Carlos Manuel Puebla Concha was a Cuban singer-songwriter. Recognized as "the singer of the revolution", he used his music to spread the values of the Cuban Revolution, singing the most relevant events and being a chronicler of the changes that have occurred in his country since 1959.
He cultivated the most diverse genres of Cuban popular music, such as the bolero, the son, the guaracha, the sucu-sucu, all worked with the rhythmic and stylistic characteristics that they demand, uniting his music faculties, to the one of poet. Puebla sang the most important events in the history of the Cuban people, becoming the quintessential chronicler of all national events since 1959. He is the author of the famous song dedicated to Ché Guevara, Hasta Siempre.
He was born in Manzanillo, Oriente, on September 11, 1917 and died in Havana City on July 12, 1989.
He was self-taught, and then studied at the Seminary of Popular Music (today the Odilio Urfé Center), directed by the pianist and musicologist Odilio Urfé.
Career path
In 1931 he began to work at the Manzanillo radio station CMKM; later he moved to Matanzas, where he joined a trio with Eugenio Domínguez and Francisco Baluja, with whom he acted for CMGH. With this trio he moved to Havana, and appeared at the Supreme Court of Art, in which he won a second prize.
In Santiago de Cuba he worked at Club 300. He acted in the program Esta Noche en CMQ, directed by Humberto Bravo. In Havana he joined the trio La Clave Azul, and in 1952, Carlos Puebla y sus Tradicionales (guitar, maracas, bongó and marímbula), made up of Santiago Martínez, Nerón Guada and Rafael Lorenzo, with whom he worked from 1952 to 1962 in the Middle Winery.
In Montevideo, Uruguay, they performed at the Palacio Peñarol, together with the typical Uruguayan ensemble Los Carreteros; in Chile they appeared with the poet Pablo Neruda, with whom they recorded an LP.
In Caracas, Venezuela, they performed at the Venezuelan Association of Journalists and at the University of that city. In Paris they did a performance at the Mutualité theater. In Mexico, as members of a delegation from the National Council of Culture, they performed at the Auditorium del Bosque de Chapultepec theater, then traveled to Guadalajara and Guanajuato. In Spain they were invited to perform at the Festival de la Rábida, held in Huelva, Andalusia. In Portugal they performed at the Spring Festival, held at the Crystal Palace, by the Predense Artistic Union, the Philharmonic Society and Cova de Piedade.
His music appears in the films Alba de Cuba, State of Siege (by Costa Gavras) and Our Man in Havana (with Sir Alec Guinness).
He also toured Mexico, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, Panama, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Brazil, Venezuela, Soviet Union, Mongolia, Korea, France, Italy, Portugal Spain, Finland, RFA, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Belgium, Angola.
Pieces of work.
Now it's your turn, miner
Oh, my poor Cuba!
Song of useless hope
Ultimate song
I sing to Camilo
How does a general fall
Let's stop pretending
Tell me my love, what am I going to do without you?
The creed
The survey
Elegy for Salvador Allende
Emilian
Waiting for the invasion
This love of us
This is my goodbye
This is my town
It was a happy moment
Earn peace now
Thank you, Fidel
See you forever
We have to say goodbye
The Song of Stalingrad, text: Manuel Navarro Luna
The OAS is a laughing matter
The first woman I loved
The roads of my Cuba
The commander arrived
What a vain effort
Who would have imagined it?
I want to talk to you
Broke off relations
Greetings to Spain
Cuban serenade
If I remember you
If it's all over
They saw you with him
Will
Yankee, go home!
And that's when Fidel arrived
And that if not
And if you pay me
I was sincere
Carlos Puebla at the Wax Museum
The Wax Museum, the only one of its kind in the country, has a museum assembly dedicated to Natural Heritage, Popular Art, legitimacy and Heritage. It exhibits wax representations of great Cuban musicians, including Carlos Puebla Concha, who denoted great complexity at the time of its realization, incorporating the costumes and accessories. A very curious fact is that the teeth, nails and eyes are made of wax and the hair is natural, planted once the wax is soft. All these characteristics moved Rosalba Juárez Batista, Carlos's widow, on her first visit to the museum on July 14, 2009, motivating her to donate documents, trophies, decorations, and costumes belonging to her husband to the center.
Artistic look
The image of the popular troubadour Carlos Puebla is revealed to us before a conception of marked realism and naturalness very well achieved aesthetically and endowed with all expressive content. Conceived through the polychrome wax modeling technique, the figure acquires a seated position (seated) demonstrating a certain complexity for its execution in terms of its formal content. The meticulous work of the artists and the interest in capturing the psychology of the character, warns a coherent composition of each anatomical detail. The piece achieves great richness to the extent that its body treatment is deciphered, highlighting characteristic elements such as features, hands, eyes and hair (the latter of natural origin), which in turn makes the image an attractive set before the watcher's view.
The incorporation of accessories that are an inseparable part of the figure, highlighting the shoes and clothing of great elegance, as well as his guitar, seem to give life to this great Manzanillo musician, giving the feeling that he will give the public the most authentic of his interpretations. Although the piece is trapped in a certain static state and in some way betrays the self-taught training of the creators, it radiates in its maximum expression verism of a great exponent of Cuban music, which finds a place in a space where art transformed into wax bets on the extraordinary immortalization of what was known as “The singer of the Revolution”.