When Omar left school, he was due to go to the Moscow Conservatoire to study classical music, but instead he was accepted at Cuba’s newly founded Instituto Superior de Arte, which is a university for the performing arts. The teaching there was intense and he met loads of musicians with whom he would work throughout his career: Omar Sosa, a pianist who now lives in Spain; Giraldo Piloto, leader of a band called Klimax; Gonzalito Rubalcaba, the son of the famous Guillermo; and Angá Diaz, a brilliant percussionist, among others. They graduated in 1986 and each spread across the globe finding work, but always kept in touch.
When Omar was in his early 20s his beloved father died. His elder brother died shortly afterwards, following an asthma attack. At the age of 24, Omar felt it was up to him to take responsibility for his mother and support his sister-in-law, mother of two of his three nephews, Victor, Aaron and Ramses. He’s a very practical person who doesn’t have time for weeping and wailing and high emotion – he just gets on with things, and that’s what he did.
Omar isn’t a political person and he never joined the Communist Party in Cuba, but he is fiercely loyal to his country. They have a world-class education system and universal healthcare. Cubans look out for each other, as they do in all community-dominated cultures. They have a saying that I love (and try to live up to): ‘We share what we have, not what we have left over.’ He grew up without extreme poverty or extreme wealth. No one has much, but they all have enough.
There are lots of myths about Cuban society, one of them being that Cubans aren’t allowed to travel, but Omar has been travelling as long as he’s been working. (Having said that, visa requirements for Cubans make me glad I’m British.)
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