In this edition Soycubano.com would like to pay homage to Noel Nicola, poet and troubadour, and to Victor Manuel, painter, on the occasion of their birth anniversaries on the recently-concluded October and also congratulates José Martí National Library that celebrated another anniversary of creation. In order to recall those dates we have decided to offer the following interesting articles and show you, as usual, some of the newest products from Soycubano specialized shops.

Two years after the decease of who was protagonist of the Nueva Trova creation together with Silvio and Pablo.

On August 7, 2005 died in Havana troubadour Noel Nicola, one of the protagonists next to Silvio and Pablo of the Nueva Trova creation, movement that made him to be known in the whole island and in some other countries. Two years after his death, perhaps not everybody remembers the anthological song that represents a singular woman: imaginary María del Carmen, who according to the song lyrics “was engulfed by the noises of the central English tandem”, referring to the local sugar cane mill Panama , in Vertientes, Camagüey.

The song, written at the end of the ´70s, appeared during Noel Nicola's stay in that place, as part of the Columna Juvenil del Centenario moment in which he was described as “thin, smiling and skinny, far from the prototype of the perfect cane cutter”

At that time, when “the guitar was resting next to the litter and verses and notes were under the weak mat,”, the troubadour visited the house on A Street between Second and Third Streets, where the girl, that supposedly inspired him in descargas and assemblies, lived.

This address or point of reference contrasts a little bit with the questions by colleague Amado del Pino: Would it be in the modest and melancholic train station of Vertientes where the peculiar smile of young Noel faced the personal way of walking or the sudden of María del Carmen?

“Would have they walked together the long path from the trains to the central English tandem?”

Perhaps is the answer of this journalist who had references of Carment María Reynoso Gallegos, a student of Chemistry Engineering, maximum inspiring suspicious of the most promoted verse by Nicola and necessary in the troubadour Cuban song book.

Kalía, that is how the young lady is known, is opposed for her pure existence to the trick that lies under the title of the composition ( Para una imaginaria Maria del Carmen ) and her friendship with the author and repeated meetings allow us to speculate about the origin of the text.

The truth is that like Yolanda by Pablo Milanés, Gretel by Carlos Varela or Lucía by Joan Manuel Serrat, the not-so-imaginary-inspiring girl approaches us to the skin and walk of a flesh and blood muse, whose grace and magnetism made the poet to feel captivated.

With this necessary song we recall Noel Nicola Reyes today, troubadour with huge wings, self named “unlucky troubadour”, and who was defined by Silvio Rodríguez as “indispensable unknown man, rich substance to be revealed and loved man with petals painted like teeth”.

Article written by Luis Enrique Perdomo Silva. Taken from Juventud Rebelde and published at La Ventana.

Los olvidados (The forgotten)

We do not know the circumstances and exact motives for this painting that has been always in private collections: personal motivation or just pleasure for an assignment?

In Bohemia magazine (No. 4 from June 11, 1939) was published an extensive article about Antonio Ortega with the title “A la Habana ha llegado un barco…” (A boat has arrived at Havana …) that shows pictures of the St. Louis ' passengers.

At the end of May 1939, the German boat SS St. Louis gets ready to dock in Havana Bay . Coming from Hamburg with more than 900 Jewish people who were running away from the Nazis. Some of them have relatives and friends waiting for them in the city together with other members of the Hebrew community. But Cuban president, Federico Laredo Bru, issued a special order that prohibits the St Louis´ dock. The boat is convoyed outwards by police boats. After a week, just thirty passengers have obtained disembarkation permit.

A complex plot of interests in which immigration Cuban laws mediate, the international relationship of forces, the rejection of the United States, internal contradictions of the Cuban politics, the anti-Semite campaign encouraged by the German regime in Cuba, as well as the corruption of local functionaries who sell visas and permits, turn the subject into a sordid drama.

Finally, Jewish people are accepted in the island and on June 2 the boat leaves for the ocean convoyed by Cuban police. Other incidents of the odyssey continue: rejected also by the United States , they must return to central Europe with an uncertain destiny. But about to arrive at Hamburg , it is known that France , England , Belgium and Holland accept St. Louis´ Jewish…

Historian Margalit Bejerano has qualified this event as “the last slam door on German Jewish faces, three months before the Second World War”.

