Pico Blanco, a bar known as the "Rincon del feeling"
The Bar Pico Blanco is located very close to the birthplace of a genre of music called “feeling”, in the Cayo Hueso neighborhood, specifically the famous Hammel Alley. The Bar is in the Hotel Saint John’s, on 0 Street, between 23rd and 25th, in the Vedado neighborhood.
What is this “feeling”, that the Cubans have taken from English?
One Cuban expert claims that “there are so many definitions that there are no definitions.” Let’s just say that it’s a unique way of singing with feeling, a result of the evolution of Cuban singing that began in the western city of Santiago, but that took off in the capital, and this is why many consider it to be the “child of the old Santiago ballad”.
José Antonio Méndez, or el "Ronco", one of the first singers of “feeling”, said that the genre searched for “the condition” and that it should be sung with honesty; the world-famous writer of “Novia Mía” and “Si me comprendieras”, among others, is certainly an authority on the matter, in my opinion.
Another early signer of feeling, César Portillo de la Luz, always defended the idea that the goal was not to sing well, because “we didn’t try to be singers”, but what they wanted was, “to communicate something with beauty.”
For this reason, the songs are suggestive, by combining a text, totally non-academic lyrics that are closer to everyday speech, with a difficult but attractive harmonic structure that brings us closer to the person we love, in order to speak with them up close, with the accompaniment of a guitar.
Of coutse, the genre has its detractors. There are some who think that the music of César Portillo de la Luz, José Antonio Méndez, Ñico Rojas, Ángel Díaz, Jorge Mazón, Rosendo Ruiz Quevedo, was too intimate, too urban or too improvised.
The cathedral of feeling is in the Bar Pico Blanco of the Hotel Saint John's, in the vicinity of the Rampa. Remember that the singer Silvio Rodriguez wrote that, “There are no better songs to fall in love to than these”, and Havana residents could be singing to their lover, in that deep and assured way, a feeling like: If I could express to you how immense in the depths of my heart is my love for you.
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