Sindo Garay singing for a bandit

I don't remember much being recorded about the bandit Valera. He was such a dangerous guy that grandparents of my generation still speak of him with respect, decades after his death.

Our elders often tell anecdotes where that man, always wearing a guayabera shirt, a huge horse and a neat hat, took the oxen from the rich and gave them to the guajiros. It is said that he was killed near El Cristo, a town in Santiago de Cuba. 

Sindo Garay, who, as is well known, had a reputation as a genius but also as a man of very firm departures, had a cross... well, a registered one, with the bandit. 

According to what has transpired, Sindo was a customary transhumant. It is a legend, even written, a trip to Havana that he made -unintentionally- from El Caney. That is to say, the bard went to a party in El Caney, and they took him to Santiago de Cuba by cart, the singer fell asleep and continued lulled for hours by the movement of the transport, which was no longer a cart but a boat and whose destination was no longer Santiago, but Havana, where he remained for a long time far from his family. 

With this life, he suffered the abandonment of his wife and, therefore, had to take care of his children alone. He had to make a living with his guitar and he sang as well as worked as a circus performer. In one of those wanderings through Alto Songo, La Maya, La Prueba, Siboney or any other land that would listen to him, Sindo crossed paths with the bandit Valera. 

They say that Sindo was in a café that still exists in Yerba de Guinea, a village between La Maya and Guantánamo. He was singing and looking for a few pesos when a tall man in a white guayabera came in. 

The majority was silent, stunned by panic - the bandit Valera was a kind of Robin Hood, but he killed. The man went to Sindo and asked for his Key to Maceo. Sindo sang it and the man asked him to repeat it. When he finished, he put a large bill in the sound hole of the guitar and walked away like in a John Wayne movie, without looking at anyone. 

The Maceos were a legend in those lands. One could breathe the sweat of the anecdotes where both José and Antonio made war and no one was exempt from such matters, not even the songs of Sindo or the ardors of a terrible man, like the bandit Valera.

Sindo tried to say thank you and was asked to be quiet. He did. The bandit Valera had left and the diners wanted to keep the waves of peace.