A Famed Latin American Musician and a Charmed Renegade Actor Make Their Anti-Communist Debuts

The Anti-Communist March being preformed by Mia (L), Nestor Jimenez, Frankie Marcos, and Greg Jackson. Photo by Ive Torr Photography

Commentary

Frankie Marcos, a Miami-based renowned Cuban American musician, is risking a 50-year career of adulation to share his immigration story as a warning to America.

Mr. Marcos’s newest song, “The Anti-Communist March,“ has achieved a total of 4.2 million views on YouTube in five months and citations from Argentine President Javier Milei, as well as a mass U.S. reception because of Mr. Marcos’s frontman—the country singer, international model, and ”Days of Our Lives” star Greg Jackson. It’s also gotten backlash, threatening Mr. Marcos’s finances, career, and safety.

But Mr. Marcos didn’t write the song for personal gain. He wrote it to send a message: that what he had seen in Cuba, the growth of communism that displaced his family, was happening in America. The question for Mr. Marcos is how many people will listen before it’s too late.

A Cuban Musician Comes to America, Makes a Career

Mr. Marcos came to Miami when he was 13, from an island with an explosive music culture drawing from Europe, Africa, and America. When he was 15, he started playing flute and saxophone professionally, even as he explored Miami, whose black population tuned Mr. Marcos into the similarities between traditional Cuban music’s syncopation—its crossings of different “beats”—and the rhythms of American funk, a combination of blues and soul. These influences merged with catchy, commercial favorites such as the songs of Blood Sweat and Tears to give Mr. Marcos his style.

“He makes arrangements and plays them technically to perfection, without losing the essence of what he’s trying to convey,” Mariori De Marcos, his wife, told me.

Mr. Marcos describes his work, with characteristic modesty, as the gift of others.

“All my life I’ve been around good musicians, and good cultures,” he told me.

But he’s taken that gift, transformed it, and gone his own way. After making his bones in the Miami music scene in the 1970s and eventually transforming it, he appeared everywhere, from Las Vegas to post-Soviet Russia, and shared the stage with everyone, from Liza Minnelli to Tom Jones.

“I finally found a way not to have an accent,” he said, describing the joy this brings him. Still, there is a melancholy shot through Mr. Marcos’s engagement with the world, one that comes from losing his first home.

Since Mr. Marcos left Cuba, the country has gone from being the fifth-ranked Latin American country in income per capita to a place where electricity is scarce, underage girls survive off prostitution, and families flee on makeshift rafts across the Caribbean.

“I wrote my first anti-communist song in 1983, and I called it ‘Cuba Libre,’” Mr. Marcos recalled. “And my father came to me, and he said, ‘You already have a record of work you’re building on, don’t get into the political thing.’ I listened to my father. I changed the lyrics completely. I made the song about the drink.”

But 40 years later, when his record of work had gotten his name on a boulevard in Miami, Mr. Marcos threw his life a curveball because of Jordan, his son.

Seeing Communism Come to America

“Jordan was majoring in international relations at FIU [Florida International University],” Ms. De Marcos said, “and he would come to me saying, ‘I would like to show you what I wrote,’ but he’d also say, ‘Just know it’s not what I think; I have to write it for the professor to get an A.’”

In class after class, the dogmatic political bias was clear.

“What was frightening,” said Ms. De Marcos, “was that he couldn’t write what he believed because of his GPA.”

The situation hit Mr. Marcos harder. For an artist, having one’s beliefs slowly leeched out by the world’s demands is among the worst of all fates, and Mr. Marcos is an artist from Cuba, so he also recognized the makings of a political play. In his view, and the views of other Miami Cubans over the past few years, America’s institutions are taking promises—equality, women’s rights, world peace, racial justice—and using them to push politics to another register, pitting blacks against whites, and women against men.

“It’s the beginning of a new proletariat in America. It’s what Castro did in Cuba,” Mr. Marcos said. “It’s what the regime still does today.”

Not long after, a new song pushed its way into Mr. Marcos’s mind.

The song came during a saxophone improv session with his collaborator, the renowned Paquito D’Rivera.

“Paquito said, ‘Frankie, what’s the name of the song we just made?’ and I said, out of nowhere, ‘It’s “The Anti-Communist March,”’ and Paquito started laughing. Then I said, ‘I need lyrics,’ and he realized I was serious. I said, ‘They have to be universal, understandable to everybody; they have to explain what communism is.’”

Mr. Marcos also had to figure out how to make music born of sax improv appeal to Americans. That is where Greg Jackson entered the picture.

Finding a Frontman

Even over the phone, Mr. Jackson’s magnetic cool brings to mind Robert Redford’s response when he was asked to act a scene as if a girl had turned him down: “What do you mean?” Thanks to this self-confidence, Mr. Jackson can put his ego aside and read the terrain, which has allowed him to survive industries he came into at high tide and then left as waves of homogenization came crashing down.

Mr. Jackson entered modeling in the late 1980s not long out of the Navy, spending five or six years hitting the big brands of the time: Michelob, Discover, Ford, Valentino, Armani, Italian Vogue, Salem Lights. When the three-inch catalogs started shrinking with digital media, he went to Hollywood, where he got turned off by the drug scene and instead made a career by diversifying. His work ranged from skits on Leno and Letterman to nearly killing a character played by Jennifer Aniston’s dad on “Days of Our Lives,” to country music performances, to making smart westerns “before the studios got bought by conglomerates that made them silly.”

