Ozzy Osbourne Talks ‘Mind-Blowing’ Cuba Visit, History Channel Show
Ozzy Osbourne and his son, Jack, have been filming a new show for the History Channel, in which the Black Sabbath frontman travels to unique historical sites, since last fall. So far, they’ve visited the Alamo – where Osbourne apologized for urinating on the monument three decades earlier – Stonehenge, Roswell, New Mexico, Havana, Cuba and Mount Rushmore, among other places. It’s an experience for which the singer is grateful.
“After The Osbournes TV show, my son chose to go behind the camera and he’s got his own company,” Osbourne tells Rolling Stone. “He said, ‘Would you be interested in doing this show?’ And I went, ‘Oh, great, fine.’ I just got back from Cuba last week, which, incidentally, if you get any chance to go over there you should go, mate. It’s fucking great.”
Havana left a strong impression on the singer, who lauds how cheap things are, how easy it is to navigate and its abundance of “fucking mind-blowing” architecture and classic cars. He also enjoyed visiting a war memorial built after the Cuban Missile Crisis. “They got parts of a fucking U-2 plane lying around in this military thing in a park and you can just go and touch it,” Osbourne says. “And I’m going, ‘Fucking hell. If that was in England or America, they’d have a fucking screen that you couldn’t touch this stuff.’ Then somebody pointed out to me that under the Castro regime, it’s everybody’s property. It’s not a government thing … but it’s kind of weird.”
Osbourne also reiterated that he knows from experience that people should visit the island before it becomes gentrified. “As the embargo’s dropping off every week, it’s gonna get built up and right now is the best time to go,” he says. “It’s like when I first went to Prague in the Czech Republic many years ago as the Russians left. It was cheap and it was funky and it was good until, you know, we all get the businesspeople in there and they fuck it all up. I had a great time in Cuba.”
The History Channel has yet to reveal the title of the Osbournes’ new show and a premiere date.