About Facebook-like television or even the aircraft in the early years of the consolidation of their respective empires, people used sometimes to speak ill for being very intellectual or singular person and contrary to everything. I recognize its dangers and excesses but I like it because it accompanies me, because (as the good bars in “real life”), one could come and go without hardly anyone asking you where you were and perhaps above all I am pleased that in this social network people can suggest or propose a book, a movie, a song.
If before I was like three times without the cassette-last-century word if any-of Pedro Luis Ferrer for having lent it passionately, we are now quite a few who play his songs and in recent days we have remembered the dates of his brief tour through Spain. Thanks to Facebook we have also learned in this April 2013 that Gema Corredera, our tremendous singer, has performed in the United States with his teacher-and of more than a generation-Marta Valdés. Gema-with effective drama in that balance of good taste that is promoted without being “heavy” – has put some of his songs from the new album and we thank her, that is something (as the title of one of the beautiful interpretations) “cool” .
The friend I enjoy the most, the italic is because, like many others, I don’t personally know this formidable artist, is Ricky. Yes, Ricky, that of Latinos! Now he goes through Europe-often gives concerts from Amsterdam to Mallorca, and, without being overwhelming and with humility, plays some of his songs. This week he confessed that he struggled to find his own copy of that classic entitled “I’m looking for a girlfriend.”
And when I check, now without that wonderful but noisy group of friends around, without dance floor crowded with village girls of all colors-, voluntarily getting further in the simple but fresh and even candid lyrics, I reconcile with several certainties. In a moment of insistent politicization Ricky, from his clear and graceful voice, is asking for a girlfriend and offers her simple human things, endearing as being honest, hardworking and dancing well.
I remember when, following a trend that ranged from the stale ruling to common envy -some criticized, at the start of the nineties, that musicians could earn a lot of money in a Cuba that was being hit by the economic crisis. Then I recalled in direct discussions and in the pages of La Gaceta de Cuba the years in which these essential responsible for our sweat, not heroic but away from casino wheel or house parties, lived in humble shelters, were transported by buses of any category or slowness and lost much of the international market for external political circumstances and internal mental limitations.
I thank again the fact that I had in those times when epic and propaganda were all around us as the sea-geographical realities and the immense poem by Piñera, with the complicity of those who, like Ricky, push the pause to all that letany to play with the “I will tell you right now”; providing arguments as solid as the prospective bride candid, light, amid the night of Labour and Social emergencies, that torch of deep joy.
