The Punks on G Street: Tracking Cuba’s Rebellious Youth 50 Years After the Revolution

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Gawker/ Julia Cooke

I met Liván, Takeshi and the rest of their band of frikis—rock and metal fans of the punk-and-anarchist subcategory—around nine one Thursday night on the median of Havana's G Street. I'd come to Havana to write a book about what it was like to be a young adult in the post-Fidel city and, since G Street was the biggest party in town, it was where I began.

Every weekend and some weekday nights, clouds of cliquey, fashion-conscious, loud-talking teenagers and young adults descended on the avenue. By nine, dozens already stood on street corners in loose circles that, since the night was particularly busy, grew amorphously into traffic until drivers honked horns and policemen shuffled toward them and the kids retreated to their sidewalks. Surrounded by so much youth, the impossibility of 80-somethings governing in perpetuity felt as evident as the statues of martyred leftists lofting impotent machetes above the grass below.

These boys loped down the hill four in front, and then three, pushing each other into onlookers. They wore torn jeans, wallet chains, boots, scruffy Converse, inked limbs. Each had sculpted his hair into a Mohawk or some variation of it. They wanted to take up space, and they did: as I sat on a bench, watching, their group stopped a few feet away from me and a photographer out to capture images of the more colorful Cubans on the avenue asked to take a few shots. The camera's flash made the shiny leaves of the bushes in the background gleam along with the studs in the boys' lips, eyebrows, noses.

"So, what kind of music do you listen to?" I asked the boy who sat down on the opposite end of the bench. In the five years since I'd first lived in Havana for an electrifying teenaged semester at the University of Havana, G Street had bloated from a few stonefaced friki hanging out after weekend shows into the nexus for all tribes of young Cubans. It was both threatening and threatened: People rumored that the government would shut it down—send policemen in on a Friday night and round everyone up under the charge of "social dangerousness" or "a pre-criminal danger to society," hazy legal terms that carried with them up to four years in prison. So much collective youth was undesirable to Cuba's government. Understandable, in light of the average age of dissenting movements across the history of one-party political systems.  More >>