Guillermo García

Musician in the band Chicago, Guillermo García played with Lennon, Ringo Starr, Stevie Wonder. Before that he was in the rebel troops in the Sierra Maestra and now he has another group: Rodiles.

Guillermo García lives in a beach house without a sea, in the middle of Coconut Grove, with waves that crash too far away and fake sand, without salt spray, that dissolves into the dirt of the yard. A kind of palace in ruins, with few walls and furniture of different styles, in the manner of the hippie communities of the 60s.

But Guillermo is a "sixty-something," a type too "new" to be one of the Cubans who fought in the armed conflict of the late 50s. The thing is, he was the youngest guerrilla fighter in the Sierra Maestra.

"That's exactly what Raúl Castro told me when he discovered me, at nine years old, in the camp of column 18 of the Rebel Army," he says while pulling out a magazine clipping from a bulging folder. It's a photo of a vigorous Raúl Castro, dressed in white, next to a child that the caption identifies as Guillermo García. "Imagine! My whole family rose up and there was no one to leave me with, so they took me with them."

The boy had been present throughout the entire campaign, until the rebels descended on Guantánamo.

There are newspaper articles from 1959 that mention him as an important messenger of the Rebel Army and even as a translator for Raúl Castro on some occasions.

"They kidnapped some marines from the Guantánamo base to prevent aerial bombardment," Guillermo explains, "and I had studied at a school run by American missionary nuns, so I served as interpreter at the meeting between Raúl and the marines. The gringos couldn't believe their eyes, asking me what a child was doing in that madness and how it was that I spoke English."

The press went wild when they found him among the rebel column that entered Guantánamo in the first days of 1959. Then he arrived in Havana like a movie star, with his 11 years, his July 26th armband and his own M1 carbine, a personal gift from the second-in-command of the revolution.

"I wasn't any hero, just a traumatized child, witness to too much death and tragedy. The war had destroyed me and no one noticed."

"I remember the ambush at El Abra," he tells me, leaning his face forward in a gesture of complicity, "the rebels set fire to the army vehicles with fuel tanks, the smell of burned bodies has tormented me ever since."

In Havana, after the triumph, his family tried to restore the child he had been, but it was too late, according to Guillermo.

"I remained a young rebel in my own way, with long hair, American music and rejecting all restrictions."

He began to be a regular at the city's police stations, over and over again he was detained in raids against the "ideologically deviant" that were carried out on the streets of Havana in the 60s.

"I remember a police officer scolding me for not being grateful to the heroes of the Sierra. From my cell I told him that the ungrateful one was him, that I was one of those heroes and look where he had me. The guy looked at me terrified, like I was crazy."

Guillermo understood that he didn't fit into the new society and decided to pretend: he cut his hair, stopped protesting, graduated from the naval academy at Mariel and, in 1968, stayed during the first stop his ship made in Canada. And he made his way down to Florida, where his life changed.

"In Miami luck knocked on my door, I was a street musician when I met Stephen Stills, from the group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who proposed that I work with him in California. There we recorded the album Manassas 2, at the Record Plant studios, and for me began an incredible artistic adventure."

In 1971 he joined the well-known musical band Chicago, with them he recorded the album Chicago VII, for which he has a gold record. He also was on their first European tour. In 1972 they played for 650,000 people in Stuttgart."

But Guillermo is much more than his time with the mythic band of Terry Kath, Robert Lamm and Peter Cetera.

"When I left Chicago, I did work with musicians of the caliber of John Lennon and Ringo Starr. I also worked with Stevie Wonder and even with Joe Walsh, the guitarist of the group Eagle, the ones with 'Hotel California'. In the late 70s I worked with Foxy, a popular disco music group in Miami."

There is a fog in his life during the 80s and 90s, he expresses that he dedicated himself to starting a family, but the subject makes him uncomfortable and he prefers to change course.

Today Guillermo lives with seven of his 13 children in that surreal paradise he has created for himself. He has returned to music and formed a band with two of his boys.

The group is called Rodiles and they play in the street. Sometimes on the CocoWalk stage and other times in plazas or restaurants in the area.

"We charge whatever they give us and we sell some of our CDs, but we're just starting out, and we already have videos on youtube."

The youngest rebel in the Sierra Maestra, who was a member of the legendary band Chicago, is today a street musician in Miami, working hard to advance the careers of Michael and William, his talented sons.

"I see them with a great future," he says closing his eyes, as if he were a seer in a trance, "and believe me they're not going to suffer the ordeal that I had to go through, that's what I'm here for, full time!"

I ask him if he believes he is living a second chance in life. Guillermo smiles.

"The second chance was about twenty years ago, this perhaps is the thirty-fourth one that life is giving me, and as I've said so many times, now I'm really going to take advantage of it."