That sensitivity called Lecuona

In the lobby of the recently restored theater I was surprised by a mural painted by a local artist. In it, with a naïf accent that did not pretend to hide, the faces of relevant artists of the Creole culture were represented. But among them, as if out of nowhere, appeared the image of our most famous chess player. I could not contain myself and asked why José Raúl Capablanca was there, and someone kindly told me, a sotto vocethe truth. 

The master of the Cuban trebejistas was on that wall replacing another essential name, but still annoying to certain sensibilities. A commander, also known for his eagerness as a composer, had been invited to the coliseum to admire the reconstruction to which he had been subjected, and it was he who, with an accusing finger, pointed at the mural and asked: "What is that one who left Cuba doing there!". "That one", I am assured he said, although others remember that he used a homophobic insult to point at Ernesto Lecuona. 

The anger of the military man was enough to make that face disappear from the mural, and in order not to find perhaps that of another person among the many possible artists, it was decided to paint over the face of the composer of The Comparsa and Charming Damsel, that of that famous chess player... and free of any suspicion of homosexuality. This happened about twenty years ago, in Manzanillo, to give the precise data. As proof that in spite of the recordings, discs, rehabilitations and tributes, the name of that son of Guanabacoa still arouses some suspicion.

Ernesto Lecuona was blessed with a career full of successes and recognitions, although there was never a lack of those who considered him the author of "music for young ladies". His musical magazines, his piano pieces, his work in favor of the Cuban song, his management as an entrepreneur and discoverer of new talents, are part of that history, as much as the disdain with which he was also judged. In music in CubaAlejo Carpentier does not hide his preference for Caturla or Roldán, leaving Lecuona in a kind of lower level. His taste for experimentation distanced him from an author like Lecuona, who found a fertile area in that point where Cuban sensibility was nourished by other heritages, as a subtle renovator of the airs that had nourished, until then, the powerful flow of Cuban music. And it would not be strange to perceive that as another form of homophobia (read Carpentier's "lost" chronicle on the spectacles of transvestites and homosexuals in Germany in the 1930s, hidden for many years), as a barrier that, in addition to what could be described as bourgeois taste from other critics, served to put Ernesto in an apparently less attainable zone.

The truth is that Lecuona went through that and much more. The student of the Peyrellade Conservatory and Joaquín Nin triumphed in Spain, Argentina, Peru, Rio de Janeiro and other parts of Europe and South America. That included his appearance at Carnegie Hall, where he presented his Black Rhapsodyin 1943. Admired by some of the most important composers of his time, he had the gift of popularity and abundant creation. His surname became the guarantee of a certain type of musical creation, which beyond the fervor with which Esther Borja, Rita Montaner or Bola de Nieve interpreted it, also reached the repertoires of Las D‘Aida or Benny Moré, just to mention other popular music performers who recognized the master's spell. 

To him we owe Mary the O (his approach to the argument of Cecilia Valdés(which he had to change because he could not get the rights to the novel, which would later be turned into a lyrical comedy by Gonzalo Roig, a friend of his), The coffee plantation and Rosa the Chinese. He was able to link with grace and fluidity the elements that came from zarzuela with undoubtedly Cuban accents; and the fact that he is still sung and interpreted attests to his influence, which cannot be reduced to what several of his detractors reproached him for.

Those criticisms became an almost impenetrable wall of silence when the composer decided to leave for the Canary Islands, the land of his father, shortly after the revolutionary triumph. The "seizure" of his farm La Comparsa, located in El Wajay, by the rebel troops, is a chapter that has become an unfortunate legend, as it happened with others who also went into exile at that time (such as Gastón Baquero). In the same way, his name was also used against him, placed on the list of those banned by the regime, which understood his withdrawal as a betrayal. In that estate -which, as his great friend María de los Ángeles Santana remembers, received notable colleagues and personalities- Lecuona also received his young friends, to whom he allowed whims that he patiently tolerated. That calm man, of enormous stature, excellent pianist, carried his homosexuality within the limits of his time, as an open secret that, at times, -as it is said that Montaner used to say when she wanted to provoke him- was rather loud. His songwriting is full of lyrics and motifs in which homosexuality is undoubtedly present, as in the compositions of Bola de Nieve, waiting for the interpreter or the listener who knows how to decipher the keys to his secret. 

All this had an influence on that silence that some of her faithful hardly dared to break. Esther Borja most of all, who in her program Cuban album never stopped singing it. Lecuona's death in 1963 put a certain caveat to that censorship, and the newspaper Revolution dismissed him with a terse note (a sparse funeral school, to put it in a curly way), which quickly attested to his death. In the third paragraph of his will, Lecuona made it clear that his remains would rest outside Cuba as long as the new political power was in power there. And that did not help much in the recovery of his legacy, and for the same reason, the fierce defense of the best interpreter of the lovely damselis a sort of double feat. 

Finally, already in the 80's, his memory is opening up more and more. In the galas of the Adolfo Guzmán contest, his themes became frequent. He was recorded, and continues to be recorded by various performers and pianists, confirming the breadth of the man who was called, in a perhaps exaggerated phrase, the Cuban Gershwin. Several biographies, compilations, documentaries, confirm this kind of return. In Playing Lecuonadirected by Pavel Giroud and Juanma Villar Betancort, Chucho Valdés evokes the maestro with emotion, lamenting that in Guanabacoa there is hardly any physical evidence left of his birth and youth sites. Michel Camilo, in that documentary, in which Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Omara Portuondo and Raimundo Amador also appear, accompanies Ana Belén in a version of Siboney (perhaps the best known and most worn theme of all that Lecuona created) that greens in that throat, and that tells us that his works can surpass times, fashions and styles without ever ceasing to be just that: Lecuona. No wonder Agustín Lara once said: "Cuba is his music. Cuba is Lecuona. Or better said: Lecuona's music is a synthesis of his homeland". And that continues to vibrate there, when I hear Bárbara María Llanes or Miriam Ramos singing it, renewing it, bringing it closer to us over those old misgivings, and over the 60 years that have passed this week since the day of his death.

Perhaps Lecuona is, more than a renowned composer, a sensibility. One of those forms in which the sentimental history of the Nation exists, beyond the dates and the iron chronologies in which they tried to erase his name -and that of so many others- as they did on the wall of that theater in eastern Cuba. Time will have to replace not only his face, but his full name, where it belongs, beyond even the facts that bring him back to us, such as the edition of his epistolary and his commented chronology that we owe to the researcher Ramon Fajardo Estrada. 

In that sensitivity reappears, clear, the profile of Lecuona. If the airs of his time bring him close to the corny metaphor, if his mastery of rhythm makes him seem at times easy and catchy, if his gift for cadence simulates not going beyond a certain comfort zone, the truth is that he bequeathed a work that, assuming all that, is also much more. And his integral for piano (recorded by Huberal Herrera, among other important figures) shows that he is not only the author of I am going to Vigo or You are in my heart. His work reminds us that what is Cuban borders all that, assimilates it, contains it, projects it and shows it to the world as part of its nature and our identity, of a sensibility that the music unfolds towards other coordinates. He explains Cuba as exactly that, more than as a country, as a sensibility.