From this dramatic event, that took place in Havana, remained the live memory of witnesses or protagonists, a lot of archive material and graphic testimonies in the press of the time. But it will also have an unexpected chronicler: painter Victor Manuel.

It is curious that the creator of the perfect Cuban landscapes or the melancholic “gitanas” (gipsies) has felt attracted occasionally by situations or characters of the most recent history in which he was present and about which he gave firsthand versions, though sometimes they were primary or naive.

Victor Manuel (Havana, 1897-1969) was one of the pioneers of the modern painting in Cuba. After his first travel to Paris (1927) and his contact with the post-impressionism, he changed his style and in 1929 he painted, in that city, his famous Gitana Tropical (Tropical Gipsy), considered as a symbol of his art. Since then his paintings will approach to two main topics: female heads and landscapes. This unpublished photo is part of a sequence taken by Chinolpe in the ´60s and that was showed in the exhibition “Nuevo encuentro con Victor Manuel” (New encounter with Victor Manuel) during the presentation of Opus Habana (Vol. 7, No. 2, 2003).

Concerning that, Victor Manuel was touched by the social tendencies of the Cuban painting during the ´30s. (See for instance, the painting entitled Desahucio (Eviction), or a draw representing an anti-Machado protestor, or the watercolor entitled Los refugiados (The refugees), just to mention some works included in the collection of the National Fine Arts Museum.

But Diaspora, title with which it has been published recently, is a piece with greater ambitions. We do not know the circumstances and exact motives of this painting that has been always in private collections: personal motivation or just pleasure for an assignment?

The truth is that when the St. Louis was in Havana , the anguished wait and the unhappy end must have touched Victor Manuel very much because years later, without taking into account the historical precision too much, he captured his memories on canvas which were taken to the certain atmosphere of his painting.

The testimonies of the first collector and close relatives, related because of friendship with the painter, allowed not only to identify the topic and its unusual characters but also placed it in an approximate date, the ´40s, and established, above all, its original title that must be recovered: Los olvidados (The forgotten). (…)


Fragments of article penned by Ramón Vázquez

Curator of the National Museum of Fine Arts.  

Taken from Opus Habana, Vol. VII, No. 1, 2003, pp. 52-55

Treasures that wait for you

Among all wonders José Martí National Library treasures, in Havana City , we can find its unusual and valuable resources with printed matter from the XV (18 incunables) century to the XVIII, most of them are overseas.

A valuable nucleus joins them which centralizes Cuban treasures, because it is about true bibliographic jewels produced in the Island with a great value and that belong to the national patrimony.

These unusual and valuable resources include, among others, Raventós Collection, with valuable books of music from the XIX and XX centuries, books with special binding, beautifully illustrated and of famous origin.

Other jewels of José Martí National Library are, undoubtedly, its resource of manuscripts made up of collections or pieces that have come to this cultural center through donations, purchasing to individuals or goods recovery.

Most of them come from outstanding personalities of the culture, historians, scientists, writers, as well as institutions like Economic Society Friends of the Country. It makes this building very valuable for the study of the Mayor Antilles´ culture due to its unpublished character and the wealth of its information.

Among the distinguished collections we can find the ones from famous intellectuals like Antonio Bachiller y Morales, Alvaro Reinoso, Néstor Ponce de León, Fernando Ortiz and José Lezama Lima.

Other illustrious people are present in this collection: Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Homeland Father, patriots Antonio Maceo, Máximo Gómez; thinkers José Antonio Saco, José de la Luz y Caballero, Félix Varela, scientist Felipe Poey and writers José María Heredia and Cirilo Villaverde.

It is important to highlight that authors as Roberto Fernández Retamar (Director of Casa de las Américas) and Cintio Vitier, studious of José Martí´s work, have donated their own manuscripts to the National Library.  

Article by Lucía C. Sanz Araujo

Source: Radio Reloj