Then, COVID-19 hit and put paid to the industry. In the face of lockdowns, Mr. Jackson again kept one step ahead: moving to South Florida, meeting a model and artist, Kiki Bremont, and pairing up personally and professionally with her.

One of the ways Mr. Jackson and Ms. Bremont got work was through the website International Entertainers. In the summer of 2023, Mr. Jackson first decided to ignore an offer he received: “Want an American for the English version of a Spanish song—country rock flavor.”

After two more approaches, he called the number back and got Mr. Marcos. A few weeks later, he and Ms. Bremont were at Mr. Marcos’s studio—about as far from homogenized Hollywood as Mr. Jackson could imagine.

When Jackson Meets Marcos, Hollywood Meets Miami

A lot had happened to “The Anti-Communist March” in the few months since Mr. Marcos and Mr. D'Rivera first improvised their way to the song. The addition of violins, violas, cellos, trumpets, trombones, drums, congas, guitars, and bass had made the original score into a full Frankie Marcos production—catchy, emotional, and underlyingly complex. The lyrics, which Mr. Marcos had worked on with a political-historical and a linguistic-historical consultant, were specific yet uncompromising.

They turned on the basic line “Communism is the cancer of humanity,” which Mr. Marcos thought formed the core of the song.

As Ms. De Marcos, who had made her career in medicine and at first cautioned Mr. Marcos about the lyrics, puts it: “For everyone, cancer is such a scary thing. It brings the sense of a fate that is the worst it can be, losing everything, being so scared.”

Reading the lyrics of an anti-totalitarian anthem that turns on a cancer metaphor and then being asked to perform it would throw some artists off their stride. But if Mr. Marcos’s art is about synthesis and control, Mr. Jackson’s is about reacting in the moment. He knew immediately, reading over the material, how to adjust to it.

“Make it as big as you can. That’s what it demands. It’s that serious. Do it any other way—embarrassed, small—and it goes hokeyville,” he said.

Mr. Jackson nailed the song in an hour and a half. When the Marcoses cautioned that the song might upset the wrong people, Mr. Jackson, the former Navy man, delivered a line that could have come straight from one of his intelligent westerns: “Hey, I can stay at home sitting down, or I can get up and do something for my country.”

The ‘Anti-Communist March’ Debuts—and the Backlash Begins

That was Sept. 11, 2023. Four months of edits followed, filled with Mr. Marcos’s total attention to detail. Then, on Jan. 8, 2024, the video went up. It got 12,000 views in 7 hours.

“Well, OK,” Mr. Jackson recalled thinking at the time. “That’s nice.”

But the views didn’t stop: they went to 500,000; then a million.

“There was so much traffic,” Mr. Jackson recalled. “The numbers would stop and stay stagnant and YouTube would have to stop and catch up.” In five months, the song had 4.2 million views.

What really struck the Marcoses were the comments on X and YouTube from Venezuelans, Georgians, Chinese, and others, all survivors of communist regimes. They said Mr. Marcos’s cancer metaphor had touched a nerve. They said he had to get the word out further. They reposted the song to Argentine President Javier Milei, one of communism’s ardent opponents in the Western Hemisphere. Eventually, three close advisers to Mr. Milei passed it on to him. Soon Mr. Milei was using the phrase “the cancer of humanity,” warning of collectivism’s threat.

But what struck the Marcoses simultaneously was the backlash. Ms. De Marcos’s computer was attacked by a virus that paralyzed it, then stopped, and then did it again. Friends began contacting Ms. De Marcos via texts to her cell, writing in strange cadences, asking for private information, and she eventually realized her phone had been hacked and her friends’ numbers repurposed by frauds. She went for advice from both the Miami Police Department, which consulted the FBI, and Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat of the Cuban Democratic Directorate, who has deep experience crossing swords with the Cuban regime.

On advice from Mr. Gutierrez-Boronat and the Miami Police Department, the Marcoses put extra security on their house and changed their routines.

What the March Means to America

But the pushback wasn’t limited to Cuba: Mr. Marcos suspects some bad actors of sabotaging his online presence as well.

YouTube demonetized “The Anti-Communist March,” costing Mr. Marcos income in the mid-five figures, and then it extended the move to all of Mr. Marcos’s music, after unfounded complaints about inappropriate content; the Marcoses appealed the decision, and YouTube eventually retracted its restrictions on Mr. Marcos’s apolitical art.

Mr. Marcos’s Facebook page, which is a chronology of his music and events for 20 years, had its email mysteriously switched, likely by Cuban agents, and, per Facebook’s policy, was shut down; no one at the company would help until, months later, a friend of a friend who works at Meta maneuvered around the issue.

Mr. Jackson, who’s kept one step ahead of the shifts in America, worries about the future that’s in store for his own 23-year-old son.

“The world that Frankie’s talking about—we’re already living it,” Mr. Jackson said. “We’re cattle in the pasture. The fences are set up. In Hollywood, everything’s regurgitated; everywhere else people are either setting up bunkers or paying $10 for a dozen eggs.”

To Mr. Jackson, Mr Marcos’s song is a story of how many people have been lost to the communist play in other countries.

“You buy into their story and you lose everything. Dreams, hopes, everything you want to do, man—it’s over,” Mr. Jackson said.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.