva was about to die, she arranged for her house to be occupied by a black family from the lowlands, neighbors Eliseo and María, and their young daughter. Descemer never understood Genoveva's decision until a long time later, when she had to move out of the lot and, unable to get the piano out, it was inherited by the girl. Eliseo and María's daughter learned to play the piano and was later also accepted into the Manuel Saumell school.

“I think there is something spiritual about the piano,” he says.

Already in music school, Descemer distanced himself from the neighborhood. One of his friends was killed in a street fight, and another is admitted to the Mazorra Psychiatric Hospital. Eduardito, a neighbor, jumped into the sea and never reached the United States. The guajiro is still in prison. One who became a babalawo and those who left the country were saved.

“The life I lived was ideal, my mom took me out of that, she completely diverted me,” she insists.

Descemer will live on the site until, at just over twenty years old, having been able to travel and raise some money, he bought an apartment on a very high floor of a building on Calle Infanta, where his mother, after a while , sick. Descemer found out when the residents of the lot told him that Mercedes Martínez, at night, would visit her old neighborhood of Old Havana and claim her house on the lot, which already had other owners. The mother developed senile dementia or Alzheimer's, it is not known for sure. Even today the family does not have an exact diagnosis of the disease.

Then Descemer bought a more comfortable house and the family moved to Línea and H, in Vedado.

—After that my mother never knew where she went, and that was the dream of her life, a house in Vedado.

—And yours too?

—No, I didn't care about any of that. I loved Old Havana.

***

In the patio of the house in Miami, a mural stands out with the figures of the musicians Benny Moré, Santiago Feliú, and the santero Sergio Pupo (Photo: Alejandro Taquechel).

At the age of 16 Descemer Bueno went to a concert by the troubadour Santiago Feliú in the Covarrubias hall of the National Theater.

“I was impressed when I saw that guy. I said: 'Damn, what is this?' It was someone from another galaxy, playing the guitar backwards. We only studied the classics, do you understand?

At the Amadeo Roldán school they were taught by mainly American musicians, such as John Scofield, Jaco Pastorius or John Williams.

“As if you didn't live in a country with a tradition like Cuba's,” says Descemer, who established a close relationship with Santiago since their last year of school.

At the beginning of the 1990s, still as a student, he joined the group Estado de Ánimo on bass, led by Santiago and also made up of Robertico Carcassés on piano, Elmer Ferrer on guitar and Ruy López Nussa on the battery. With a fusion of traditional and foreign rhythms, a mixture of funky, rock, jazz and rumba, Estado de Ánimo left a good part of the island's public euphoric and laid the foundations for the birth of other jazz groups in the country. Each of its members, when they took their own path, also formed renowned bands on the Cuban music scene such as Habana Ensemble, Interactivo, La Academia, Columna B or Siete Rayo.

From learning with Santiago, whom Descemer says was “a guy who gave everything”, the need to compose songs was born. It was also with Estado de Ánimo that Descemer sang for the first time outside of Cuba, on stages in Spain, Bolivia, Uruguay, Germany and Argentina.

Robertico Carcassés remembers that, on one of those trips, Descemer —whom he describes as an “alien genius”— almost came to blows with Santiago.

“Descemer snored like a damaged motorcycle and Santi was a very light sleeper and got sick when they shared a hotel room,” says the director of Interactivo. "To try to stop it, Santi would snap his nails or throw a pillow at him, and they almost came to blows one day when Desce woke up in a daze while Santi shook him to stop snoring."

In 1993 Descemer and Robertico Carcassés, in search of new rhythms, joined two star musicians, the drummer Dafnis Prieto and the saxophonist Yosvany Terry, to form Columna B. With this new group, Descemer would discover the United States and enter Contact with famous jazz, either playing with Steve Coleman or teaching classes at Stanford University.

“I have a teacher inside me”, Descemer dares to say. To the Stanford students, with his poor English, he would say: “Look, this here is the pentagram, I'm going to do this here with my foot, this with this other foot, and I'm going to play these notes for you. with the bass”. The students were stunned and the university teachers were no less surprised with the musical level of the Cuban.

“That time the teacher who was in the classroom went crazy and said to a translator: 'No, no, don't translate that.' The guy thought that the level we brought was something that he himself did not understand and his class was going to be too small ”, he assures.

The bolero player Descemer was born with Sé feliz, the album of 12 boleros that he produced for Fernando Álvarez —the first he had composed up to then— after finding him swatting flies in his underwear in the corridor of a building.

