Antonio Francisco Membiela

Ñico was a town singer, and he achieved this precisely because of his peculiar way of performing the bolero, for being definitively one of the greats of the Cuban victrola, and for that combination he left with us forever in our hearts.

He was born in Zulueta and as a teenager learned to play the guitar. He moved to Cienfuegos with his family while very young, and his house was located on O´Donnell Street between Santa Elena and Santa Cruz, exactly on the same corner as Santa Elena, where today there is a sports yard, or court, that belongs to the School of Economics and that in the mid-1950s was built by the American Dominicans, who had a school for young ladies there.

Ñico's father, Don Antonio Membiela, was the owner of the hardware store La Bomba, on Calzada de Dolores between Gloria and Industria, a few doors away from the residence of Adolfina Lazo, godmother of the Cienfuegos trova. For this reason it should not be strange that a great friendship existed between Adolfina and Ñico.

Ñico used to walk around the streets of Cienfuegos with his guitar giving serenades, or he would be received at some house to listen to his trovador improvisations. His artistic career was difficult work for him, because in towns in the interior it was never easy to break through.

Guitar in hand, the young and very thin Ñico Membiela, with his health broken since his early youth, had choirs of friends and girls who admired him and would listen to the songs he incorporated into his repertoire.

He joined various groups. He played marímbula and bongó in a sexteto of sones. Around 1929, at age 16, he began singing as a trovador in Sagua la Grande. Later he moved to Cienfuegos and Santa Clara, trying to gain space in radio media.

He settled in Havana in 1942, begins singing on Radio Salas station and remains there for five years, and shares the radio with performances in cabarets and nightclubs, but Ñico's national fame arrived between the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1954 he joins the Orchestra of Cheo Belén Puig and records two songs that open the path to fame for him. In 1959 singers are promoted who overnight become important figures in the country's sound environment, among them Blanca Rosa Gil, the little doll that sings, and Ñico Membiela who without a doubt was one of the greatest victrola phenomena of those times when this music-producing device occupied a leading role in every corner of the country.

Ñico was very little known despite his already long artistic career, but he records Corazón abandonado by Rosendo Rosell and suddenly finds himself sharing the stage at the Ali Bar with three greats of the bolero and song at that moment, Beny Moré René Cabell and Fernando Álvarez.

Havana's nightlife reached its splendor in the sixties and at the Ali Bar those artists with the greatest success on the victrolas gathered, victrola artists as the record producers themselves called them. In January of 1960 the presentation begins at this renowned Havana cabaret with Celeste Mendoza, Reynaldo Hierrezuelo and Ñico Membiela who reappears on this nightclub stage in March of the same year following the Spanish Pablo del Río and the Cuban René Cabell. At this moment the Moliner record label had managed to sell more than fifteen thousand copies of the version he made of Total.

His old neighbors on Santa Elena Street would smile when they saw him pass by in his Cadillac, each time he was hired to sing at the Hotel Jagua, of which he was one of the most frequent figures in its Guanaroca cabaret.

Alipio García, artistic director of the Ali Bar, proposes to Ñico that he record two mixed boleros, a formula that Orlando Vallejo had already used successfully and this is when the anthological recording of Contigo Besos Salvajes emerges, which quickly becomes one of the most popular songs of this year 1960, closely followed by Sombras by Blanca Rosa Gil. This was the bolero that took him to the height of popularity: CONTIGO BESOS SALVAJES, truly a combination of two musical pieces: CONTIGO, by Mexican Claudio Estrada, and BESOS SALVAJES, a tango of disputed authorship, because on a 78 r.p.m. record of the Modiner firm, it is attributed to the authors Fontanal and Fombona, while on a cassette released recently by EGREM it is attributed to Irusta and Fugazot. The fact is that the melodic combination had such a well-achieved arrangement that the blend gives the impression that it is a single piece.

Also famous in his voice were the boleros TOTAL, by Ricardo García Perdomo; DOS COSAS, by Vicente González, and the combination CUATRO VIDAS – MI ADIÓS, by the authors Justo Carreras and A. Carajavilla.

Very curious is that in the sixties, Nico popularized the bolero titled BOXEO DE AMOR, by an author whose name I don't remember, and which was much requested among audience requests. Paradoxically, BOXEO DE AMOR was suspended on radio stations and public record players for ethical reasons, since in double sense the song alluded to a couple making love. I admit that, for that time, the lyrics were very "strong," but at the same time it enjoyed well-achieved poetic quality, which captured popular taste.

In 1963 the performer Ñico Membiela departed abroad to fulfill a work contract and remained outside his country until his death in 1998 in the city of Miami. In the United States he recorded several records, with orchestras conducted by Pepé Delgado, Juanito Márquez, as well as with the Casino Orchestra of Tampa.

I have been very struck by the fact that Ñico Membiela, and I quote exact words from Rico Salazar: "in the twilight of his existence, affirmed that he wanted to go to Cienfuegos because there they were going to pay him tribute." At the age of 85, after a life of bohemian excess and excesses, and gripped by an illness that led him to lose his clarity of mind, the memory of the Pearl of the South came to him, of the old friends who together with simple neighborhood girls would create a chorus to listen to his performances. It may be that for him that was his most brilliant stage, the stage of the simple bohemian that so many knew and few today, by the harshness of the calendar, remain to recall.