Let us remember the Guayabero today on the 14th anniversary of his physical disappearance

March 27, 2021

«My little mare, of course, / I take her to all the fairs / because my little mare is serious, / respectful like me. / One day / a little donkey from Bainoa fell in love with her. / And she, who is from Jibacoa / told him: it can't be, / because you want to put / Havana in Guanabacoa».

If you want to laugh you'll laugh, and if not, you won't, he would say to you —in life—, Cuban troubadour Faustino Oramas Osorio, El Guayabero, known as «the king of double entendre» in Cuba.

Deceased on March 27, 2007 in his native Holguín, El Guayabero earned the affection of the Cuban people and the admiration and respect of not a few musicians.

«He is a popular tres player who uses a very repetitive rhythmic melodic design, in whose most elementary cell lies Cuban flavor (…) I believe that every tres player should know his tumbaos», said Pancho Amat about him.

I knew him personally in the 1980s, during one of his performances at the Casa de la Cultura in Bejucal. And I was amazed. When he wasn't wearing his jacket, he maintained an astonishing seriousness and was a man of few words, but he was another person when he took the stage and made the people laugh heartily with that double entendre that only he was capable of conveying. «I only have one meaning, the other one comes from people's minds. It's that there are a lot of dirty-minded people out there», he confessed more than once.

Thus he traveled Cuba and the world, leaving behind sones and guarachas of unforgettable charm, among them: Marieta, Ay candela, Tumbaíto, Como vengo este año, Cuidado con el perro que muerde callao, Mañana me voy a Sibanicú, the latter disseminated by Pacho Alonso just as En Guayabero.

About the latter, Faustino Oramas himself explained how he earned the nickname that immortalized him.

«They call me that thanks to a brunette woman. Or rather, to a jealous husband in a little place in the Orient called Guayabero, where I went to sing to make a living and almost found death instead. She was attentive to me and the bar people went and told her husband the gossip, a brutal cop from those old days. Well, what's the point of telling more. I left running with the musicians and on the way out came the song, which says in its refrain In Guayabero, mama, they want to give me / In Guayabero, mama, they want to give me ».

National Prize for Humor in 2002 and recipient of the Replica of the Axe of Holguín, Faustino Oramas has been a guide for figures like Alejandro García (Virulo), Pedro Luis Ferrer or Tony Ávila, who with his Choza de Chacho y Chicha, reminds us, on the 14th anniversary of El Guayabero's death, of the legacy that this exponent of the old son tradition left us with his mastery of writing music with spicy and jocular lyrics, which were at once entertainment and social chronicles.