“He was in his underpants,” Descemer specifies. “Poor thing, with his glass eye. No one called him at all." Descemer knew Fernando's voice well, his mother had his records and those of Elena Burke at home. After years of complete oblivion, Fernando Álvarez, one of the most powerful voices that Cuba has given, recorded in 2001 Be happy. In August 2002 Fernando died, at the age of 74, and in 2008 the EGREM record company released the album.

“With his more than 70 years, Mr. Álvarez's voice had changed; it was more limited and more delicate, without the authority and firmness that he had when he was younger. But his voice was emotionally intact, and he managed to pull off the combination of stoic longing and tragic insecurity in the lyrics of Mr. Good's songs, many of which are worth savoring…”, music critic Ben would write in 2009. Ratliff for The New York Times.

While visiting New York, Descemer meets Andrés Levin, who talks to him about the possibility of composing and working together. Two years later, the Cuban took him at his word, returned to the city and joined Yerba Buena, where he wrote most of the songs on President Alien, an album that shook the New York scene from top to bottom in 2003, and which in 2004 was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Latin Rock/Alternative Album. Ratliff would describe the group at the time as "one of New York's best new dance bands, mixing 1960s Latin boogaloo, Cuban religious music, some American soul and Afrobeat fela."

Descemer remained in Yerba Buena until relations became too strained. If you ask him today what happened between its members, he will say that he prefers not to go into details, because, after years of fighting, now they have regained friendship. He will admit that he stopped attending a very important concert that the group had in Central Park and that that was the end.

However, above all there is an undeniable cause that led Descemer to disengage from Yerba Buena. He wanted to be his own leader, not take orders and create outside the margins of the group.

“I left because I wanted to be me, I think that's the most important thing. At first I didn't think much about it, I was just another musician, but New York taught me what I really was”.

This is how Siete Rayo was born in 2004, where Descemer, now as a producer and artist, recorded his first solo album entitled Descemer Sieterayo, with the collaboration of guitarist George Pajon, from The Black Eyed Peas.

The first piano that Descemer Bueno had was obtained by his mother (Photo: Alejandro Taquechel).

In 2005, for financial reasons, Descemer moved from New York to Miami. “I loved New York. But I never forget a time when I saw 14,000 pesos in the account and thought I was rich, and at the moment it started to go down and I had to leave”.

The following year he returned to work in Cuba. He begins to visit the country and, with the reputation that Yerba Buena had mainly given him, he finds his place in the music scene of that time. Haydée was born from those times, the album produced by the singer Haydée Milanés; The miraculous island, for William Vivanco; Breathe, for Yusa; Art Bembé, for Gema and Pavel; and Love and Music, for Kelvis Ochoa.

“Until then I was more of a musician. So they start to see me more as a songwriter and producer,” she says.

Together with Kelvis Ochoa and X Alfonso, he composed the music for the film Habana Blues, which in 2006 won the Spanish Goya Award for Best Original Band.

The sound engineer Maykel Bárzagas, who has produced Descemer's albums Bueno, Bailando, Mi primer Concierto. DVD, among others, ensures that the singer-songwriter has a very unique personality. “Few understand it, he is extremely sensitive and spiritual, he has a very high spirituality that is not for fun, it is cultivated. It is volatile, sensitive, spontaneous, witty, and at times very hurtful."

When it comes to working with him, however, the most difficult thing, according to Bárzagas, is that he delegates all his trust in others.

“He trusts a lot in one, in one's decisions, he is not one hundred percent aware of what I do with his work. And that is a great challenge because Descemer's work is not just any work and it needs to be well cared for and worked on. There are many songs that have come to me with a guitar and I have searched for the right team at the right time to turn them into what Descemer dreamed of, I love that and it makes us grow in parallel”, he says.

In the mid-2000s, through the mediation of the EMI Music Publishing company, Enrique Iglesias visits Descemer in his small apartment in South Beach, Miami.

“I saw Enrique Iglesias for the first time that day and to this day we are friends, great friends,” he says.

Although it is true that Descemer's career stood out internationally with the presence of Iglesias, it is also undeniable that the musical career of the Spaniard owes the Cuban an injection of freshness and its consequent resurrection.

The first big hit written by Descemer for Enrique Iglesias was “Lloro por ti”, released in June 2008 and which, after being in the top ten on the Hot Latin Tracks chart for almost two months, reached number one Posted for two consecutive weeks in November.

