La Guantanamera

"Man loves liberty, even if he does not know that he loves it. He is driven by it and flees from where it does not exist". - Jose Marti, Cuban Statesman, Poet, and Journalist (1853-1895)

I love music!

It seems these days I am listening to a lot of stuff from the sixties. Maybe it is because I was a baby/toddler/youngster and that time was a happy period in my life. Maybe it’s because I remember the optimism of those earlier years and the music reflected that.

In these days I tend to go back to “La Guantanamera” a lot. It is a song I heard a lot of when I was a kid…I remember I loved the chorus, never knowing what it stood for or indeed what the preceding Spanish verses meant! Just the sheer beauty of the sounds made me smile then.

Years later it was adopted with adjusted lyrics by various football fans on countless terraces around Britain & Ireland. I heard it with a deal of sadness when The Republic of Ireland beat Northern Ireland 3-0, “one team in Ireland, there’s only one team in Ireland”. I loathe the fact that the small island of Ireland has to have two football teams when we are united in other sports. I imagined that the writer of the true lyrics Jose Marti would not have appreciated the sentiments of the crowd in Lansdowne Road that day as it was a poem identified (with) the love of freedom for his native Cuba…It is a beautiful song, set to a traditional Cuban air by Jose Fernandez Diaz.

Yo soy un hombre sincero I am a truthful man
De donde crece la palma From where the palm tree grows
Y antes de morirme quiero And before dying I want
Echar mis versos del alma To let out the verses of my soul
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera

Mi verso es de un verde claro My verse is light green
de un carmín encendido And it is flaming crimson
Mi verso es un ciervo herido My verse is a wounded fawn
Que busca en el monte amparo Who seeks refuge on the mountain
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera

Cultivo una rosa blanca I grow a white rose
En julio como en enero In July just as in January
Para el amigo sincero For the honest friend
Que me da su mano franca Who gives me his open hand
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera

Con los pobres de la tierra With the poor people of the earth
Quiero yo mi suerte echar I want to share my luck
El arroyo de la sierra The stream of the mountains
Me complace más que el mar Gives me more pleasure than the sea
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera

The sheer beauty of the lyrics even in English is breath-taking, I simply love this song and Pete Seeger’s 1963 live recording of it is incredible. The world owes a great debt to Pete for keeping songs such as this in the public consciousness….more on that man later.

As I play the song my two year old “sings” along to the melody…the torch is passed!