Guantanamera – Tune by Joseíto Fernández, Lyrics by José Martí, Various Performers
The song Guantanamera has a lot of moving parts. The song itself was composed originally in 1929 by Cuban singer/songwriter Joseíto Fernández. At some point, he drifted away from the original lyrics, and started changing them weekly, depending on the events of the day. While the chorus, “Guajira Guantanamera” (country girl from Guantanamo) fit the original lyrics, it didn’t really have any meaning once the lyrics started to change. Fernández just kept them anyway.
The lyrics of the version we’re most familiar with are actually stanzas from several different poems (A Sincere Man Am I, I Cultivate a White Rose, If You’ve Seen a Mount of Sea Foam, and I Hate the Masks and Vices) in a collection of poems called Versos Sencillos (Simple Verses) by Cuban nationalist hero, the poet/revolutionary (and journalist and educator), José Martí, published in 1891. The lyrics pretty nearly speak for themselves. What comes out is compassion and solidarity with the oppressed, and returning love for hate to oppressors. They were first applied to the song by Cuban composer Julian Orbon in 1958, around the time of the Cuban Revolution. That version became very popular in Cuba, and strongly associated with the revolution.
José Martí was born in Cuba in 1853, and became involved in Cuba’s independence movement in his youth. He was jailed as a teenager in 1870 for “anti-Spanish” activity, during the first Cuban war for independence. His initial sentence of hard labor was commuted to exile in Spain, on the way to which he wrote his first political work. His exile lasted three years, after which he traveled around Latin America and the United States before returning to Cuba in 1879, from which he was promptly deported, again for criticizing the Spanish government. He spent much of the next fourteen years in New York City, where he wrote his Versos Sencillos. He continued to travel around Central America and the Caribbean basin, fundraising and advocating for the cause of Cuban independence. In 1892, Martí formed the Cuban Revolutionary Party with the express mission of Cuban independence. He laid out the goals and ideals of the party in the Montecristi Manifesto. In it, you can hear some of the same hopes for post-independence reconciliation and forgiveness we hear in “I Cultivate a White Rose”. The party organized and sent out an expeditionary force from Fernandina Beach, Florida in late 1894, and the Cuban War of Independence began on February 24, 1895. Martí was killed in early action, but he continues on as a symbol for Cuban nationalism for Cubans of all political persuasions (the version of Guantamera selected for this essay reflects this).
Martí was an advocate not just of independence from Spain, but from all foreign domination, and advocated for Latin America to find its own political culture and voice. While Cuba was nominally independent, there was chronic U.S. interference in Cuban affairs until the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and of course, it continued in a more or less clandestine manner after it.
Lyrics
I’m an honest man
From where the palm trees grow
I’m an honest man
From where the palm trees grow
And before I die I want
to let my verses out of my soul
Chorus:
Guantanamera
Guajira Guantanamera
Guantanamera
Guajira Guantanamera
My verse is clear green
And burning red
My verse is clear green
And burning red
My verse is a wounded deer
That seeks refuge in the mountain
Chorus
I cultivate a white rose
In June as in January
I cultivate a white rose
In June as in January
For a true friend
Who gives me his honest hand
Chorus
And for the cruel one that tears away from me
The heart with which I live
And for the cruel one that tears away from me
The heart with which I live
I cultivate neither thistles nor nettles
I cultivate the white rose
Chorus
With the poor people of the earth
I want to make my destiny
With the poor people of the earth
I want to make my destiny
The mountain stream
Pleases me more than the ocean
Republished from the Milwaukee DSA website.
