Music corner

The team at the excellent Penultimos Dias blog get a hat tip for pointing the way to an intriguing interview published today by Reuters.

The interviewee is Carlos Lage Codorniu, the 25-year-old head of the communist-controlled Federation of University Students in Cuba.

What makes the interview newsworthy is the fact that Lage Codorniu also happens to be the son of vice-president Carlos Lage, who is generally regarded as the third most important political figure on the island. After the Castro brothers, of course.

In other words, the younger Lage is one of the privileged few.

As you would expect, he says all the right things to the interviewers: socialism is immortal, young Cubans are right behind Fidel, the “achievements” of the Revolution are many and sacred and must be defended at all costs, capitalism is evil, blah, blah, blah.

“We can not question the basic premise of the Revolution,” he says, parroting the official line perfectly.

Much more interesting, though, are Lage Codorniu’s comments on his taste in music.

He admits that in his younger days he was something of a fan of Queen, the British band. Then he saw the revolutionary light, ditched rock music and went back to listening to Silvio Rodriguez, the Castro regime’s official musical propagandist.

No accounting for taste.