# Zoila Castellanos Ferrer

**Date of birth:** June 27, 1920

**Date of death:** December 8, 1988

**Categories:** Arts, Music, female composer

She was born in the distant town of Regla. A prominent composer of twentieth-century Cuba, she began her musical career by creating Spanish versions of various international compositions.

Later, arriving in the 1940s, Tania Castellanos joined the Feeling, which was born in the Hammel alley in Havana, and then the musical concerns of talented young people were channeled into an unusual or novel way of approaching song. It is worth noting the empirical nature of many of them. Painters, radiotelegraphists, glaziers, in short, people with varied occupations set those trades aside at night. Then came the time for the guitar, or in other words, for the Feeling, an English word that means "sentiment."

It is in that world where Tania Castellanos inserted herself. Crossing Havana Bay as the sun set and arriving at the popular Hammel alley or any other place where the filineros gathered was an unavoidable and enriching motivation.

Tania Castellanos, who incidentally was registered as Zoila, and not as Tania, was affiliated with the People's Socialist Party since 1939, while her work as a metalworking laborer had an impact on the country's political life. That affiliation precisely motivated the change from Zoila to Tania.

In those struggles she meets Lázaro Peña and together with him, another struggle participates in the essence of music: the one that ultimately motivates sentiment.

Only between 1951 and 1955, the list of compositions by Tania Castellanos registered with Editora Musicabana exceeded 15 titles. The first of them, with contract date of June 13, 1951, was: "En nosotros," performed by several Cuban artists. A special version was the one made by Tito Gómez and backed by Enrique Jorrín's Orchestra in the late 1970s of the past century.

The life of Tania Castellanos was a coming and going of emotions. When she sang of love, she did so from the most diverse facets: love for the homeland, for the brothers and sisters of the five continents, for heroes and martyrs, for those who struggled for just causes, and of course, for those who made and make the union of sentiments the exact prolongation of human virtue. While she composed, she secured support for artists from cultural spheres.

She died on December 8, 1988, a woman from Regla who dressed her figure in song, to give us the infinite allegory of love, in the constant verse of a journey through life.