Teresa Fernández García

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Cuban trovadora and teacher whose songs for children have remained in the musical taste of Cubans for decades.

Born in the city of Santa Clara, capital of the former province of Las Villas, Teresita Fernández grew up in the heart of an eminently musical family. Thus, she began singing at age four on the radio station CMHI in her native city, on the program Hora Martha directed by her mother Amparo García.

Although her mother wanted her to be a pianist, Teresita Fernández's temperament did not allow her to develop on that instrument because, as the trovadora confessed, playing the key and waiting for the hammer to strike seemed very boring to her.

In her biography 'Yo soy una maestra que canta', written by journalist Alicia Elizundia Ramírez, the artist asserts that she was interested in poetry as much as in music. Thus, since the only thing that unites the two manifestations is song, she sought out a trovador to instruct her.

At age twelve she met Benito Vargas, a tobacco worker and trovador who spent his nights giving serenades and who taught her the essential chords of the guitar.

In 1948 she graduated as a normal school teacher and in 1959 obtained the title of Doctor in Pedagogy. Shortly before receiving this degree, she began working as a teacher at the Normal School of Santa Clara. Her entry into the classroom coincided with a general strike held in Cuba in 1958 against the government of Fulgencio Batista. Her students went on strike and she accompanied them in the civic protest. Soon after those events and faced with a lack of understanding of her artistic interests in the predominant environment in Santa Clara, then characterized by deeply conservative thinking and outlook, Teresita chose to emigrate to the Cuban capital, a place where she decided to dedicate her life entirely to the art of trovador music, with the same vocation of those wandering teachers of whom José Martí spoke.

As a composer, her first songs date from the nineteen fifties. Around that time, she entered Cuban musical life through the duo of Las Hermanas Martí, generous advocates of her art who came to perform her song "Canto a mi bandera," whose text demonstrated the simple beauty of trovador poetry:
As if the beauties of the fields were so few,
they gave me a flag to increase their charms,
butterfly against the wind, tricolor Cuban rose,
when they gave me that flag they bound my soul.

The first performer to include a song by Teresita Fernández in his repertoire was Ramón Veloz, a well-known exponent of music of peasant origin in Cuba, who performed the piece titled "Cubano mira tus palmas". Thus, Teresita began to dedicate herself fully to the art of composing and singing her compositions.

Teresita Fernández's popularity would begin in the nineteen sixties, as expressed in his Ensayos voluntarios by literature professor and scholar of Cuban song Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera. It was a popularity limited to circles of connoisseurs, since our radio and television producers were not bold enough to promote such a "non-spectacular" musical expression. Teresita was at that time a rare author who combined the sonorities of ancient ballads and our peasant folklore in her very personal songs, among which there was no shortage of musical arrangements of texts by José Martí or Gabriela Mistral.

It was the Martí sisters, specifically Berta and Cuca, who, in the Cuban capital, facilitated her first performances. Thus, the Arlequín hall, one of the small venues on Havana's La Rampa, where the most demanding theater samples of that era were presented, opened its doors for the debut of the trovadora from Villa Clara on July 20, 1965. According to Teresita herself, seated in the front row were two great figures of Cuban music of all time: Sindo Garay and Bola de Nieve.

Months after that first recital, Bola de Nieve requested the presence of Teresita Fernández on the nights of the famous Monsigneur restaurant at the corner of 23 and O in El Vedado, a space known in that era as chez Bola.

After a period of working with the pianist and singer, Teresita began to have her own space on La Rampa, in the small Coctel club located at 23 and N, a place whose name would remain associated with hers forever, even after she took other directions. According to Marta Valdés, young people who still enjoyed a children's songbook where not everything was fantasy would gather there, as Teresita's songs dealt mainly with reality.

From the 'Coctel' club, Teresita extended her hand to a young man still unknown, who remembers himself, looking back at those years, as "a wandering trovador" who could not find a fixed place to deliver his songs. It was Silvio Rodríguez, at the very beginning of a new era in Cuban song, as well as of a lasting friendship between the trovadors, which has borne fruit on the many occasions they have had the opportunity to coincide on stage.

In 1966 the founders of the artistic-literary magazine El Caimán Barbudo embraced her with their tribute in the theater hall of the National Museum of Fine Arts (Cuba). Thus they recognized in her their accomplice minstrel.