In 2010, Descemer composed “When I fall in love”. On the Billboard Hot 100, the song reached number 89, the highest position achieved by a song by Iglesias in Spanish.

In 2014 he gave him “Bailando”, which sold more than one million copies in the United States and more than eight million worldwide, thus becoming the tenth best-selling song of the year.

At first Descemer thought of “Bailando” as a bachata and offered it to Romeo Santos, but he never received an answer. He rather believes that he never heard her. Then he tried with Enrique, who at first did not pay much attention to him.

“I sent it to him by chance, because I knew that Enrique didn't do bachata,” he says.

Then Descemer added a flamenco touch to “Bailando”, a rhythm that marked him since he visited Spain with Santiago, a trip in which they listened to the album Soy Gitano, by Camarón de la Isla. Nevertheless, Descemer believed that the Spaniards, suspicious of their traditions, were never going to accept their theme.

“When I saw what was happening in Spain with the song, I didn't believe it. They let the song in and that was a lot,” she says, still in awe.

“Dancing” is a song that continues to earn money for Descemer to this day. The song took off with more than a million dollars in debt because what almost always happens with all great hits, someone comes along and sues the songwriter for plagiarism.

“All the great songs in the world have ended up in demand. Because everyone sees it as an ace to earn money, it's like a lottery. I, for example, would not do it, it is as if I told you that 'Despacito' has something of 'Dancing' and I was going to sue Luis Fonsi”, he comments.

When Descemer is asked if “Bailando” is a song he likes, he will limit himself to saying: “It's a song I trusted from the beginning”.

Also in 2014, Descemer and Iglesias made “El Perdedor”, which then reached number one on the Billboard Tropical Songs chart.

In 2017 he wrote “Súbeme la radio”, whose official video exceeded one billion views on YouTube.

“Nos fuimos faro”, in which Descemer and Enrique join the Cuban El Micha, arrives in 2018, certified Platinum for more than 60,000 copies sold in the United States.

This July 1, both singers released the video for the song “Me pasé” together with Farruko, which in a few days has reached more than five million views on YouTube.

Descemer recalls that after the first song he recorded with Iglesias, he told him that he did not usually repeat recordings with the same musician. Today they already have several successes together. Descemer also mentions that, when he played those songs in El Sauce, a small cultural center in Havana, more than once they yelled at him "recortero" from the audience.

The Cuban researcher based in Miami, Dr. Eva Silot, who has known him since she was little and shared professional and personal spaces with him during the time they both lived in New York, will say that Descemer is a musician in evolution.

“Her professional career has had different stages that are clearly distinguishable. Estado de Ánimo is perhaps Descemer's most experimental, troubadour and at the same time jazzy phase. In Yerbabuena's stage, Descemer clearly shows his skills as a music producer, his New York worldview in an unprejudiced dialogue with all kinds of cultural references, and the influence and importance of his Afro-descendant vocation and legacy, and specifically his Afro-Cuban spirituality," says Silot.

However, from her perspective, the researcher considers that it is the boleros that show her maturity, her cosmopolitan vocation and the global potential of her music.

“With the boleros, Descemer shows himself to be aware of the best traditions of Cuban musical culture, which he knows how to recreate and deconstruct so well,” he says. “But, undoubtedly, his commercial explosion came after his collaborations with Enrique Iglesias. At this stage Descemer became a musician with a global reach with wide international success. At the same time, it is consolidated as an icon of Cuban music on the island”.

Although one day for Descemer the most difficult thing was composing songs, today it is very easy for him. He used to write prose, and today he does the same thing first with the music and then with the lyrics or vice versa. He considers himself a master of this art.

Descemer, yes, has a dilemma with his songs. The ones he likes the most are not exactly the ones that have brought him money. However, of all his songs, they are the last to which he feels a kind of debt.

“Thanks is for those who have fed me: 'Dancing', 'Turn up the radio for me', 'The loser', 'When I fall in love'. The rest I still love. I love 'Ciego amor', and that is a song that has not given a penny. It is a dichotomy between what is good and is not giving you anything, and the other. 'Be happy' did not give money, but Luz Casal sang it. I loved that voice, it was my voice. Do you know what it means to say: 'Damn, the girl from Tacones Lejanos, by Almodóvar, sang me a song?'

Despite such success, Descemer believes the best is yet to come. “I am missing my best time. The time of Descemer the artist has not yet arrived. I never saw myself as an artist, now I have no excuse. I think of myself more as Frank Sinatra, Compay Segundo, who are artists who grow up after 50 years”.

