Two oceans between Arica and Havana

Seventy minutes later, in another room, with a series of portraits of Che behind him forming a pop art iconography, Manuel García will tell me why he changed that word in his song. He will also tell me that they, the singer-songwriters, prefer to be called troubadours, and that he was born in Arica, in the north of Chile, where there is a patch of salt and desert sand and a very clear sea curtain. 

A journalist from some other Latin American country will record an interview with his cell phone and he will explain with the conviction of someone who believes his own dreams that "love is the reason we are alive and not death". The seawall, so close to this room on the second floor of Casa de las Americas, has drawn the walls with an X-ray of saltpeter. And Manuel Garcia's lyrics will return, prophetic: "Now it seems that I/ must look towards the sea", as if that melody that the Chilean composed so many years before knowing Cuba had encapsulated a little bit of our land, as if The Dance of the Dragonflies was confessing something to Havana.

"On September 15, 2023, he gave his first concert on the island for the 50th anniversary of the coup d'état perpetrated in Chile against the government of Salvador Allende, at the Che Guevara Hall of the Casa de las Americas. Then, on the 16th, he sang at the Uneac headquarters in Santa Clara and on the 18th at the Martí Theater, as a tribute to the Chilean national holidays. This would be the fourth time he performs in Cuba and the second time he performs at the Che Guevara hall", explained Adis Santos Acosta, from the Chilean embassy, in charge of most of the logistic details of the concert.

"We wanted to bring him because of his talent, of course. Manuel is a very well-known artist, who has collaborated with an extensive catalog of musicians: Silvio Rodríguez, Pedro Aznar, Mon Laferte. But beyond that fact, he is a man of commitment, of deep thought, with an open political position and who wields a series of social causes, that is to say, he is not just another musician", Santos points out and then explains that for the El Caminante en Casa concert to happen they had to "conjugate the stars" and appeal to chance. 

First was the presentation of the book. "Haydée Santamaría's life and work can in no way be restricted, as has often happened, to a few facts or a specific period." So write the compilers Jaime Gómez Triana and Ana Niria Albo Díaz in the volume Life must be defended. "There was no guerrilla or intellectual Haydee, without the peasant, without the Martiana, without the communist, without the internationalist," reconstructs journalist Dailene Dovale in her profile of Haydee. The night of life. Then came the news of the twenty songs for Haydeé that Manuel García had barely memorized and wrote to be activated like the biological gears of a life; a little later, the careful selection of eleven of those unpublished songs to share them at Casa de las Américas and, finally, this Saturday concert.

Photos: Abel Carmenate. Courtesy of Carmen Souto and Casa de Las Américas.

It is not usual to have a show on such days for a space that operates from Monday to Friday, says Carmen Souto, musicologist of the Directorate of Music. But when so many confluences manifest themselves (Manuel García's trip to Cuba to record two albums at the Ojalá studios, his overflowing admiration for Silvio Rodríguez, the 65th anniversary of the founding of the Casa) then that something, the thematic concert, was just waiting to happen; says Santos, who does not seem, at first glance, a superstitious woman.

Troubadour Frank Delgado also believes that the recital could only have taken place here, at the Casa de Las Americas, a sort of Havana mecca. He recalls the beautiful analogy that many years before Victor Jara played the songs to which today El Caminante would pay tribute. "It's a place that has its own magic and history. It is difficult to play here, but it is always important," he assures.

Manuel García, on the other hand, dwells in another sequence of the real world, where the symbolism of playing in the Casa mixes with that of the altar with two photos, candles and chocolates for Haydeé, the story that sweats his neck, that of the word games and melodic motifs. "I am grateful for the complicity of those who will suffer these themes that will be born today in truth -says the Chilean as soon as he starts his presentation-. and the midwives and birth attendants will be you... patience. Thank you for attending.

Behind Manuel García rises The Tree of Life, modeled by a Mexican potter. The mermaids, deities and marine figures tell a phosphorescent version of the One Hundred Years of Solitude. Before this image of Caribbean magical realism, Manuel García looks like a naked man with a guitar; unarmed before an audience of at least two hundred people, singing: "...y el amor y el dolor y la muerte..." (and love and pain and death...). Then another song: "it was his guitar from night to morning/ like a star that shone out there"; another one: "that flower, I can't save it alone"; "I'm bleeding the sweet amber of ancient butterflies". A girl with lips stained almost brownish red blows kisses in the air.

The songs, the Chilean will tell me later, advance in history chronologically and many of them are about love because in order to create them he thought "of Haydeé, a young girl in love with her boyfriend cruelly murdered at the time [when] the Revolution was beginning. I wanted that dreamy idea to be present, that youthful idea that is also part, of course, of the world of romantic love and not only of love for the struggle". 

