THE International Boleros of Gold Festival, organized by the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC), is back with a brilliant constellation of artists. This 24th edition is dedicated to the Caribbean and the 90th birthday of composer César Portillo de la Luz.

June 21-24, lovers of bolero from all of Latin America will come together. UNEAC has organized performances at Havana’s Mella and America Theaters, as well as within the Hurón Azul patio, at the organization's headquarters. A returning special feature is the International Colloquium, held at the Hispano-American Cultural Center (Malecón 17, between Prado and Genios).

José Loyola, president of the organizing committee, recalled that the festival was born towards the end of 1986. UNEAC's musical section decided to organize a theoretical event in Havana, July 10-12, 1987, entitled 'The bolero in Cuba and Latin America.'

In conjunction, a performance was scheduled at the Mella Theater with the most important bolero singers of the day, and the event was baptized Festival Boleros de Oro.

Thus in 1988, the first Festival Internacional Boleros de Oro was held with artists from Mexico. Then in 1989, as the salsa boom was taking off in Cuba, it was extended to other cities on the island.

Almost all of bolero's greats have passed through Cuba: from the composers Vicente Garrido, Mario Ruiz Armengol, to singers Fernando Fernández, Tania Libertad, Sonia Silvestre, Paquita del Barrio, Patricia González, María Isabel Saavedra, Danny Rivera, Andy Montañez, Cheo Feliciano, Vanesa Knight, Noriko Corezo, Takafuni, Masako, Mitsuko, and even the researchers Jaime Rico Salazar and Cristóbal Díaz Ayala.

To keep the bolero alive throughout the year, UNEAC has hosted the weekly

Peña Boleros de Oro in its Hurón Azul patio, since October 21, 1988, on the initiative of then-Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto.

Rosendo Ruiz Quevedo and Vicente G. Rubiera stated that the Cuban bolero constitutes the first major vocal synthesis of Cuban music which, on moving beyond borders, gained a universal permanence. A type of song which Latin Americans made their own in order to express their emotions, triumphs and disappointments, to live their tragedies of love. As Gustavo Valera writes, "The bolero receives its citizen’s charter through its compositions, the Cuban, native plant is injected into it, a definitive cutting, given its touch, sometimes more secret, more loving, less rhythmic; a mix of modernist poetry and romantic songs. The essence is the same."

"Everybody who loves does so with the words of boleros," says researcher José Balza. Lisandro Otero adds, "We Cubans resolve everything with a bolero or a son or rumba song, as much to cry as to laugh."

Like jazz and tango, the bolero emerged in the night. A climate for songs, for romance, has always existed in Cuba. First the outpourings of Santiago de Cuba trova singers; then singers who migrated to Havana, using bars, cafés, neighborhood movie halls, theaters and even cabarets as their headquarters.

The bolero has never been able to break away from affectation. The Mexican bolero Titan Agustín Lara was harshly accused in his own country of being kitschy and of creating daring songs of fluff. "I am ridiculously kitschy and I love to be so… Anyone who is romantic has a fine sense of kitsch and not getting rid of it is a position of intelligence. Women like it to be this way… I vibrate with what is tense and if my emotion cannot translate it in anything other than the Baroque language of affectation, I’m not ashamed of that."

The eminent poet Mario Benedetti wrote, "It is difficult to avoid affectation in Hispanic-American letters; although there are degrees of affectation. There is unbearable affectation. But we are not talking about that. I am going to say this publicly for the first time: there are certain degrees of what is called kitsch out there, which is very close to the people, the most authentic sentiments of the people. And this must be respected. This kitsch, to identify it in some way, has to be defended. Defended from snobs, who are too refined. I am a kitschy and very happy man."

The bolero assumed a stylistic concept, an atmosphere, an emotional climate; it was taken up throughout the continent, because of its impassioned charge. It was becoming the blues of Cuba. It fused with all the Cuban and international musical genres, with tango, Mexican folk song, and jazz.

It became dance music, felt and beloved; a modulated expression, with words which could be melodically declaimed. It recounted stories of lost loves, bars and cantinas, as the composition sung by Orlando Contreras on jukeboxes, "That is learned in the street, in the cantina/glass after glass in a musical background/ of women who tell you so many things/ and the lips that lie to you when kissing/."

The bolero was born like Cuban palm trees, among Mambises, pro-independence fighters; it crossed the bullets and the cannons, among the humblest people; it was the story of those disinherited from fortune, of those whose only festivity was to visit serenades and jam sessions.

In order to identify musical eras of Cuba and Latin America, one has to refer to the bolero, the close companion of nostalgia. "The bolero expresses sentiments and situations which move me and I know moved so many people of my generation. A bolero can make lovers love each other more and that is enough to make me want to do and love a bolero. To succeed in making people love each other more, even for a brief moment, is culturally important, and if it is culturally important, it is revolutionary." (Gabriel García Márquez, Opina magazine, October 1985).