***

For some time Descemer Bueno has had concerts canceled in South Florida (Photo: Alejandro Taquechel).

After more than 15 years in Miami, Descemer Bueno has valued the possibility of settling back in New York and experimenting with other musical rhythms, in addition to rescuing the use of Spanglish in his compositions, in the style of his hit “Guajira… ”. In several of his latest live broadcasts on social networks, he has been seen walking, as if he were sitting at home, along the Central Park promenades, or enjoying a concert from the Williamsburg lawn, or sharing with friends from a rooftop the shimmering views of Manhattan.

New York has treated Descemer in a way Miami has not, a city that has become particularly hostile to him in recent years. “I never imagined being in a Miami where I couldn't play,” he says. "It has been hard, because I am a forerunner of the success of young Cuban music in Miami."

For some time the interpreter has had concerts canceled in South Florida and fewer and fewer venues hire him for a show. “No one has called me to do things; They used to do it all the time."

In 2019, while the singer was visiting Cuba, several televisions, a washing machine, a dryer, all the equipment from his recording studio, his computer and a Mercedes C 300 model were robbed at his Miami-Dade home of the year.

Days after the robbery, host Alexander Otaola asked several questions about the artist on his streaming show: “Where was Descemer while his house was looted? Where does Descemer show up when he goes to the beautiful island of Cuba? What is one of the paladares preferred by the Cuban artist?

Otaola did not hesitate to share with his audience images of Descemer together with the owners of the Destino bar in Havana, belonging to the grandsons of the commander of the Rebel Army, Víctor Bordón, who was involved in the execution of many people with the arrival of Castro in the power, during the so-called Revolutionary Tribunals.

The images generated an intense and controversial debate on issues of cultural exchange between the United States and Cuba, and the privileges enjoyed by some Cuban artists abroad to perform on stages on the island, when others are completely prohibited. Immediately, part of his audience in exile turned their backs on him. Descemer even claimed that more than one person was bullying him, and threatened to sue Otaola for defamation.

“Thanks to the Otaola campaign, all my concerts here have been cancelled,” a disappointed Descemer said then via Facebook Live. "I'm sorry Miami, they won't be able to count on me anymore."

At that time, Avelino González, Descemer's lawyer, told América TeVé that if Otaola continued, he could face the courts. For his part, Otaola told the same outlet: "I am not accusing him of anything, I am only putting some evidence, some photos, I ask Descemer to explain his relationship with the heirs of the high Castro hierarchy."

Regarding Otaola's argument, Descemer will say: “Yes, that happened. All the artists who have played in that bar have coincided with their owners, I have played in that one and in many more, I played in the Fantaxy, which everyone knows belongs to Sandro Castro, Fidel's grandson, and he could have messed with that one, but he didn't. He takes it with me and I don't quite understand why.

Until that moment, Descemer had kept out of politics, and did not testify against the regime in Havana. If something surprised the Cubans in exile, it was his sudden change, which many began to label as opportunistic.

“I think I put too much emphasis on the right not to speak and remain silent, and they threw it in my face,” Descemer admits.

But his new stance didn't just surprise the exiles. “Descemer is a victim of pressure from the Miami mafia,” said Cuban Vice Minister of Culture Fernando Rojas, while official Alexis Triana said that every time he saw Descemer “competing miserably with the infamous Otaola — or more drunk or drugged (…)—, I wonder how far our share of responsibility goes in having turned this out-of-tune singer and, unfortunately, a good composer, into this subject so popular on our stages and on our radio and television”.

According to Descemer, his “dislike” for the Cuban government has always come from him. “My maternal family has never had anything to do with it, there has never been anyone from the Party. My dad hasn't spoken to his brother for 40 years because he was a lieutenant colonel." He even boasts of being the only Cuban musician who has had the ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel sit among his Karl Marx audience and who has not exalted his presence. “I didn't greet you or say anything about you. As if you were not there because you are not more important than any of the people who go to my concerts”, he once let the Cuban president know. He has also said that he believes that Fidel Castro's mother never should have given birth to him.

At one point, Descemer was heavily pressured by exiles to speak out politically. “I don't talk about sport either, because I don't know. Do you know how many things I don't talk about? I felt that everyone had an infrastructure that also allowed them to earn money, making content that in the long run everything translates into money, and they were putting me in a situation of having to talk about politics. So I felt that more than anything it was a strategy of certain and determined people to use others to make money, and it is what it continues to be”.

