50 Fashion for Men en La Havana
Forget Retro. The Men of Havana Embrace the Reggaeton Look.
HAVANA — On a recent evening, tourists in banded hats and guayabera shirts climbed out of pink 1950s-era American cars to puff cigars, drink mojitos and listen to Buena Vista Guild classics at the Hotel Nacional. It was one of those frozen-in-fourth dimension Havana scenes that Americans, enticed past their flag once once more flying over the U.South. embassy and the promised easing of a 50-yr embargo, can't wait to witness.
They may desire to avert their optics from the new Havana manner on display down the cake at Chacal & Yakarta's "Party Full Nasty" reggaeton concert. In a scene out of "Magico Mike," the stars attract a crowd of ogling women wrapped in cast dresses — but they also describe an army of acolytes adorned with curated beards, towering bouffants and lots and lots of pleather.
At get-go glance, the scruffy audience recalls another outdated Cuban classic: the Barbudos rebels who grew beards while hiding in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Notwithstanding the trendsetters of mod Havana are non Fidel Castro and Che Guevara but El Yonki, Los Desiguales and other commandants of the reggaeton revolution. The obsessively coifed troops wear a uniform of diagonally cut oversize T-shirts and harem sweatpants, and they like to shout lewd lyrics that rile the crowd ("Mami, scream if y'all want …" is not exactly "Hasta la Victoria Siempre").
"A lot of people are post-obit us, and we are a model for them and how they live their lives," Michel Anaya Salazar, 26, improve known by his stage name, El Happy, said as he explained his grooming regimen and showed off his "bling bling" religious bracelets and Cazal sunglasses. "I feel responsible."
There is surely plenty for which to hold El Happy responsible. Critics have pointed out that "Cubatón," similar other iterations of reggaeton, can be musically grating in its tinny repetition, and lyrically misogynistic in its vulgar depictions of women. Merely perhaps highest on the list of things that El Happy and his comrades should feel responsible for is sculpted eyebrows.
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"Same as women," said Africa Amada Rodriguez Cruz, who hung on her beau'south hairless arm before the "Political party Full Nasty" prove. "They pluck their eyebrows and shave their whole bodies."
The look, like the music, is everywhere. The hundreds of reggaeton fans with dyed and gelled hair who sit at dusk on the wall of the Malecón, the promenade overlooking the Bay of Havana, look like a perched flock of tropical birds. And the beats pump out of '50s-era cars and computer screens (and computer screens attached to the dashboards of '50s-era cars) across the island.
Back in 2011 the government tried to stop the imperial menace. First it complained that the exceedingly explicit hit "Chupi Chupi" "put the soul of the nation in the residuum." So, in 2012, Orlando Vistel Columbie, the president of the Cultural Ministry building'southward music institute, banned the music from radio and television, declaring, "Neither vulgarity nor mediocrity will exist able to tarnish the richness of Cuban music."
The music survived, notwithstanding. "The thing that keeps reggaeton live," El Happy said, "is the transcendence of reggaeton."
As the authorities has relaxed restrictions, the music and the fashion influence of its stars accept spread beyond Cuba and taken over Havana. Fans have overcome highly restricted Internet access by passing effectually reggaeton videos like contraband via retentiveness sticks. They get pleather gear that they believe to be imported from the United states or United mexican states at private (nongovernment) shops on Galiano Street, nearly the towering, scaffold-encased Capitolio dome.
But the true stamp of reggaeton's influence hither is the hair.
On the streets of Havana, fans wear their pilus similar Alejandro Santoya, amend known as El Yonki (derived from the give-and-take "junkie"). El Yonki's big hitting is a vocal called "La Barba," or "The Beard." "It signifies experience," he said of facial hair on a contempo evening, as he rhythmically pumped the brakes of his expensive Chinese sedan and reached into the glove compartment for hair wax. "It gives you lot a serious look."
