A brief evocation of Nicola on the anniversary of her death.

What do you live for when you are over 60?
I don't know, I would have to get there.
Do you think about death nearby
or in what one day was left undone?
Does death come to be a friend
that one jokes and plays with it?
I would have to get there.

Noel did not manage to answer himself, nor did he grow old and gray-haired, as it is almost always pretended to look in the final farewell. At 58 years of age, cancer in his lungs suffocated his body. But only that. The nine discs, the twenty poems of César Vallejo set to music and In fact, I forgive you refused to be silent. Death could not cast its mantle over them on August 7, 2005, nor could this one. A lover of some geography arms himself with Nicola's verses to face amorous crusades, without paying too much attention to his feigned absence of 19 summers.

His songs rest in the imagination of an audience still blissful in the luxury of feeling that it discovers him. Cuba never saturated its radio frequencies, its theaters or its banners with the lyrics of the gangly boy who calmed rumors and drew applause at the Casa de las Americas, while working as a research assistant at the then Institute of Ethnology and Folklore of the Academy of Sciences, together with Argeliers Leon.

But, even so, he loved his bittersweet melancholy, almost palpable even in the moments when his fine irony tore the leather of social presets. Perhaps that is what earned him the name of "the quiet one" of the Nueva Trova, and maybe that is why today he can be known as the most intimate, undisputed master of that serenity to get on stage, take the guitar and let out his wet afternoon voice to sing of love and make everyone die of life.

"Second homeland the night
closed the dream with a flourish,
put his darkness in the word
but, nevertheless, it illuminates what it is".

Noel Nicola was the founder, in 1969, of the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC and of the Movimiento de la Nueva Trova in 1972, according to all the biographical summaries that gravitate in the space. on-line. They are brief. They say very little, and most of them are limited to mentioning collaborations with greats: Silvio, Pablo, Feliú... as if Noel necessarily needed their shadow.

Too poorly written and sung lyrics in honor of the author of For an imaginary María del Carmenafter having been inscribed in the history of Cuban music as one of the driving forces of this movement. muevecontinentes which then became - for most of them - the Rodríguez-Milanés binomial.

Its brevity, which seems to be more symbolic than factual, reinforces the theory of the exquisite quality of the small things, of the stars kept in the bottom of the pocket for when things get serious and a light is needed against all odds.

"Summer, I'm leaving,
and I feel sorry for them
the submissive little hands of your afternoons.
You arrive devoutly;
you get old;
and you will no longer find anyone in my soul".

Discography

Entre otrostogether with Santiago Feliú / 2002.

Give me my voice / 2000.

Soy y no soy el mismo / 1998.

Courage, troubadour / 1989.

Tricolor / 1987.

Noel Nicola sings to César Vallejo / 1986.

Lejanías / 1985.

Just as I am / 1980.

Start of the day / 1977.