There, during the inauguration of the Más i Más Festival, he sang what he had always wanted to sing: boleros. He had been traveling for more than a month in western Europe – on the summer jazz festival circuit, increasingly open to so-called world music – as part of a promotion campaign for his next album, Mi sueño, a bolero songbook (My Dream, a Bolero Songbook), which in good Spanish, basically means one of those songbooks that gets passed from hand to hand with our favorite singers’ favorite songs.

His dream was cut short. When he came back to Havana last Wednesday, Ibrahim was no longer that man as strong as an oak tree, of medium height and with an irrepressible smile, who ascended from modesty to the heavens. A severe digestive dysfunction changed his body forever, leading to his death on Saturday, August 6. A sudden death, truly unexpected.

“I hope the album comes out, because it was already basically done,” said Daniel Floristano, a Brazilian who has been Ferrer’s road manager for nine years, in comments to Granma on Sunday, August 7. “He was really hopeful. For the first time, he was singing what he really felt like singling, the songs that he knew by heart since way back. Because for him, the time had come to stick his neck out for the bolero as a genre, with all of its properties, in places outside of the Ibero-American region.”

Weeks before beginning his last tour, this reporter exchanged impressions with the singer about the work that he was taking forward.

“Man, boleros are for eternity,” he said, without a shadow of a doubt. And, just in case, he added, “I don’t deny that the son and the guaracha move me like a fish in water, but when you sing people a bolero, a really good bolero, it really moves them. A romantic song is one thing, because it talks about love, but a bolero – with all its force and tenderness – is another. Ballads? I hear them, yes, but that’s it. But a bolero now, one of those truly good ones, has no comparison.”

He let me in on his special liking for “Quiéreme mucho” (Love Me Lots) by Gonzalo Roig (“someday, you’ll have to write about why that is the song that identifies those who like to drown their sorrows in rum”); “Perfidia” (Treachery), by Alberto Dominguez; “Perfume de gardenia” (Scent of Gardenia) by Rafael Hernández (“why are all of his boleros as Cuban as our palm trees?”) and Naufragio (Shipwreck), by Agustín Lara.

Right in the middle of the tour, the maestro says that he would continue singing as long as he was alive, even if he had to lean on a walking stick – such was his commitment to his art.

But even more so in his condition as a universal Cuban. Quietly, without publicity fanfare, he contributed funds to the island’s cultural institutions for arts education.

He believed in and felt for his own. For his wife, Caridad, for his nine children, whom he watched grow up, for his colleagues – on more than one occasion, I heard him say that Pacho Alonso and Enriquito Bonne deserved a book so that the new Santiago branch of 20th century son would come to light – and for his homeland.

A billboard in the outskirts of Havana recalls his serene and sure response to the U.S. government’s denial of an entry visa, which kept him from attending the Latin Grammy ceremony, where his album Buenos hermanos (Good Brothers) made its presence felt: “Me, a terrorist? Look at my face, see if it has any signs of terrorist in it, because the only thing I do and have done is to take our culture to the world.”

Fortunately, the loss of Ibrahim does not mean silence. With his princely air, wearing his inseparable cap and his small, great, human voice, he will keep singing boleros until the end of time.

(Granma August 8, 2005)