Raul Paz

Guajiro; chic Cuban country music : Raúl Paz unites multiple worlds, bringing together his Cuban identity with 15 years spent in Europe, and his long career with his new young fanbase. A musician of the town and the countryside, the singer-songwriter is releasing “Guajiro Chic”, a warm, political yet danceable new album.

Cuban singer, songwriter and composer Raúl Paz spent almost fifteen years in exile before returning home to Cuba. He has been living with his family in Finca Villaverde in the Viñales valley since 2009. A warm approachable man, he plants and organises his family's life independently, using solar energy and permaculture. He enjoys the skillful simplicity of his close neighbours, ‘destitute and inspired workers on the land, roots musicians’. These new circumstances led to the energetic and seductive Guajiro Chic. Raúl Paz fine-tuned the lyrics, using double meanings, an art peculiar to artists in exile as much as to the malicia of the peasants.

Born in 1969 in the province of Pinar del Rio in the far west of Cuba, Raúl studied Western classical music at the Higher Institute of the Arts. But at home everybody listened and danced to Guajiro music. Raúl Paz thus acquired a good grounding passed on by his father, that of campesina music, from which the unsubmissive Cuban musicians drew their know-how, ‘without concern for mixing races, colours or social status - the Matamoros Trio, Bola de Nieve, Beny Moré and Polo Montanez, for example’.

Raúl was a gifted student and was offered a scholarship to the Schola Cantorum in Paris. In 1994, he found himself on the banks of the Seine. Here he found fans of Cuban music, salsa dancers and lovers of son, rumba and trova. He was studying classical music, but was drawn to popular Cuban music too and started playing in Parisian clubs like the New Morning or the Hot Brass, adapting to popular music so well and so quickly that he invented his own musical identity ‘a mixture of tradition and modern sounds’ that attracted young people. During the fifteen years he spent in France, Raul built up an exemplary career, moving from clubs to big theatres like the the Olympia and the Zénith.

In 2009, Raúl decided to return to his homeland, to the countryside. ‘I'm fed up with the city, the business, the rush, the competition, the speed, the formatted music’. From his country retreat, he composed albums, music for ‘telenovelas’ for national television, and produced an album for Florent Pagny (Habana, 2016). At the end of the pandemic he triumphed at Havana's Teatro Marti ‘with a classical repertoire’. His return to Cuba marked an aesthetic turning point and created the new face of Cuban songwriting. And because he spoke the truth in his songs, young people followed him. From now on, Raul Paz intends to move freely and share his life between Cuba and Europe. He has also set up a label to launch young Cuban talent and promote their music internationally.