Sara González's 72nd Birthday in Voices from the Mariana de Gonitch Academy

July 13, 2021

The 10th Sara González Political Song Contest is being held today, July 13th, in virtual format from the Covarrubias room of the National Theater, in tribute to the 70th anniversary of the birth of the Cuban troubadour.

Master Hugo Oslé, director of the Mariana de Gonitch Singing Academy, which sponsors the event, reported that emblematic works such as Su nombre es pueblo, Plegaria a un labrador, Girón, la Victoria, among others, will be heard.

Sara always stood by our young artists and supported the selfless willingness to improve the art of singing in the community, highlighted the founder of the Political Song Contest that bears the name of the unforgettable artist.

The jury, presided over by musician Emilio Vega, will award a Grand Prize, First, Second and Third places to the best performers.

A man rises / early in the morning… Sara sang off-camera, as the sound cover of some television adventures, a sort of Silvio, more serious… (although when listened to carefully you can tell it wasn't the singer-songwriter's timbre either). When shortly after, she "discovered" herself on the small screen, many came to know the performer: Sara González (1951-2012). Fat, unkempt, with powerful teeth that seemed to devour the microphone, and above all, a stage personality that moved the studio; a nuanced, powerful and very beautiful voice; she was the anti-diva; exactly the opposite of the image we had in those years of the "star". It was a new concept of the performer—that in other latitudes had been personified, for example, by Janis Joplin or Mama Cass Elliot—, a vision, a radically different version of singing.

A member of the Icaic Sound Experimentation Group first, later accompanied by the Guaicán group, she knew how to make us vibrate, tremble, internalize to the point of emotion (deep, nothing circumstantial) everything she sang, from Latin American pieces or those of her companions Silvio, Pablo, Noel, Amaury, Eduardo Ramos, to some of her own that she was already beginning to compose. Among those early works was an excellent album that was not, like most debuts, personal, but rather musical adaptations of Martí texts, sponsored by Casa de las Américas.

Sara was the protagonist of a type of epic song, of multitudes, in which she set the standard. After hearing her in La victoria, Su nombre es pueblo, A los que luchan toda la vida, ¿Qué dice usted?, and so many more of that kind, one cannot conceive of other performers for those pieces.

But there is another Sara—intimate, lyrical, personal—that is no less enthusiastic. It was precisely along that line that her last CDs were directed, which made journeys through female authorship in Cuban song, from María Teresa Vera to Lázara Ribadavia.

Hearing her vocalize Monte adentro (Pepe Ordaz), De otra manera (Vicente Feliú), Cantando al amor (hers), or the boleros of Marta Valdés, is almost as rich as seeing her "soneando" (which her CD Son de ayer y de hoy bears witness to, a warm tribute to her—and our—dear masters in that line) or electrifying us with her political songs, for whatever the genre, she always managed to communicate all her tenderness and inner beauty, and they constituted her greatest victories.