The prominent musician Jacinto Efraín Rodríguez Mondejar, director of Los Gafas, the island’s leading pop-rock group, passed away this Sunday at the age of 77 in Havana.
His death surprised many of the followers of the veteran band, officially founded in August 1968 under the direction of Efraín (guitar and vocals), as they used to call him.
“There was no news that he was suffering from any illness, he looked fine but he had an acute medical condition with hypertension, he remained active and always wasted energy during concerts,” he told Cubanet a musician close to artists.
His burial will take place on the afternoon of June 30 at the Colón Necropolis.
From the beginning, Rodríguez Mondejar managed to bring together young soloists and instrumentalists who marked a style with a marked national tone, which would last for more than 55 years, in a musical career in which he was accompanied by outstanding soloists such as Maggie Carlés or Héctor Téllez, who remained in Los Gafas for 14 years.
The band managed to carve out a space for itself at a time when rock was viewed with ideological distrust by the authorities while “Hey Jude” by The Beatles was becoming fashionable around the world, and also “clandestinely” in Cuba, in a historic 1968.
That year, in March, Fidel Castro decreed the nationalization of private businesses that remained from the so-called Revolutionary Offensive, nightclubs were closed for a year, and, in the world, events such as the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Tlatelolco massacre (Mexico), and the student revolts in France, convulsed the atmosphere.
Los Gafas, led by Efraín, had begun to play informally and without a name in the early sixties at the Casa de la Cultura and other venues in the Havana town of Santiago de las Vegas, before being officially baptized as professionals on August 18, 1968.
Efraín told the official media Cubahora Until then, they were called “the airport combo” because of the support they had received from the nearby airport terminal. “They even gave us overalls and glasses to look like the pilots, and that’s when I came up with the idea of calling them Los Gafas,” he revealed.
Currently, Efraín remained active at the head of the new version with new faces of the old group with weekly performances in different nightclubs in the capital such as Barbaram-Pepito’s Bar, La Maison and Café Miramar, after performing for four years at El Submarino Amarillo, of which he participated in its inauguration.
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2024-07-05 06:40:04
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