Adelaida Diestro Rega

Outstanding Cuban pianist and director of choral groups. She was the creator of the Quartet Las D'Aida that filled a long chapter in Cuban music.

She began her music studies with her father, Vicente Diestro, a Presbyterian minister, and completed them at a private conservatory. She studied Music technically and worked, like Isolina Carrillo, Adolfo Guzmán and Orlando de la Rosa, as a repertoire pianist for radio singers.

She was the director of the choir at the church where her father served. Her beginnings as an artist were at the radio station Mil Diez, where she worked as a repertoire pianist; there she met the founding musicians of the feeling movement César Portillo de la Luz, José Antonio Méndez, Tania Castellanos, Luis Yáñez and also the maestro Adolfo Guzmán.

In 1952 she created the quartet Las D'Aida, made up of Elena Burke, Omara and Haydée Portuondo, and Moraima Secada, a group that in the early 1960s became established among the essential ones of the Cuban songwriting movement known as filin.

She toured with the quartet throughout Venezuela, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, Poland, the United States, France, Germany, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and others.

True stars came from Aida's hands. "I never made any star –the maestro emphasized–, a singer doesn't come from a sweet potato, those voices were natural, I only guided them down the best path".