/ARTS WEEKLY/ MUSIC-CUBA: Elena Burke, Voice of ‘Feeling’, Dead at 74

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jun 18 2002 (IPS) - If there was something Elena Burke loved, it was to sing and to enjoy life. Perhaps it is because of this, even after AIDS had left her unable to walk, she would appear in her wheelchair holding some old songbook and singing with her legendary voice and “feeling”.

Until very recently, her admirers continued to wait for her at Gato Tuerto, a Havana nightclub that she had made her own. But then they learned on Jun 10 that Elena Burke had died. The “Señora Sentiment” of Cuban song would not return.

She said, “I sing only what I like, nothing more,” “I love decadence, saying a word that doesn’t fit,” to enjoy a good tango, drink a little rum, watch television, believe in everything.

She would interrupt a song, speaking more than singing a word, acting out the melody, accentuating the sentiment, and constantly changing the way she interpreted the music. That is how she sang until her death, at age 74.

“This is how I am,” she would tell reporters, because if there was something she did not like it was to give interviews. She also refused to talk about the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV, the precursor to AIDS), which she became infected with in the early 1990s.

“She could go on no longer, although she could do too much with that fatal immunodeficiency that destroyed her blood – but not her song – in these last few years,” wrote Pedro de la Hoz in Granma newspaper, voice of the governing Communist Party.

In an attempt to follow her example, hundreds of people attended her funeral and put sad words aside, instead singing “Para vivir” (To Live), a song by Cuban singer-songwriter Pablo Milanés that Burke made popular in the late 1960s.

Born Feb 28, 1928 in Havana, Ramona Elena Burguez González, as her parents named her, was a precocious girl. Her favourite pastime was to sing and she imitated Argentina’s Libertad Lamarque because she always loved the tango.

Burke liked to tell of the time when she was just nine years old and forgot the medicine she was to buy for an uncle who was ill, and instead went dancing to the drumbeat of a group that paraded through the streets of Havana.

With that same free spirit, Burke ignored the juries that rang the bell of rejection three times in the amateur singing contests in Cuba, and in the 1940s she was already becoming an essential voice of Cuban song.

After performing with several different groups of the era, such as Mulatas de Fuego and Las D’Aida, in 1958 she began to sing solo. It was then that she was referred to as the representative of the “feeling” movement of Cuban music.

That feeling was the result of a fusion of the traditional Cuban “trova” and bolero, with other musical touches coming from the United States. As its practitioners used to say, the key was to “cantar con filin” (sing with feeling).

And she was “sentiment in full voice,” says Omara Poruondo, the female singer of the internationally acclaimed “Buena Vista Social Club”. Burke virtually vibrated with the songs of César Portillo de la Luz (“Contigo en la distancia” – With You in the Distance), José Antonio Méndez (“Novia mía” – Girlfriend of Mine) and Isolina Carrillo (“Dos gardenias” – Two Gardenias), according to Poruondo.

The 1960s were perhaps the highpoint of Burke’s career. She travelled half the world, performed at the Festival of Song in Viña del Mar, Chile (1964), at the closing ceremonies of the Cannes Film Festival (1964), at the Expo ’67 in Japan, and at the Record Festival of Mexico (1969).

It was then, at a concert in Havana, that she included Milanés’s “Para vivir”, as well as “Hay un grupo que dice” (There Are Some Who Say), by Silvio Rodríguez, two songwriters who were largely misunderstood at the time in their endeavours to create “a new genre of songs.”

Cuban composer Meme Solís, resident of New York, corroborated Burke’s openheartedness. “In my most difficult times (after requesting government permission to leave Cuba), she never shut the doors of her house to me. and she continued to sing my songs,” he said.

Those were the early years of the Cuban Revolution, when emigration from the island was seen as a betrayal against the motherland. If a writer or artist left the country, his or her art did too, because it was no longer disseminated in the socialist-run country.

“She was always definite about everything because she operated without hypocrisy, because nothing about her was fake. She was authentic and lived life as she felt it,” said composer Portillo.

Burke considered Cuba to be “life itself”. “Leave the country for awhile and you’ll see,” she told a reporter in 1997 after having stayed for a time in Mexico, but returning to the island when she began to feel ill.

That year she made her last international tour. “By then she was singing as a form of therapy,” said Malena Burke, her only daughter, who now lives in the U.S. city of Miami but was able to return to Havana for the funeral.

“Elena has died,” they told the poet Bladimir Zamora, and it was enough for him to understand that Cuba had forever lost Burke’s “genius for going out and singing intimately before the multitude, or for sharing some Creole joke on a street corner.”

According to Zamora, the “opus of pleasure” of Señora Sentiment “is beginning to become a legend.” But if we are lucky, “Elena will not stop singing, standing there sensually, in the afterlife,” he said. “She is now pure voice.”