José Guillermo Quesada Portabales (Rhodes, Las Villas, April 6, 1911 / San Juan, Puerto Rico, December 25, 1970) is one of the great icons of music throughout the continent.
He was characterized by his urban form, the guajira introduced by the lyrical authors with the son genre. In this way, a friendlier, less aggressive and rustic peasant image was created, from an idyllic urban vision, with no cloudy skies, no shabby huts, no poverty, no drought, an image of placidity and beauty of the countryside.
The singer spent his youth in Cienfuegos, where he began working since he was eleven years as a typographer's apprentice. At seventeen he started to develop his guitar skills, serenades and says goodbye to the craft to sing with the variety companies that pass through Cienfuegos. With one of them he went to Santiago de Cuba, where he stayed working for a while.
His repertoire, at that time was troubadour: songs, boleros and some tango. One fine day, for a play he had to sing a guajiro point and, instead of doing it in an orthodox way, with a nasal and shrill voice, Portabales sang it to his air, soft with his baritone voice. He had just invented a new modality.
Since then, he was considered "the creator of the lounge guajira". With his beautiful voice and his excellence, he immediately became famous, accompanied by his guitar or a set. He had many followers and admirers and he also helped singers who started as Evelio Rodríguez, Coralia Fernández and Ramón Veloz.
In 1937 he traveled to Puerto Rico where he became a radio idol. He marries a Puerto Rican lady in 1939 and, sponsored by the same product he advertises in Puerto Rico, he traveled to Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Panama. He made his first recordings for RCA Victor from 1937 to 1939 and returned to Havana. He remained a very popular artist in Cuba until 1953, he toured the Caribbean and New York and from that year he settled permanently in Puerto Rico, as an important part of the daily musical scene of the island and traveling from time to time in the Caribbean.
He spent a lot of time singing at Cecilia's Place, the famous San Juan restaurant. He was active and very sought after his death in a car accident. He recorded several Lp in the sixties, in the last twenty days before his death. With his unique style he divulged Cuban Guajira music extraordinarily inside and outside of Cuba, hitherto rejected by the peculiar style of his other interpreters. As a composer, he left a classic of Cuban popular music: El Carretero².
To my hands came some unsigned notes and I reproduce them, waiting to find their author:"Portabales confessed singing that he was the son of the Siboney, that race exterminated from my land by the sword and the foreign cross. Maybe it was his way of saying it belonged to the vast memory of pain´´.
He announced that gigantic capacity of love that the man of the earth has; he did air in the same air, so that nobody was surprised in the assault: "You will see how they want the guajiros / you will see".
Everybody who listens to him lets in his blood the wild nature of my island; the rivers that escape from the sierra, the tiny buzzing of the tomeguin, the dove auguring the twilight, so that the limpid stars come to settle on the glow of the mangoes. And under the sleeping sky, a man travels the roads, made of fire and wood, deep earth himself in the aroma of a sap that does not rest.
They considered him king of a genre, the lounge guajira, which may sound very foreign to the telluric passion of the mountain, and whose father was Jorge Anckermann, with the play "Bulls and roosters", staged at the Teatro Lara, in September of 1899. The voices of Pilar Jiménez and Adolfo Colombo sowed in the wind that jewel entitled "The stream that murmurs", the first theme of a style that awaited the simple grace of Portabales to grant him the scepter.
He was the owner of mischief and fervor. Surrounded by clean guitars, his voice, slightly steely, says, with surprising repose, the magic words of the mountain, as if with those spells it was creating the wild smell of the environment, drawing it in the human interior until making them breath and password.
Ever since he was born, the splendor of the tocororo persecuted him like a fire. In the manner of a prince who inaugurates his lineage, he made his debut at age 19 on the CMHI radio station. But his shadow had a throne in 1939, when he recorded "El vaivén de mi carreta", the crushing crunch that Ñico Saquito heard at the dawn of the poor.
The year 1944 bathed him in splendor in the Cuban homeland. The town found him daily in "Rincóncriollo", a radio program of the CMQ, that listened to the stones of the road. In 1948 he repeated the formula, multiplying it. Guillermo Portabales entered the homes at ten o'clock in the morning and at nine thirty at night, and he was one more in the family, son and brother, the sweet hope of a different landscape in the suffocation of many.
He founded different sounds: a set with his name, and the trios Habana and Cuba. He had already discovered three years before the similar island that would be his second love and his grave: Puerto Rico. That is why it is multiple, diverse, a man of two landscapes that in essence unite under the warmth of the Caribbean. The guajiro point sometimes smells like jíbaro on the rope of its restless unfinished blood. In Borinquen he established his heart after 1953, for refusing to sing to a dictator.
He declared that love by making these premonitory verses of Rafael Hernández his own: "As I am not of stone / one day I will die. / To my borincana earth / my spoils I will leave ". It was his latent goodbye. His legacy.
In 1960 he recorded a bunch of songs on Radio Progreso. They came out edited in what turned out to be his broadest and definitive record success: "Here is Portabales", as longing to remain among us. The cruel weather did not allow him more returns. On October 25, 1970, he died in a traffic accident in Puerto Rico.
Some of hisbestknowninterpretations:"Amanecer", "Al vaivén de mi carreta", "Barracho", "Bohío", "Añoranza", "Come to enjoy", "Paisaje", "Habanera see", "Bajo palmar", "Como llaul de palma "," My cabin "," Bella Cubana ".
Among his compositions are: "Nostalgia guajira", "When I left Cuba" and "Cumbiamba" and his emblematic song "El carretero", almost a peasant anthem that Eliades Ochoa revives in that project that celebrates its 20th anniversary and more Buena Vista Social Club
NOTES:
¹- María Teresa Linares, El punto cubano, Oriente, S.C, 1999, p.96
²- Cristóbal Díaz: Dictionary of Spanish and Hispano-American Music, Foundation. Author, Madrid, 2000
Translated by Susel Esquivel
