Cuban Troubadour Threatened by High Tide

By Leandro Estupiñan.

Photos: Amauris Betancourt.

Alta Marea (High Tide), a cultural gathering, is a proposal in the Trouba House in Holguín city headed by troubadour Fernando Cabreja. It is already 10 year old and started off in Moa. When Cabreja and his family decided to settle down in Holguín, they did not only take the color and the memory of their city as well as the mania of the trouba and the compromise to promote cultural highlights through radio programs along with, , but also brought down on their shoulders some significant projects they had created.

In his 25 years of artistic life, Cabreja has won respect over so much for his compositions as for his work as an unrelenting cultural promoter. He has kept alive the Trouba Viva Meeting against all odds. And still now, this space, forged to promote trouba and troubadours from all over the country, goes on in Moa. His commitment to Moa ties him up to keep it on.

Alta Marea, on the other hand, definitely made it to Holguín. It is linked to his passion for literature and poetry, and for local writers. That half-way sickly devotion took him to found a space thought to join friends, to fuse poem and song. Alta Marea is named after the title of one of his songs, included in the recently Como una luna en pie (Like a standing moon) CD.

Still in Moa, he was able to invite guests like poets Alex Pausides and Vladimir Zamora. Now, inviting guests is not a problem because he benefits from living in a provincial capital city.

The gathering is on Thursdays, at the dying afternoon as Sindo Garay would say. The last guests have been writers Rolando Bellido, Lourdes González and Delfín Prats. The environment is pleasant. And it would be better if fans could put apart routine and meet there enthusiastically to have a ball for a while listening to Life trouba music and true poetry.Sponsored by ARTEX (a Cuban art promoting institution), and the Book Provincial Center, the gathering was inaugurated in Holguin last October 2, with guest poet José Luis Serrano.

Poet Jose Luis Serrano.

Cabreja was then already anxiously expecting the results of his concert at the Pablo de la Toerriente Brau Cultural Center, in Havana. It was done in the famous A guitarra limpia cultural gathering, which was meant then for a CD recording.

The CD was launched last November 22 in a fortunate moment for any troubadour: in a concert by Silvio Rodríguez. Thus, next to one of his teachers and in the place where he was given a hand to make his work known, Cabreja launched his 13-track CD.

The classics of his work are there, compiled as a symbol to his honest creative work, to his sensibility, to his worries, and to his vocation as a cultural promoter, because he had invited singing guests such as Ivette Rodríguez, from Baguano municipality and Edelis Loyola, his wife. She confessed that Cabreja had courted her without empty speeches. And so it seems to be the troubadour: An enemy to schemes or, as one of his songs reads: A prisoner to illusion.