At that time, the media disseminated a couple of Teresita's compositions, "No puede haber soledad" and, above all, "Cuando el sol," a kind of pop ballad that in the voice of vocalist Luisa María Güell captured the attention of a segment of Cuban musical audiences.

Alongside her musical work, as an excellent communicator, Teresita conducted the radio programs Musa traviesa and De regreso. Likewise, her first foray into television was in 1960, when she inaugurated the program La casita de azúcar, together with the puppets Pitusa and Eusebio, which was broadcast for much of the decade.

When between the late nineteen sixties and 1970, Cuba was immersed in economic projects such as the "cordón de La Habana" and the "zafra de los diez millones," Teresita joined José Antonio Méndez and César Portillo de la Luz to be protagonists of a long national tour that reached both miners in a mine and the open countryside.

In 1974, when her television work ended, with a group of her closest friends and at the initiative of Celia Sánchez Manduley, La peña de los juglares was created beneath the yagrumas of Parque Lenin. This space, which many called "Teresita's peña," was founded with the hope of giving a very special meaning to Sunday mornings, with the trovadora as hostess. It can be assured today that few initiatives have achieved the level of convocation that she and her friends reached among the people who, from any point in Cuba or anywhere else in the world, answered her call every Sunday for fifteen years. Among many important names that passed through the peña, mention should be made of Alicia Alonso, Antonio Gades, Onelio Jorge Cardoso, Cintio Vitier, Fina García Marruz, Pablo Milanés, Silvio Rodríguez, Marta Valdés, and Francisco Garzón Céspedes, among others.

Since 1988 to the present, Teresita has performed on various international stages, notably including her performances at the Jornada Dariana in Nicaragua and at the II Ibero-American Festival of Oral and Scenic Narration in Monterrey, Mexico, where she won the Chamán Prize.

Throughout her extraordinary career she has received countless recognitions: the EGREM Silver Record, 1980; the EGREM Prize, 1988, with the LD Mi gatico Vinagrito; the Order For National Culture; the Order for Cuban Education, Rafael María de Mendive; the Raúl Gómez García and X Anniversary of the Nueva Trova medals, as well as the Félix Varela Order and the Pablo de la Torriente Brau Prize, the latter granted in 2000. Likewise, for the totality of her work, in December 2009 she was awarded the National Prize for Music.

An evaluation of Teresita Fernández's musical work must start from the fact that, in the panorama of children's song in Latin America, she completes a triangle of Great Masters, whose other vertices are Mexican Francisco Gabilondo Soler and Argentine María Elena Walsh.

Our greatest singer's work encompasses, in addition to that aspect known as children's song, a repertoire inspired by the homeland, by nature, by love, and which is based on the musical arrangement of paradigmatic works by Latin American authors such as the Rondas by Gabriela Mistral or the Ismaelillo by José Martí.

In Teresita Fernández's discography, among other materials are included the aforementioned album Mi gatico Vinagrito, the CDs No puede haber soledad and Teresita canta a Martí (both edited by Centro Pablo), Vamos todos a cantar (a tribute by various trovadors to the creator and conceived and produced by Jorge García for the EGREM label) and Teresita en nosotros (Bis Music, 2007), an attempt to rescue in the voices of Sara González, Silvio Rodríguez, Liuba María Hevia, Amaury Pérez and Teresita herself, some of her adult compositions that had not been previously recorded.

"Styles? I know only one: that of sincerity when creating or performing" -she declares-. For that very reason, one fine day we began to find her sitting, together with a group of her closest friends, beneath the yagrumas of Parque Lenin, with the hope of giving a very special meaning to Sunday mornings, from what they made known as 'La peña de los juglares' and many called "Teresita's peña." Few initiatives have achieved the level of convocation that Teresita and her friends reached among the people who, from any point in Cuba or anywhere else in the world, answered her call. The turn of the century saw her take flight toward her parents' land or toward various latitudes in the American continent: "the most beautiful thing in my life is not the song I sing, but the story that has accompanied me so I could sing it" -she once said.

Our greatest singer's work encompasses, based on the same excellence in text and through a musical language marked by transparency, in addition to that aspect known as children's song (or rather, as song for infants of any age), a lush body of work inspired by the homeland, by nature, by love, by the greatness and virtue that some mortals have achieved.