Jeffrey Brown:
Born in 1963 and raised in Havana, his first love was theater. But, in his 20s, he turned to music, to Nueva Trova, a Cuban genre of folk singer-songwriters that emerged in the 1960s and addressed social issues.
He learned from and was embraced by Cuban stars such as Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanes. Varela was part of a post-revolutionary generation that experienced the full brunt of the so-called Special Period of the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and end of the support it provided Cuba, leaving his country in near economic collapse.
Living in a one-party communist regime still run by the heirs of Fidel Castro, he sung of both the country’s beauty and promise, but also its problems, a dissent not directly political, but there for all to hear.
