Felix B. Caignet kept radio listeners crying

Pablo Soroa Fernández (AIN)

Just as no novelist, since Lucrecia Borgia, has had as much luck with crime as the British novelist Agatha Cristhie, no one is comparable to Cuban Felix B. Caignet when it comes to making radio listeners cry.

Still today across Latin America, rivers of tears are shed by those listening to the sad tales of Albertico Limonta and Mamá Dolores, the main protagonists in El derecho de nacer, a radio soap opera which debuted April 1, 1948, over the airwaves of the former station CMQ.

The story was taken to the big screen in 1952 by the Mexican director Zacarías Gómez Urquiza, with Jorge Mistral and Gloria Marín in the leading roles. Fifteen years earlier, another one of Caignet works, La Serpiente Roja, with the unforgettable Chinese detective Chan Li Po, became the first Cuban film with sound.

Félix Benjamín Caignet Salomón (Santiago de Cuba, March 31, 1892 - Havana, May 25, 1976), known among friends as Félix B, was also a poet, a theater critic, composer, journalist, singer, ventriloquist and – inexplicably – one of the most severely criticized figures of the era.

The motive for such cruelty was identified in an August 30, 1972 interview with Caignet conducted by Orlando Castellanos, on Radio Havana Cuba.

He was the most popular author of the day and the one who charged the most. This he was not forgiven, but it meant little to him.

He was accused of mixing metaphors, of being ridiculous, a tear-jerking writer, but the success of his work was his consolation. His radio soap operas were heard in the homes of all social classes and these listeners expressed their gratitude copiously.

He very purposely wrote to make people cry with his characters, since early on he realized that many were born with pain and misery tattooed on their souls and had so much pain and bitterness in their lives that they never cried for themselves. It was to be expected.

These people, he said during the interview, took on the feelings of one or another character who was suffering and, without being aware of it, associated their own pain with that of the fictitious figure, and cried with him or her.

This versatile intellectual also created the songs Frutas del Caney - recorded by the Venezuelan combo Dimensión Latina, and dedicated to this beautiful locale in the eastern part of Cuba – and Te odio, perhaps his most famous composition.

Even without having written his famous radio soap operas, this last composition (I hate you and still I love you, I hate you, but I can’t forget you…) would have been enough to make him worthy of the fame he enjoyed.

In his native Santiago, it was sung by the Trío Matamoros; in Havana, Rita Montaner and Barbarito Diez with Antonio María Romeu’s band, while in the United States, Bing Crosby made it a hit with a well-done translation.

He was too much for the writers of the neo-colonial republic, a man born on a coffee plantation in the municipality of San Luis, in the former province of Oriente, who had known poverty and opulence and who, according to Oscar Luis López, was one of the five pillars of Cuban radio all-time, among generations of writers, announcers, directors and musical arrangers who have participated in radio broadcasting in Cuba.

Within his own homeland, he was vilified because of envy, nothing more than misguided admiration.

The people, for whom he created El precio de la vida and Ángeles de la calle, and the children who are now grandparents, to whom he dedicated

Aventuras de Chelín, Bebita y el enanito Coliflor, recall his name with affection.

His remains which were initially laid to rest in Havana’s Necrópolis Cristóbal Colón, were moved to Santiago de Cuba December 25, 1992 and buried at the foot of the hills in Carney, alongside his parents, as he had requested.