A mass for El Taiger: the Cuban singer fights for his life in Miami after being shot in the head

Fifth consecutive day and The Taiger He doesn’t wake up, he doesn’t give signs, he doesn’t do a live on Instagram, he doesn’t get into trouble with anyone, he doesn’t show off his multi-carat jewelry, he doesn’t unleash “a tiradera” or beef, a new hit doesn’t hit. A national, collective and unspeakable sadness is felt. Outside the Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, an improvised altar has been set up with candles and photos where people kneel, cry, pray, sing and speak in Yoruba languages. Some claim that El Taiger, alias of José Manuel Carbajal Zaldívar, will soon get up from the stretcher and walk out; others that, if he lives, he could be left with irreversible brain damage and some say what the rest do not want to accept: that most likely the most popular singer in Cuba Today, one of the greatest exponents of the cast musical genre, a Creole version of reggaeton, will not return to life after a bullet shot that entered through his forehead and exited through the right side of his brain.

It is a miracle in itself that he is still alive. On the morning of October 3, Miami police officers found him in the back of a black Mercedes-Benz, covered in blood, and surrounded by two gallons of gasoline. Everything that can be said right now about what happened does not exceed speculation. That with gasoline they planned a fire so as not to leave traces. That the person who shot him is someone who hated him to the same extent that he loved him, enough to drive the car to the vicinity of the hospital. which was a dealer. That he was a friend. That he regretted it. At first some considered the possibility of suicide. The singer himself has acknowledged that he has been dealing with depression for years and warned in one of his songs that he was “living below zero,” “with nerves below zero.” Rather, he said that he had been “improvising a life” for four years, since his mother died in 2020. It is not something that the regular followers of El Taiger, 37, have not noticed in his sudden transmissions at the helm, with lost eyes. , the tangled language, the unintelligible words, under the effect of some substance and the deepest and darkest night in Miami. But authorities have ruled out this theory and have focused the investigation on what appears to be a homicide.

Although they have circulated the photo of Damián Valdés, alias He narrates, a person close to El Taiger who is missing and who seems to be one of the last ones he was with, the truth is that no one knows much more than what the authorities, friends or his work team have let his millions of friends know. desperate fans, in the middle of an investigation where discretion is necessary for the moment.

Once his body was found and taken to the hospital, El Taiger underwent surgery. He is not in a coma but he is in critical condition, he breathes artificially and has a lot of brain damage. “If they take away the machines, he is a vegetable, he is dead,” Carlos Alfaro, his representative, told the press. If anyone knew the value of his brain it was El Taiger. “The most expensive or expensive thing my body has right now is my brain,” the singer once said while fingering the multiple gold and pearl jewelry that hung from his tattooed neck. “It is the hardest garment that a jeweler cannot make for me,” he added. On the cover of your album Engagement The singer’s head appears, almost as a premonition, without a part of his brain, as if it had been removed by the force of a gunshot.

Cubans cannot explain how something like this can be happening, that is, that El Taiger is barely there, the person who has given them enough reasons in recent times to enjoy dancing and disobedience. He was born José Manuel Carbajal Zaldívar in Altahabana.grew up with the group Los 4, became El Príncipe de Los Desiguales and catapulted as El Taiger. He conquered the sky of the distribution, the craft of Cuban music that Yosvanis Arismin Sierra Hernández, known as Chocolate MC, the King of Delivery, under the mantle of his idol Elvis Manuel, an 18-year-old reggaeton player who ended up drowning in the middle of a boat trip trying to reach Miami.

Tired of the genre that came from Puerto Rico, or wanting to make one of their own, or reinvent it, the neighborhood Cubans created the cast, the musical genre that is heard, lived, danced, sung, breathed in the streets, the alleys, the avenues and the castes of Cuba. The background sound of the country, the band of its destruction, of its decline. It is still an enigma how in an almost desert, arid territory, where nothing grows, a country completely devastated, a new rhythm has been born. People appropriated reggaeton and put timba on it. It is, by far, the best thing that has happened to Cuba in recent times, which already gives so little, or returns almost nothing.

The cast, however, has given everything to those from below, to the young people who do it without a music industry behind them, some in their early twenties, who have hits, who come from the most marginalized neighborhoods. The cast changed their lives, gave them food, offered them a place, paraded them like kings around the stages of the country and the world. Class people cannot understand it, the academic man who calls him low, marginal, vulgar cannot understand it, nor the lady who says that all delivery drivers are, equally, drug addicts, criminals, conflictive and social scourges. .

“I know that many people today do not bet anything on the cast,” said Wampi, one of the exponents of the genre, who became a voting member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of USA, the first distributor accepted by the institution that awards The Grammys. “They still believe that it doesn’t mean or represent anything to anyone or the world, but the reality is that this genre has changed our lives.”