What was it, then, that made Descemer suddenly begin to openly and publicly confront the government of his country? According to him, the fact that last year several officials first looted the farm that he bought in 2010 in the Alquízar municipality, Artemisa, and then it was evicted by the Cuban police.

“There is a moment when I realize that the people from the Cuban government are in exactly the same position as the influencers here in Miami, who are taking me for things,” he says. “The government had already gotten into my farm and I had remained silent. But the second time no. At the moment someone up there didn't like that I had that. I paid for it, I got my copyright money and instead of having it in the bank I bought the farm. When you ask me about the blockade, not now, but at that time I thought it was absurd and helped the government to maintain itself. I thought that if they removed it, the government would disappear or it would have to explain itself. But that logic in Miami cannot be defended in any way. I remember that in April 2020 I said publicly that the blockade must be removed, they published it in the Granma newspaper and about 18 or 20 days later they entered the farm again, and I said: 'No, these people are throwing me with everything'. I see that you are using me to say that in Miami there are people who are against the blockade and you are breaking into my house, do you understand? So what am I?"

The first time the government intervened on his farm, Descemer remained silent, but the second time he asked for help from Israel Rojas, a member of the Buena Fe duo, whom he now considers a "troubadour of the dictatorship," and with whom he has He had public lawsuits, as he has also had with Yoel Martínez, with Manolín "El Médico de la Salsa", with La Diosa, with Alexander Abreu or with Yotuel Romero.

I tell Descemer that if he goes to Israel, it is because at some point he knows that the Buena Fe singer could intervene with government officials to benefit him, but he denies that it ever crossed his mind.

“No, I didn't know exactly what Israel could be,” he replies. Then I tell him how is it possible that he didn't know, if everyone talks about Israel sympathizing with the government in Havana.

“Damn, I'm telling you the truth. Now I can speculate that Israel is something, it's hard for me today to think that Israel could be a policeman, but now that I've seen it, broder, it's here to give you a cookie, ”she says. “But if you ask me, I am telling you the truth, I have a hard time thinking that Israel is a type of apparatus. It's not that I hate Israel. I've had conversations with that guy. Today I have no doubts, I know that he has responsibilities there. But I live with the doubt of tomorrow being able to find an Israel that tells me: 'My brother, what was I going to do?, where was I going?'. I am not telling you to put myself in Israel's place, which is a complicated place, because I know that they like good guitars, Israel does not have Chinese sounds or guitars, and I know that Israel fought with Yotuel when he wanted to put the sons of Díaz-Canel to open a concert for him. Yotuel was fighting for those little boys to open the concerts for him. If you ask me what I think of whom, I am very confused. Because I have a Yotuel now that I don't talk to because he's a friend of Otaola's”.

After Yotuel and Descemer worked together with Gente de Zona, el Funky and Maykel Osorbo on the song “Patria y Vida” —which has become a kind of anthem for Cubans and which has just been nominated for Song of the Year and Best Urban Song at the 2021 Latin Grammy Awards, now the musicians have distanced themselves. Descemer, according to what he has said, disagrees with the distribution of the song's profits, since the musicians who are now in Cuba (Osorbo and El Funky) would receive lower percentages than the rest.

“I don't want that percentage,” says Descemer, referring to his 15 percent, the same amount that the rest would get, except for El Funky and Osorbo, who will have 5 percent. “That to me is somewhat ridiculous because I live on million-dollar songs, my songs are ringing at the cash register all the time. The day the money from "Patria y Vida" falls into my account, I won't notice it."

After Descemer made public the issue of the song's earnings and was criticized by not a few followers for airing such sensitive issues, Yotuel did not hesitate to respond: “You are mixing everything up. What does ‘Patria y Vida’ have to do with these personal issues?” the former Orisha member told him in a meeting on the youtuber Adrián Fernández program.

With personal issues, Yotuel was referring to the figure of Otaola, since Descemer did not agree with the participation that Yotuel had in the presenter's space.

“I broke up with Yotuel because I told him: 'Hey, my brother, don't let this boy use you, because he is disrespecting me wherever I go.' And when I call Yotuel, the same Yotuel I've known all my life, he tells me: 'No, no, that's my friend too.' He tells me that Otaola is his friend and I told him: 'Well, they should never have put me in this song thing, because that's called a conflict of interest.

Descemer has called the deposition he will have tomorrow with Otaola's lawyers "total racist." According to him, all they will ask him is whether or not he is a communist.

