Jeremías Gamboa

In March 2016, as part of their "América Latina Olé Tour," the British band The Rolling Stones performed in Cuba for the first time, in a free concert held at Havana’s Ciudad Deportiva. On Good Friday, just after the visit of U.S. President Barack Obama—the first American head of state to set foot in Cuba in eighty-eight years—the Stones played before a crowd whose exact size remains a topic of debate: was it 500,000 people? 1.2 million?

The audience included fans from abroad who didn’t want to miss what promised to be one of the band’s most thrilling shows, as well as actors, journalists, and of course Cubans who, for the most part—due to restrictions imposed by the Castro regime—had never heard the Rolling Stones’ music before.

Argentinian journalist Javier Sinay, Mexican writer and Café Tacvba guitarist Joselo, and Peruvian writer and journalist Jeremías Gamboa traveled to Cuba to witness this strange experiment: a head-on collision between the world’s longest-running rock band and a people only just beginning to awaken to their music.

This book brings together the chronicles they each wrote about that concert, which became a historic event.