The cast is Cuban, and its exponents have made it clear to Peruvians and the world when they wanted to claim its authorship. The cast is slower than reggaeton, softer, more sentimental. A song that invites war can seem like a liturgy. The cast is an identity, and therefore it has its codes to slide the eyes, move the mouth, raise the hands and shoulders. The cast has been called sexist, but the cast has not hidden to say that “fuckinkele It is not obligatory, it is if you want”, or that “they take away anyone’s dick, they hit anyone’s jars.” The distribution was reached through the same path that Cuban reggaeton artists such as Eddy K or El Micha previously traveled, or the urban music made by Gente de Zona, inheriting the tradition of Tego Calderón, of Daddy Yankeeby Don Omar. Today some of the fashionable names are Bebeshito, Kevincito el 13, Fixty Ordara, Ja Rulay, Dani Ome, Charly y Johayron, el Chulo, Wow Popy or Maxwell. Among all, El Taiger has reigned, his teacher, his opponent in some cases, the greatest, who has sung with Bad Bunny, J Balvin or Cosculluela, but he gave up the highest positions in the industry to pursue a solo career.

The Taiger, in the words of the Cuban composer Elito Revé, “father of changüí” and leader of the famous orchestra “Revé y su Charangón”, changed the format of Cuban music. “The Taiger kills people from the beginning, because their songs come in with the tumbao,” he said in an interview on the YouTube channel Advanced Cuban Studio. “Now he starts you with the tumbao from the beginning.” “Before we did the body of the song, the action and then comes the tumbao or the chorus of the musical theme, but now what the youth wants is the chorus directly.”

Taiger, aware of his talent, did not hide to show off, to say that he had been the one in the genre for more than ten years. And it is. In his songs with dissimilar rhythms, with simple titles, a maximum of one or two words (The Healthy One, Matador Speaks, The History, Behavior, Get Over Yourself) He plays with language, grabs the words, twists them, inverts the meaning. The Taiger not only gave music to young people in Cuba, it has been setting a style for years, a way of dressing, of getting cuts at the barber. Now that he is between life and death, people have asked him to put on his prince’s tuxedo and wake up, which is taking too long.

El Taiger was elevated by the cast and has ended up being a victim of the cast itself: of what it can mean to come from below, of what it may be that you have nothing and at the moment you have everything, of being on people’s lips, of being measured by the moral yardstick of others, now that some say he deserves it, in a world full of drugs and crime. That no other end could be expected for him, who leaves and enters the Miami prisons normally, and once outside he recites verses by José Martí and rides around in a Lamborghini.

Taiger has also been a victim of that lynching corridor between Havana and Miami, and there, in the midst of his convalescence, some have him located. N has stopped singing on the island’s stages, as the conservatives of South Florida do not allow, who have long been in conflict with him for bathing on the beaches of Varadero, singing in the clubs of Miramar, spending time with his friends. children and his grandmother, and then return normally to the patio of the Neme gastrobar, in Miami, making use of a freedom that El Taiger has never been willing to traffic with. “I’m going to go as many times as I want because it’s my country,” he once said when asked about the matter.

From Cuba it took a while for the official media to publish the news, when the entire world is paying attention to the singer’s state of health. It took days for the National Institute of Music to wish him a “speedy recovery.” The distribution, however, has been much more democratic. He comes from the neighborhood but he doesn’t care where the people who listen to him and dance to him come from. He moves easily between both shores: he was born in Cuba but grew strongly in Miami. The cast forgives. All the singers who were involved in controversies with El Taiger, with whom he argued publicly or asked for their heads, have gone on to leave a candle, a message, a wish for recovery.

The cast, and in general urban music, has united Cubans inside and outside in recent years in a way that the leaders, nor the parties, nor the CED party parties, nor the stands in the Plaza de la Revolution, nor the concentrations at the Versaille restaurant. Two years ago, fed up with the pandemic confinement and the double control that the government exercised in the country, the residents of Central Havana came out in tumult over the unexpected death of the famous reggaeton singer El Danny. Now similar images have been seen of large concentrations in Havana, Camagüey or Guantánamo, a sea of ​​people walking the dark streets of their cities, while crying and singing the songs of El Taiger. The distribution is the last and almost only territory of freedom for Cubans. Nobody is going to repress them now, not like the government does when people come out to ask for freedom, or electricity, or food. In the end it is the same people who have nothing, it is the same insurgency in the streets of Cuba. It seems that they are taking over the country, that they are taking it from someone, and that Cuba is beginning to be free. The exiles also gather in several cities as a vigil, asking that El Taiger wake up once and for all. It is, inside and outside, the free and distributive republic of Cuba, a conquered territory, the only thing that cannot be taken away from the Cubans.

Nobody wants a life without The Taiger. He himself once warned the rest: “The day I’m not here, not even the sun will give you the light that I give you.” And the light has already begun to fail.