Approximate reading time: 2 minutes, 32 seconds
The beautiful city of the sea, the one that enchants, the one that I like the most, recently reached its 205th anniversary. How much history, how much culture and music has sounded through each of its streets, avenues, walks, parks.
Distracting your memory and revisiting emblematic places such as the José Martí park, with its triumphal arch – the only replica in Cuba of that in Paris – with that majestic roundabout, is once again feeling that the 19th century takes over the imagination of each of those who visit it. We inhabit it and enjoy it daily. There, in that park every Sunday morning you could enjoy some of the bands that coexisted in the city. Symphonies, waltzes, fantasias, mazurkas, marches, were the musical forms that, alternating with international and Cuban pieces, made up their repertoire. This tradition also reached municipalities such as Palmira, Cumanayagua, Cruces, Rodas and Santa Isabel de Las Lajas.
The songs of the Vienna children’s choir still resonate on the stage of the Tomás Terry theater, or that memorable Cuban Song Festival organized for the first time by Eusebio Delfín together with Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes.
In the 1930s, the splendor of Cienfuegos music was appreciated. In places such as the Spanish Casino, the Yacht Club, the Hunters Club, the Tomás Terry Theater Athenaeum and the Minerva Club, various activities were carried out such as banquets, wedding celebrations, sports games, regattas, dancing tea parties. At each festival a musical group always played.
Walking through the southern streets meant listening to different musical notes that came from the homes of the music teachers, many of them integrated into academies, which numbered more than a dozen at the time.
The Prado showed its charm; to retrace it, was to provoke the lovers to attend the longed-for meeting. The Prado and Luisa cinemas showed the best films of the time. The musical accompaniment of the film song of love It became established in the taste of the people of Cienfuegos. Excellent operas were heard in the interpretation of three great singers of magnificent abilities: Grace Moore, from Columbia; Gladys Swarthint, from Paramount and Lily Pons, from RKO Radio.
For their part, sonero fans enjoyed the emblematic Septeto Los Naranjos and others that, although short in their artistic career, enlivened the musical atmosphere of the southern Fernandina de Jagua. Other men and women of culture graced the town with their presence. Such is the case of the actors Luisa Martínez Casado and Arquímedes Pous, as well as the plastic artists Mateo Torriente and Benjamín Duarte.
The Cienfuegos press carried the signature of numerous local writers and journalists of important reputation, such as: Eduardo Torres Morales, Miguel Ángel de la Torre, Francisco Cañellas Martí, Pedro López Dorticós, Salvador Bienvenido Rumbaut Yánez, Saturnino Tejera, Eduardo Benet Castellón, among others. . They formed the great nucleus of the subsidiary of the Cuban Press Association, which had emerged in Cienfuegos since 1904.
The fidelity of the people of Cienfuegos to their history has been highlighted since 1861, when Enrique Edo Llops wrote the first history of Cienfuegos with the title Historical memory of the town of Cienfuegos and its jurisdiction. In 1920, Pablo Rousseau and Pablo Díaz de Villegas wrote the second history of Cienfuegos on the occasion of the city’s first centenary (1919), Descriptive, historical and biographical memory of Cienfuegos and the festivities of the first centenary of the founding of this city (1819-1919). A work of special importance is the Cienfuegos biographical dictionary of Luis J. Bustamante.
As for popular music, Cienfuegos women managed to obtain an important place at the national level in the person of Paulina Álvarez, recognized as the Empress of Danzonete. A name little remembered in peasant music for having created the Guajira de Salón was Guillermo Portabales. In another direction, we find Roberto Espí, singer and orchestra director who creates and directs the famous Conjunto Casino, The rhythm champions.
Known for his relationship with Benny Moré, Generoso Jiménez is an extraordinary musician who performed with the main Cuban orchestras. An important space is occupied by Marcelino Guerra (Rapindey); who was part of Ignacio Piñeiro’s National Septet like Rafael Ortiz. The outstanding figure of the music of the Cienfuegos region in those decades was Bartolomé Maximiliano (Benny) Moré. These are some of the names we should be proud of, the story that is yet to be told, we should build it.
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