Joseíto
Fernandez and his Guantánamo sweetheart
• Like a slim palm,
dressed in a guayabera
Gabriel Molina
Franchossi
THE slim young man in a guayabera
(Cuban shirt) and white pants, two-tone shoes and a
jipi-japa (Panama straw) hat, descended from the
train at Guantánamo station without any great
expectations. He had been contracted to sing at the
city’s principal ‘colored people’s’ society dance;
barely realizing it, he was buffeted in the
shoulders by a crowd continuously shouting, "Joseíto,
Joseíto!"
The singer and composer Joseíto
Fernández Díaz, so inspired by his lost girlfriend
from Guantánamo, immortalized with "La Guantanamera,"
was born 105 years ago this September 5, in the
neglected Havana neighborhood of Los Sitios.
He was 37 years of age when he
arrived in Guantánamo in 1945, preceded by the
popularity conferred upon him by a radio program of
country music and songs about daily political events,
especially impassioned ones. He received a
certificate of recognition there. The young musician
who sold newspapers began to sing at the age of 12;
at 17 years of age he worked for a shoe repairer. He
created "La Guantanamera" (girl from Guantánamo) in
1929 and performed it with the Alejandro Riveiro
band, thus imposing his version of that
guajira-son country music created by Jorge
Anckermann and Ignacio Piñeiro.
On radio, Joseito performed for the
first time on 2BX, but attained popularity with the
Raimundo Pía band on the CNW station, now Radio
Rebelde. His artistic career began with the trio he
created with Juan and Gerardo Llorente. Idolized in
the country, he used as a refrain his campesino "Guantanamera,
Guajira Guantanamera," singing with the Alejandro
Riveiro band for the CMCO radio station. He narrated
events using the décima seguidilla and
developed the poems with a country intonation.
When he became popular, CMQ radio
producers decided to use him in the "El Suceso del
día" program, and on November 24, 1941, he was given
a regular contract with the station.
Radamés Giró analyzed Joseito’s
value in his Diccionario Enciclopédico de la
Música en Cuba (Enciclopedic Dictionary of Music
in Cuba). "He was a man who rarely moved out of his
urban context, but his work as a son singer
allowed him to identify with elements of campesino
son and punto. His gifts as a singer
and improviser gave him rapid prestige – with a
voice of extensive register and intensity able to
overcome the lack – at that time – of amplification."
Giró marveled at Joseíto’s aptitude for
improvisation, being a Havana man who never lived in
the countryside.
On June 8, 1963, "La Guajira
guantanamera" attained unprecedented success after
being performed by the folk singer Pete Seeger in a
concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall, with José
Martí’s "Versos sencillos." From there, the song
toured the world and was received worldwide as the
rhythmic prelude to the Cuban Revolution.
American filmmaker Estela Bravo
relates how that astounding success was achieved.
Cuban Héctor Angulo sang Martí’s "Versos Sencillos"
set to the music of "La Guantanamera", based on an
idea supplied by Julián Orbón and Cintio Vitier.
Seeger, in a children’s summer camp close to New
York, heard it as sung by Angulo. He didn’t know who
the composer of the music was; he was something of
an unknown.
Bravo added that it was only when he
recorded the second disk that Seeger found out about
Joseíto, the singer of "La Guantanamera", with
arrangements by Angulo and, visiting Cuba for the
second time in 1999, he stated on arrival that it
should be the two Cubans who received author’s
rights, including those of interpretation, because
he didn’t want to receive something which belonged
to them and to Martí, whom he greatly admired.
It was not by chance that it was
catalogued there as a melody of the public domain,
according to Migdalia González, Joseito’s daughter.
In her home on Gervasio 658, "declared a museum at
the petition of the people," she said that at the
end of the 1950’s, the U.S. Consulate had pressured
her father with a blank check to give up the
intellectual property of "La Guantanamera." He
refused, stating that that creation was the property
of the Cuban people.
Crusellas dismissed him. The soap
company which sponsored Joseito’s program with La
Calandria, Nena Cruz, who covered the female voices
in dramatizations, broke the contract. Joseito then
founded his own band. The author of many other hits,
such as "Elige tú, que canto yo," Joseito was a
fanatic of his land, of his Havana, of his barrio. I
seemed to see him when I took Maloja Street from
Gervasio, and headed for Manrique to visit his
friend Dr. Gustavo Blain. His last public
performance was in 1971 in the "Todo el mundo canta"
program. The popular singer died in the Calixto
García Hospital on October 11, 1979, and his wake at
the Calzada and K funeral parlor was a popular event.
The King of Melody, as his friends
called him, was deeply grateful to Seeger’s
rendition which gave universal and everlasting
recognition to "La Guantanamera." The journalist and
décima singer Nancy Robinson Calvet has said
that a poem dedicated to the song was possibly
Joseíto’s last composition.
"Guajira guantanamera/ now
admired by the world/ every note in her song/ is my
sincere gratitude. She is the faithful messenger/ to
carry with her harmony/ into the immense distance/
the profound sentiment/ of eternal gratitude/ of the
King of Melody."