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In Erstwhile Havana, where old men play Buena Vista songs for tourists by the Havana Club Rum Museum, Bittista Pérez Rubisel, 25, who goes by Tito, came out of a sandwich store that played a loop of visually and lyrically filthy reggaeton videos. He expressed adoration for the "European"-style beards of Los Desiguales (striking song: "Mas Fashion"). When asked how a European beard compares with that of Fidel Castro, Mr. Rubisel turned reverent.
"He can wear information technology how he wants," he said, kissing his mitt and pointing it to the sky. "He's the jefe."
Mr. Rubisel felt freer to speak almost haircuts.
"Mine is the shark," he said, running his mitt down the length of his hair. "It'south shaved on the sides, but the top goes all the style downward to the back."
Mr. Rubisel and so ran through other popular hairstyles. To display "the scissors," he pointed at his friend, who had a small patch of hair in the back of his otherwise shaved caput, like a slipping skullcap. There was "the Yonki," named in honour of El Yonki, in which sides are shaved below a towering acme. And then there was "the steak," which Mr. Rubisel said consisted of a flattened top hanging off a shaved head like a comb-over. Sensing some bewilderment virtually the name "the steak," Mr. Rubisel turned to the visual aid of the ham hanging from his sandwich.
To get the new Havana look, immature men visit special barbershops effectually the city. The undisputed mecca of these salons is Donde Dorian.
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Camouflaged on a residential street opposite a wall with obedient graffiti extolling the local Commission for the Defense of the Revolution, the salon's drab facade gives way to a brilliant front room selling Hollywood cigarettes, Cristal beer and espresso from a vintage machine. In a higher place the polished bar is an LG flat-screen Boob tube playing the ubiquitous reggaeton videos of poolside bacchanals.
Around 11 p.m. on a contempo evening, a line of young men waited in the back room for their turn in the seat of Dorian Carbonell Fernandéz, 31, who was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and sculpting the eyebrows of Robert Richard Esteves with a straight border razor. Mr. Fernandéz looked in a mirror, lined with boxes of Bulgari and Fendi colognes, and reached over the fence of Mr. Esteves'south hair to pluck up wilted locks within. He and so blew out the hair upwardly with a blow-dryer. Mr. Fernandéz'due south hair blower always points upward.
"They all come to the salon before going out," Mr. Fernandéz said of his nearly 20 clients a night. His ain balding hair closely cropped, Mr. Fernandéz said he started in a state-run barbershop only had creative differences with his partners. "Dorsum so there was no styling and they wouldn't even wash hair," he remembered. "I wanted to be different." His dream is to start a chain and assist bring Cuban men's style dorsum to the glory days.
"It'due south similar the '50s in Havana," Pavel Premdes, 26, said as he had his hair touched upward in a "Grease"-like wave. "Dorian is bringing it back."
As another client showed off a cellphone picture of his girlfriend in librarian glasses straddling a pool table, an assistant to Mr. Fernandéz stood under an elevated drinking glass bedchamber that looks like the cockpit of a helicopter that had crashed into the salon. It is used for hair straightening.
She flipped through her phone'south pictures of the hairstyles worn by the salon's most famous clients. There was Yonki's red, green and black dollop, similar a Christmas-season Hershey'south Kiss, and Chacal's rooster Mohawk. In the corner of the room, Eduardito Borges, an aspiring reggaeton star known as El Mascara, closed his eyes as the pilus washer massaged his pilus in the sink.
"He is the stylist to the stars," Mr. Borges said dreamily.
Dorsum downwards the street from the Nacional, one of Mr. Fernandéz'southward most accomplished clients, Chacal, jumped on stage and sang, "Mami grita si tu quieres united nations tubazo, un tubazo, un tubazo." A crush of women answered in the affirmative, pumping their chests equally if doing vertical situps.
While many men in the crowd admired the singers' hair, Miguel Estevez Figueredo stood past a cherry-red leather wall in the dorsum of the club, speaking over the din and ignoring the repeated brushes of pleathered shoulders as fans pushed toward the stage. He said he preferred the longer beard of other Cuban heroes.
So he wanted a beard like Fidel's?
"Different," he said. "Darker."
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