Ela O'Farrill

Composer and guitarist, born in Santa Clara. She studied at the Escuela Normal de Maestros in her native city.

She moved to the capital and took music classes with maestro Cesar Portillo de la Luz, composition with Enrique Beliver and Vicente González-Rubiera.

She subsequently lived on the ninth floor of the building at Infanta and Humboldt, in Vedado, located across from what was the Celeste bar, where La Freddy sang in the early morning hours when she was not yet famous, and to whom she composed a special song. She worked in the show Canciones en la Noche at the Hotel Nacional with Sonia Calero and a great cast; she is also remembered at the Amadeo Roldán theater in the show "Los Autores y sus Intérpretes"; and at the Gato Tuerto, the nightclub in fashion in 1960.

She performed her own compositions: Ni llorar puedo ya (which Malena Burke sings masterfully); Nada son mis brazos (sung by Bobby Jiménez); La renuncia; Son cosas que pasan (popularized by Pacho Alonso and included by Spanish singer Martirio on her latest album Primavera en Nueva York from 2007); Cuando pasas tú (Elena Burke); No tienes por qué criticar; and, of course, her great success, Adiós felicidad, which became an instant hit that Bola de Nieve internationalized, and which brought Ela serious problems because the Cuban government considered its lyrics not politically correct, and it was banned and removed from the market.

Her music was used by Danish filmmaker Theodor Christensen (1914-1967) for his documentary Ella (Ellas in Spanish), filmed in part at the Escuela para Instructores de Arte in Havana in 1963 and premiered in Cuba in 1964. The documentary, 34 minutes long, deals with the incorporation of Cuban women into the militias. Christensen is considered one of the pioneers of documentary cinema and in the 1960s at ICAIC he advised filmmakers in training, such as Nicolás Guillén Landrián. His assistant on Ella was Héctor Veitía, today a film director, and the cameraman Jorge Herrera, who died in Nicaragua in 1981, was the director of photography, and the editor was Roberto Bravo.

Elena Burke was her great friend, who was born on the same day as her and died in 2002. She composed "Señora sentimiento" especially for her. She also dedicated the song "La Freddy" to the great Cuban singer Fredesvinda García Valdés on the occasion of her debut in the Capri hotel show.

She went into exile in 1969 via Mexico where she settled. In 1974 she managed to reunite with her parents. She returned with them to Cuba for a visit in 1979 when they allowed exiles to travel to see the rest of the family and every three or four years she returns, but always discreetly, without frequenting places, only to spend time with her loved ones.

About her, composer Marta Valdés wrote on these pages:

It was Ela O'Fárrill, at the urging of Omara Portuondo, who composed in 2008 the beautiful song that added a special touch of emotion to the tribute dedicated to Elena Burke at the Museo de Bellas Artes on the occasion of her 80th birthday anniversary. Today we must commemorate the 80 years of age of this great composer who came into the world there in the center of the Island, exactly in Santa Clara, a city that has seen the birth of many of the most refined musical sensibilities in our history.

Before definitively dedicating herself to the world of music as a composer and performer, Ela O'Farrill had worked as a teacher. When her songs arrived in the gathering places where in the late fifties in Havana some young composers and performers or simple lovers of songs framed in that way of being, sounding and listening that we identified as "feeling" coincided, they came fully formed, as if born from an experienced master, and it is that her author, very early in her musical skirmishes in full adolescence, had managed to take intense periods of classes with who was her main model, César Portillo de la Luz, of whom even now she is recognized as a disciple.

From 1959 onwards, the songs that Doris de la Torre or pianist Numidia Vaillant had brought to light as a curious thing "from the girl from Santa Clara" began to be heard in the voice and guitar of their author. They were perfect songs and they soon appeared recorded in the voices of those who—still at the beginning of their luminous careers—were searching for a firm and novel repertoire that would help them in their effort to define their styles. Boleros like No tienes por qué criticar, Son cosas que pasan, Cuando pasas tú, Nada son mis brazos and Adiós, felicidad from this first period figured in the most celebrated repertoire of the sixties in voices like Elena Burke, Pacho Alonso, Fernando Álvarez, Oscar Martin or Bola de Nieve, who took them to record. The author herself with her voice and guitar, at the head of a group of excellent musicians, was in charge of leaving her mark on the memory of her contemporaries in the intense nightlife of Havana as well as in the enormous and varied programming of recitals and concerts offered in museums and concert halls throughout the country.

Her song dedicated to the singular singer Freddy has returned to the musical scene in a leap of half a century and acquires a special tone in the version by young singer Haila. Sara González, in Volume II of her record series Cantos de mujer, dusts off Nada son mis brazos and brings it to us fresh and lively; Spanish artist Martirio, on one of her most recent albums, Primavera en Nueva York, in dialogue with a group of excellent jazz musicians, puts Son cosas que pasan to the test and—without needing to change a turn, a chord, or a word—gives it to us as if it were "brand new." As if that were not enough, Omara Portuondo has given us a new version of Adiós, felicidad, which she includes on her album Gracias, which deserved in 2009 the coveted Grammy Latino Award.