Manuel makes a lot of confidences to the hundreds of people listening to him in the audience, immersed in the sacred ritual of contemplating creation, in an almost perfect silence. He tells how in Santa Clara, after spending a whole night singing, he woke up still singing; he talks about the first work he wrote in Havana, as a letter to his father between two hemispheres, and also about a love piece (From one flower to another flower) and of his romantic intention to portray the Chilean carnation and the sunflower "which is a very local flower"; and he picks up a ukulele and then the guitar, and pronounces several times, dozens of times the words sun, moon, cosmovision, alone. He rhymes some poetic texts that he swears are not poems. He promises that if Retamar had been there, he would not have dared to read them. By the time he intones "The wind breaks like the curtains of your house, people and dogs look for you in the shadows that lengthen and I also look for you", the audience is overcome, as if there was no need to breathe.

Photos: Abel Carmenate. Courtesy of Carmen Souto and Casa de Las Américas.

To María Fernanda Coll, TatúAs she prefers to be known, she is accompanied by her mother: "For us Chileans, Manuel's music is a hymn, we identify with him very much, he is a person who does not fade, who does not disappoint, who continues to transmit that purity in his songs and that is what one finally receives".

Manuel García then embodies Silvio, the legend, and sings like him, with the words savored softly, in a hurry to come out of his mouth: "Supo la historia de un golpe,/ sintió en su cabeza cristales molidos" (He knew the story of a blow,/ felt ground glass in his head). He smiles like a boy. No one could tell Garcia that after fifty, cynicism and disenchantment begin to poison.

"The young people who were Silvio Rodríguez, Noel Nicola, Vicente Feliú, Pablo Milanés, put on the table this dialogue of a music that is dancing with time. Those trovas were born with the premise that not only the aesthetic, the romantic, not only the song had to be a kind of superficial commentary on life, but with the possibility of picking up a guitar and making verses, there was also the challenge of philosophizing from art," he says.

Troubadour Carlos Lage, who recorded vocals and accompaniment on the Chilean's new album, confesses: "I am a very close friend of Manuel's and he is an artist of tremendous delicacy, capable of composing tributes of great authenticity. Manuel is leaving the Cuban public more than an artistic message, a message of gratitude. I know he is grateful [for] our music".

"I could do more contemporary songs, more modern, I also have some projects that have to do with pop rock or electro pop and experimental things. But what sometimes makes me want to sing, for example, in a country like Cuba, are those songs that have already become part of a social, political, aesthetic and philosophical tradition of our civilization; and pick up those songs and transfer them so that those who listen to them will be kind enough to take them into consideration. Not to impose anything on them, on the contrary, to lovingly expose them", Manuel García will venture in a while, in the middle of our interview.

"I count on your complicity -the Chilean says through the microphone- if you don't sing, the song has no meaning". The cage of dreams is designed to be performed in two tones; the chorus is a short phrase: "how could you not do what love told us". The concert hall, white, is lit by the sun and dissected by many doors, windows and balconies. If the sound were visible, the audience would watch the ensemble of their voices fill the room and drain into the sea.

"Wherever I am, I will always be a passenger". The second part of the recital is dedicated to "the art of the protest song and the philosophy of our peoples", to the artistic tradition of denunciation in the countries of the South.. I remember you Amanda, Nor the entire earth. "Only love with its science, makes us so innocent," Amalia hums. "Don't you know that one? It's by Violeta Parra, Back to 17". My friend is 19 years old and grew up listening to that music, with Nicanor Parra's antipoems in the library. She doesn't say it, but seeing Manuel García live is the discreet explosion of a microsuccess. 

Photos: Abel Carmenate. Courtesy of Carmen Souto and Casa de Las Américas.

Maria, who is a journalist for The CitizenHe admits that he has not visited his homeland for eight years and that just now, when he is returning to Chile, listening to him is like a premonition, like a return before returning.

Manuel García says goodbye with The Dance of the Dragonflies and Christopher Simpson's violin. "The song says, 'I always go back to the town where I imagined long ago.' —explains— and today I sang it as 'I always return to the port', because when I come to Havana I also return somehow to my land. I'm from a place with sea but I've been living in the capital for many years. So the sea is missed in a biological way, something that has to do [with] what sensorially builds you, emotions and stories. Water, to those of us who were born marked by it, is vital to us. I sometimes sign my name Manu Garpez, and fish because of my appreciation of the sea and the life that comes from it. 

In those minutes I will forget to ask you other questions: How do the dragonflies that seem to remind you so much of oblivion actually dance? What a remedy. The words of visceral people like Manuel García make you dizzy, throw you against the gorge of utopia, make the pastime of dreaming a full-time job.