“There I have their lawyers asking me if I am a communist, and I having to say that the blacks in Cuba are not communists, and they telling me if Esteban Lazo and Mr. Mesa are communists, and I answering that the only The table that I know is Víctor Mesa, who is known to all of Cuba. It's absurd what this has become."

Last March, Descemer took to social media to share a video accusing the host of stealing underwear from a Burlington chain store and running off.

“This is the video that proves that Alexander Otaola stole a buttocked panties in Burlington and other items that you will see in the photo. This shows that he is a person of few values ​​who appropriates what does not belong to him, with such low morals he has dedicated himself to defame and discredit everyone who crosses his path, ”says Descemer.

Immediately his followers speculated about the possibility that someone had hijacked the singer's Facebook account and others that he had gone crazy. “Master, you have lost everything. Lastly, even his morale," a commentator told him.

When I ask Descemer why a musician like him responds to Otaola's constant taunts, he says: “I had to. I said to myself: 'Well, they've finished me, how long am I going to let them finish me'. Otaola has a world in the networks and a world in the court, the world of the court does not transcend, it never reaches the networks. I can win the Otaola case and stay dirty. I sue him for racism, defamation, accusation of being a communist. Everything is a thing made to ask me for a supposed amount of money ”.

“Your question is everyone's question, but how many people really know how to handle a legal case? That is the key question because it allows the world to know what is happening, because if not for the world I am an idiot. But whatever idiot you are, as long as it's good for your judgment, you don't have to care, you're going to play the idiot to the best of your ability. This is a case that could last for years if I don't push him, I have to constantly push him because he doesn't pay his lawyers. Everything is a media phenomenon. And my lawyers are going to charge me until the case lasts. That's why I have to steal it out; I have to put whatever comes out of it. If you ask me if I want to bring things from Otaola to light, of course I'm not interested at all. If you ask me if I want to hurt Otaola, of course not”.

Descemer's behavior in recent times, his constant mood swings in videos on social networks, his frequent fights with other artists, have led many to think that the subject of Otaola has affected him in some way.

“People don't even know,” he tells me. "This is a joke here. Even the people I meet there tell me: 'Damn, that guy really drives you crazy'. At the end of the day, I am the black from Old Havana who has to say: 'Wait, hold on, look what it took you to get here.' I have to put up with that guy saying he has security guards for me. If I don't leave my house, compadre”.

Others have even thought about the possibility that it is not just Otaola and have seen his behavior as a direct consequence of drug use. The singer, for his part, will reject this theory.

“It's part of the same phenomenon, but I haven't even drunk in a long time,” he says. “I don't drink because of the damage I did to myself with the drink, I once abused. I abused everything and precisely for this reason I had to remove myself from everything. Of all those things that they still tell me today, I had to leave due to complicated circumstances. For example, to have custody of my children I went through a very rigorous process, where there are things that you can't do anymore."

Descemer will not want to go into details about the mother of his children, who, according to what he says and has told the press on previous occasions, lives on the streets, affected by drug use.

“My children are my friends, my everything,” says the singer. About her daughter, Lucía will say that she is “terrible” at school, exactly as he was, but that whenever they call him to fail her in a class, he brings her drawings and the teachers are very impressed. Of Desci, his father will say that he is a "past kid", who fully learned the speech "I have a dream", by Martin Luther King, and recited it by heart in front of the other children in the classroom.

“I tell my son: 'I can't help you to be a doctor, I can't help you to be a lawyer or a marine biologist, the only thing I can help you with is my business.' I tell him: 'Look what I have been able to do without writing songs in English, imagine if you achieve this in English'. If I can help them to be the same as I am, but for the Anglo world, it is the way I fulfill my dream. That is the multiplied American dream, to be able to do in the Anglo world what I do”, he assures.

At this moment Descemer, who recently premiered the song “Libertad y Amen” together with the exiled musicians Baby Lores, Insurrecto, Amaury Gutiérrez, Eddy K, El Uniko and Trueno Aguilera, is alone looking after the children. He doesn't have a partner. He has people who help him and friends, he clarifies, but no partner.

“People are not for Otaola, nobody is for that, the girls are afraid of their mothers; is that you know that she is going to catch you. Tell me who's going to be there to get in trouble with Otaola? I'm not up to it myself, but I'm very sunny in the end. I could have read Dostoevsky but in the end I am as much Dostoevsky as Dostoevsky himself, who was a type of underworld. And I'm an underworld guy."

This profile is the result of an alliance between elTOQUE, El Estornudo and Periodismo de Barrio.